Sunday, 28 October 2012
Robert Bresson posters
When I was in Paris the other week I came across the poster for Robert Bresson's brilliant A Man Escaped (1956). That made me want to look around for posters of his other films, and here are some examples. They are all French and quite wonderful!
Thursday, 25 October 2012
Anthony Asquith
A critic once called Anthony Asquith the most
underrated British filmmaker of all time (although considering how underrated
British cinema in general is many filmmakers can plausibly claim that dubious
honour). The one thing that Asquith's name brings to mind is of course theatre
adaptations, from Oscar Wilde to Samuel Beckett, and in particularly plays by
Terrence Rattigan and George Bernard Shaw. He did three adaptations on Shaw's
plays, with the version of Pygmalion from 1938 the most famous. But it
was with Rattigan he worked most closely. Together they made 10 films, and they
are among Asquith's best, especially The Browning Version (1951) with
its heartbreaking performance by Michael Redgrave. However, there is a lot more
to Asquith than adaptations. When I began looking at his films one thing I felt
was that they had a musical sensibility, that music was important to them, and
it did not come as a surprise when I later read that he was passionate about
music, and apparently had an encyclopedic knowledge about composers. He also
played the piano and would perhaps have become a musician if a teacher had not
told him he lacked the necessary skills to become great. So instead he
discovered the cinema. He has said that during his time in Oxford, as a
student, he went to the movies constantly, learning the technique and trying to
come up with his own ways of telling stories. He also went to Hollywood to closely study how the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch worked (there is a similarity there between him and Hasse Ekman).
Asquith's career had its ups and downs. He began in the late
1920s very successfully with four silent films, including Underground (1928) and the expressionistic A Cottage at Dartmoor (1929), Then in the 1930s he was less
successful, although some of the films are of interest, with Pygmalion being both a great success and
a great film. This is a multi-authored film, with Asquith, Shaw, Leslie Howard
and David Lean, who was editor, and others all contributing with their own
ideas and talents to the finished film. This too is a remarkably
expressionistic film, in editing, framing and lighting, and what is so impressive,
besides Wendy Hiller’s performance, is that it does not fall apart but actually
holds itself together as a sustained piece of bravura filmmaking. It is a
testament to Asquith’s skills and boldness, as well as his patience and
kindness, that it all comes
together in the end. A film made during the war, Cottage to Let (1941 aka Bombsight
Stolen), is also something of a marvel. It is a film that is part comedy,
part thriller, part romance, and yet it too works surprisingly well, including
John Mills performance as a Nazi agent posing as a RAF pilot. It also has
rather stylish visuals. This film, and others, shows Asquith’s love for the
medium and his eagerness to try out new things, visually as well as
narratively. However, for the next phase of his career, he changed style. Now his
films becomes more restrained, even austere, and this phase holds most of his
great films. One brilliant example is The
Way to the Stars, (1945), one of the films he made with Rattigan. It is
exquisitely shot, framed and edited, and tells the story of the life and
frequent deaths of pilots, British and American, on an airbase somewhere in
England. It is told in flashbacks, beginning with tracking shots across the now
empty airfield, where only the ghosts and the memories of the pilots and the
crew remains. Other films to mention from this phase are The Winslow Boy (1948), The
Browning Version and Carrington V.C. (1954).
Then in the late 1950s Asquith somewhat changed track again and the films
become more glossy and “international”, where before they had been distinctly
English, both in themes and in setting.
It is tempting to see Asquith as a British equivalent of
George Cukor. Although Cukor shows more coherence, not least in terms of style,
and is the better director, there are strong similarities. The focus on acting
and adaptations is the most obvious link. But like Cukor Asquith, at least from
the 1940s and onwards, does not try to “open up” the adaptations but instead
use the source material as a strength, and with exquisite sensitivity in his handling
of the movement of the actors and the camera on the set, or the lack of
movement when called for, make the films cinematic without being flamboyant. (Our notions of what is cinematic and what is not are often still rather crude.) Take
a film like The Importance of Being Earnest (1954). It begins with an
audience settling down at a theatre to watch a stage performance of the very
play the film is based on. Here Asquith has foregrounded the film's theatre
roots, and the film is done as if it takes place on a stage. At the end it
returns to the theatre in the beginning, with the curtain coming down. By
deliberately staying so close to the theatre the film makes for an interesting
case-study when discussing stage adaptations and notions of what and what is not
cinematic. The use of editing and close-ups are techniques that the theatre has
not got. Something else that differs between cinema and theatre is the use of
framing. It is not that the theatre does not use framing devices, but the
cinema can use framing in different ways, and this is something the skillful
director can work wonders with, and in so doing distinguishing the filmed
version of a play from a stage version of the same play. The Browning Version is an example of how a director’s precision in
framing can add layers of meaning to the words and the performance, and make a
film cinematic without having to include opaque camera movements or outdoor
scenery.
Among the noticeable things in Asquith’s films are the uses
of mirrors. Asquith puts them in his images to add frames to the larger frame,
to give a sense of larger world, or for startling effects, visual or
psychological. The ending of Cottage to
Let even takes place in a hall of mirrors. The films are also full of wit
and irony, which sometimes has a slight subversive effect. The effective and
morale-boosting film We Dive at Dawn (1943),
about the crew on the submarine Sea Tiger,
has several hilarious scenes, but the most surprising thing is the last line of
dialogue. Some officers are watching the submarine come and go in the bay, and
an admiral says “It's like I'm running a bloody bus service.” This kind of wit
effectively counterpoints the often heavy subjects Asquith deals with.
His passion for innovation, of taking every film as an
opportunity to try out new ideas and approaches also means that they are almost
all of them interesting in some ways. This is very much the case with The Woman in Question (1950 aka Five Angels on Murder). It is on the one
hand a not very exciting detective story about the search for the murder of a
woman called Astra, played by Jean Kent. But the way it is told is remarkable.
The detective, played by Jon Linnane, interviews several people about the woman
and what happened the night she was murdered. Each flashback is narrated by the
witness that is being interviewed, and they all have a completely different
take on Astra, and what kind of woman she was, and why she was killed. What she
says, how she says it, what she wears, and how she behaves in the various
flashbacks are all different and when the film is over we will have to guess
ourselves which of the many versions of Astra’s personality was the closest to
the truth. It is the same idea as Akira Kurosawa would explore later in Rashomon (1951), letting an event being
told from each interested party’s own subjective view.
There is a lot more to discover about Asquith himself too,
and his films. This has only been an introduction. He is ripe for
retrospectives and critical discussions of his career. Suffice to say for now
that he was much loved by his cast and crew, and that he left a body of work
which is emotionally rich and filled with both great acting and creative
boldness.
---------------------
2013-07-11 I've changed two words that were incorrect. I'd also like to add that it is interesting to look at Asquith's films (at least some of them, such as The Browning Version) from a queer perspective.
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2013-07-11 I've changed two words that were incorrect. I'd also like to add that it is interesting to look at Asquith's films (at least some of them, such as The Browning Version) from a queer perspective.
Friday, 5 October 2012
Reading Bazin (#3)
It is time for the third post in my series Reading Bazin. Today's post is about Death Every Afternoon, a perhaps lesser known piece. It is not included in the translated What is Cinema books (although it was in the French original) but is to be found for example in the anthology Rites of Realism: Essays in Corporeal Cinema, translated by Mark A. Cohen. (The title of Bazin's text is of course a reference to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.)
Death Every Afternoon is about a French documentary called The
Bullfight (La course de taureaux 1951). The piece is not very long but it is of interest for two reasons. First because it is a celebration of the
art of editing, relevant since Bazin is often thought of as being against editing, and second because it is a formulation of Bazin’s ideas
about death’s relationship with cinema.
The review begins with an appreciation of Myriam Borsoutsky’s skills
as an editor. Among the films on which she worked Bazin mentions another documentary, Paris 1900 (1947) and The Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry 1936). She also worked on a number of other films by Guitry. After emphasising the brilliance of the editing, Bazin
declares that “[w]hen it is good, the art of the editor goes well beyond its
usual function – it is an essential element in the film’s creation”, but he makes the distinction between the Russian form of montage and
his own preference for découpage. Whereas montage is based on the idea of
symbolism and, as Bazin puts it, “the collision of images”, in The Bullfight the aim of the editing is realism and to
“fulfil both the physical verisimilitude of the découpage and its logical
malleability.” Here it is not a case of contrasting images to create new
effects out of the very collision but instead of having complementary editing,
where one image grows naturally out of its predecessor and in turn grows
naturally into its successor, and the technique is based on “precision and
clarity”.
As is only to be expected from Bazin, what he praises here
is the way realism is heightened by way of editing. Although he has primarily
written about the long take and deep focus, seamless editing is also shown to be able to serve the same master, the much vaunted realism. It is worth pointing out that Bazin's heroes, such as Wyler, Renoir, Welles and Fellini, cut more frequently than you might think, or that Bazin seems to remember. While he is right to argue that editing is "
Bazin then goes on to discuss death and its relation with
cinema, even its profound centrality in the medium’s being. He suggests that death “is surely one of those rare events that justifies the term /…/ cinematic specificity.” This is partly
because cinema is the “[a]rt of time”, and not only “aesthetic time” but “lived
time”, and he refers to Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée. The
point he wants to make is that on film, death, unlike in the
real world, is not a unique, once-in-a-life-time event. As soon as a death is
captured on film, in moving images, it can be repeated over and over again. For Bazin, death, and
sex, is something unique and special, and something which can never be
represented, only experienced. With cinema having the capacity to show death,
and then also resurrect the dead, as well as show the same person dying again
and again, our treatment of death, and perhaps relationship to it, has changed
because “nowadays we can desecrate and show at will the only one of our
possessions that is temporally inalienable: dead without a requiem, the eternal
dead-again of the cinema!”
And of course, it is only natural that such a discussion
should arise from a film about bullfighting, where not only bulls but matadors
are killed, and death, perhaps the art of death, is what the game is about.
Bazin ends the article with the following statement: “On the screen, the
toreador dies every afternoon.”
Reading Bazin #5 is here.
-----------------------------------------------------
A companion piece to Bazin's article is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Observations of the Long Take from 1967.
Henri Decaë, who would later be cinematographer on several of the most important films if the French New Wave was also cinematographer on The Bullfight, together with Jimmy Berliet.
The exact meaning of the word découpage has been elusive, and frequently misunderstood, but it can be said to mean the organic relationship of all shots, how they all contribute to the overall effect, which should be the "physical verisimilitude". Hence to equate découpage with editing, as has often been done, is missing the larger picture (literally). Découpage can exist already in the filmmaker's head prior to shooting, and can be written into the script.
-----------------------------------------------------
A companion piece to Bazin's article is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Observations of the Long Take from 1967.
Henri Decaë, who would later be cinematographer on several of the most important films if the French New Wave was also cinematographer on The Bullfight, together with Jimmy Berliet.
The exact meaning of the word découpage has been elusive, and frequently misunderstood, but it can be said to mean the organic relationship of all shots, how they all contribute to the overall effect, which should be the "physical verisimilitude". Hence to equate découpage with editing, as has often been done, is missing the larger picture (literally). Découpage can exist already in the filmmaker's head prior to shooting, and can be written into the script.
Monday, 24 September 2012
From Fanfaren to St Andrews
Last week I had my Viva/defence of my thesis and it made me somewhat nostalgic over my life in film. So this blog post is more personal than usual.
I grew up in a suburb in the south of Stockholm called Farsta, and it had a cinema called Fanfaren (the Fanfare) and that is were I began my life is a cineasté, as soon as I was young enough to go alone. Because that is what I did, even in my pre-teens. While my friends wanted to go to the cinema because they wanted to do something fun together, I went to the cinema on my own because I wanted to see the films. Among the first that I saw by myself were English film versions of Enid Blyton's books about The Famous Five and, of course, Herbie Goes Bananas (1980), which I adored and discussed in some depth with my father when I came home. Not the fact that there was a mischievous cool boy of my own age in the film, instead I wanted to talk about the visual aspects of the film, and how the movie made me feel, and made me feel like I was in Mexico. (I have written about this before, here.)
Then later the "moviebox" entered my life. We did not have a VCR but at video stores you could borrow a moviebox, a VCR without the ability to record, it could only play recorded tapes, the ones you would borrow in the store. And in the afternoons and on lunch breaks I would go home to a friend and watch James Bond films because his parents had a VCR. Eventually we got one too. Then I immediately became a fixture at the two local video stores. There was one big and one small, and I probably knew where everything was in the smaller one better than those actually who worked there. As I mentioned in my recent blog post about Tony Scott, Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) had a big impact on me, and I vividly remember the sense of intoxication with the images, the rhythmic editing and the expressive use of colours. I saw it many times.
Then there was a major shift in my life. Due to rights issues five of Hitchcock's films had been unavailable for many years, until they were suddenly released in the mid-1980s, in the cinemas, on VHS, and on TV. In the autumn of 1989 Swedish Television did a retrospective of these five films. Rope (1948) was first, but I missed that one. The second one, the week after, was Rear Window (1954) and I did not miss that one. I wonder where I would have been today had I missed it because watching it immediately changed my life. It did not take long for me to realise that this was the best thing I had ever seen. Nothing came even remotely close. I was swept away, hypnotised, and in awe. It was witty, thrilling, sexy, had a marvellous soundtrack and felt like it was otherworldly. After having seen it I could not let it go. I had to write down some thoughts, and I was thinking "Who is this Hitchcock? I need to know more about him." The next day I went to the local library and investigated their selection of film books. They were very few, but among the handful was François Truffaut's interview book with Hitch. I borrowed it on the spot and read it from cover to cover. (I read all the other books on film they had as well, but they did me no favours.)
The next week's Hitchcock was The Trouble With Harry (1955), which, like Rear Window, did not feel like an ordinary film, and I loved it too. Particularly Shirley MacLaine and the extraordinary autumn leaves lovingly captured by Robert Burks's camera. The next film was The Man Who Knew too Much (1956), which I liked almost as much as Rear Window, even though it felt like a more ordinary film. But then it became complicated because the last film in the five week retro was Vertigo (1958). I did not like it at all. I was just puzzled and unsettled. My mother came in while I was watching and asked whether I liked this one too. "No. I don't understand what is happening." I said without shame. (A few years later me and my brother was watching Marnie (1964) on VCR and again my mother came into the room. It was during the flashback at the end went Marnie is re-living her childhood trauma, a brutal and bloody scene, and my mother got upset. "What ARE you watching!? Is all this violence really suitable for you?" But we were allowed to watch the rest of the film.)
After these four films everything was settled. I began exploring the classics. There was not much available, but John Ford's The Searchers (1956) was, and a few films by Akira Kurosawa, and Richard Brooks's version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). The one I liked best of those was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to the extent that I asked if I could buy it from the store. Alas, that was not allowed. I also read all film books I could get my hands on. An invaluable resource was TV3, a Swedish TV channel based in the UK which during a period in the early 1990s showed a British film from the 1940s and 1950s every weekday afternoon. I watched as many as I could, and loved almost all of them (an experience almost equal in importance to the Hitchcock retrospective in 1989). I stayed up late one night to watch Samba Traoré (1992) by Idrissa Ouedraogo, because I had never seen a film from Africa, and was eager to do so. I started going to film festivals, and I decided that when it was time to go to university I would study film history. (I was delayed one year in my plans, for complicated reasons. Suffice to say that in my first year at university I studied Czech language and literature.) I had toyed with the idea of becoming an architect, but now a career in film took over. I began working at a cinema whilst studying at university, and I also began writing for journals and such. The first piece that got published was 15 years ago in the Swedish film journal Filmrutan. The article was about Alexander Mackendrick, and I have been writing for Filmrutan ever since. And over the last decade I have worked as a film journalist, in a DVD store, at the Bergman Archives, as Bergman co-ordinator at the Swedish Institute, as tutor, as editor, as essayist, and last year also as an actor (in a Swedish film which opens for general release in January 2013). And now I have written a thesis.
Looking back over the years it is remarkable how consistent I have been in my approach to film. I have always been more interested in aesthetics than story, the how rather than the what, and I have always been on the lookout for new things, new films, new filmmakers, new countries. I have also always been amazed by the discrepancy between the large number of fascinating films and filmmakers that exist, and the much smaller number of films and filmmakers that actually get proper attention. It was not a coincidence that my first published article was about Sandy Mackendrick rather than Hitch or Kurosawa or Bergman, or that my thesis is about Hasse. Even though I owe Hitch almost everything I have never felt that he was by default superior or more interesting than any other filmmaker.
And now, what happens next? I do not know, but I do know that there is a wealth of unknown films and filmmakers to seek out. As Calvin says to Hobbes, "It's a magical world ol' buddy, let's go exploring!"
I grew up in a suburb in the south of Stockholm called Farsta, and it had a cinema called Fanfaren (the Fanfare) and that is were I began my life is a cineasté, as soon as I was young enough to go alone. Because that is what I did, even in my pre-teens. While my friends wanted to go to the cinema because they wanted to do something fun together, I went to the cinema on my own because I wanted to see the films. Among the first that I saw by myself were English film versions of Enid Blyton's books about The Famous Five and, of course, Herbie Goes Bananas (1980), which I adored and discussed in some depth with my father when I came home. Not the fact that there was a mischievous cool boy of my own age in the film, instead I wanted to talk about the visual aspects of the film, and how the movie made me feel, and made me feel like I was in Mexico. (I have written about this before, here.)
Then later the "moviebox" entered my life. We did not have a VCR but at video stores you could borrow a moviebox, a VCR without the ability to record, it could only play recorded tapes, the ones you would borrow in the store. And in the afternoons and on lunch breaks I would go home to a friend and watch James Bond films because his parents had a VCR. Eventually we got one too. Then I immediately became a fixture at the two local video stores. There was one big and one small, and I probably knew where everything was in the smaller one better than those actually who worked there. As I mentioned in my recent blog post about Tony Scott, Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) had a big impact on me, and I vividly remember the sense of intoxication with the images, the rhythmic editing and the expressive use of colours. I saw it many times.
Then there was a major shift in my life. Due to rights issues five of Hitchcock's films had been unavailable for many years, until they were suddenly released in the mid-1980s, in the cinemas, on VHS, and on TV. In the autumn of 1989 Swedish Television did a retrospective of these five films. Rope (1948) was first, but I missed that one. The second one, the week after, was Rear Window (1954) and I did not miss that one. I wonder where I would have been today had I missed it because watching it immediately changed my life. It did not take long for me to realise that this was the best thing I had ever seen. Nothing came even remotely close. I was swept away, hypnotised, and in awe. It was witty, thrilling, sexy, had a marvellous soundtrack and felt like it was otherworldly. After having seen it I could not let it go. I had to write down some thoughts, and I was thinking "Who is this Hitchcock? I need to know more about him." The next day I went to the local library and investigated their selection of film books. They were very few, but among the handful was François Truffaut's interview book with Hitch. I borrowed it on the spot and read it from cover to cover. (I read all the other books on film they had as well, but they did me no favours.)
The next week's Hitchcock was The Trouble With Harry (1955), which, like Rear Window, did not feel like an ordinary film, and I loved it too. Particularly Shirley MacLaine and the extraordinary autumn leaves lovingly captured by Robert Burks's camera. The next film was The Man Who Knew too Much (1956), which I liked almost as much as Rear Window, even though it felt like a more ordinary film. But then it became complicated because the last film in the five week retro was Vertigo (1958). I did not like it at all. I was just puzzled and unsettled. My mother came in while I was watching and asked whether I liked this one too. "No. I don't understand what is happening." I said without shame. (A few years later me and my brother was watching Marnie (1964) on VCR and again my mother came into the room. It was during the flashback at the end went Marnie is re-living her childhood trauma, a brutal and bloody scene, and my mother got upset. "What ARE you watching!? Is all this violence really suitable for you?" But we were allowed to watch the rest of the film.)
After these four films everything was settled. I began exploring the classics. There was not much available, but John Ford's The Searchers (1956) was, and a few films by Akira Kurosawa, and Richard Brooks's version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). The one I liked best of those was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to the extent that I asked if I could buy it from the store. Alas, that was not allowed. I also read all film books I could get my hands on. An invaluable resource was TV3, a Swedish TV channel based in the UK which during a period in the early 1990s showed a British film from the 1940s and 1950s every weekday afternoon. I watched as many as I could, and loved almost all of them (an experience almost equal in importance to the Hitchcock retrospective in 1989). I stayed up late one night to watch Samba Traoré (1992) by Idrissa Ouedraogo, because I had never seen a film from Africa, and was eager to do so. I started going to film festivals, and I decided that when it was time to go to university I would study film history. (I was delayed one year in my plans, for complicated reasons. Suffice to say that in my first year at university I studied Czech language and literature.) I had toyed with the idea of becoming an architect, but now a career in film took over. I began working at a cinema whilst studying at university, and I also began writing for journals and such. The first piece that got published was 15 years ago in the Swedish film journal Filmrutan. The article was about Alexander Mackendrick, and I have been writing for Filmrutan ever since. And over the last decade I have worked as a film journalist, in a DVD store, at the Bergman Archives, as Bergman co-ordinator at the Swedish Institute, as tutor, as editor, as essayist, and last year also as an actor (in a Swedish film which opens for general release in January 2013). And now I have written a thesis.
Looking back over the years it is remarkable how consistent I have been in my approach to film. I have always been more interested in aesthetics than story, the how rather than the what, and I have always been on the lookout for new things, new films, new filmmakers, new countries. I have also always been amazed by the discrepancy between the large number of fascinating films and filmmakers that exist, and the much smaller number of films and filmmakers that actually get proper attention. It was not a coincidence that my first published article was about Sandy Mackendrick rather than Hitch or Kurosawa or Bergman, or that my thesis is about Hasse. Even though I owe Hitch almost everything I have never felt that he was by default superior or more interesting than any other filmmaker.
And now, what happens next? I do not know, but I do know that there is a wealth of unknown films and filmmakers to seek out. As Calvin says to Hobbes, "It's a magical world ol' buddy, let's go exploring!"
Thursday, 13 September 2012
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.
---------------------------------
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.
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.
---------------------------------
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.
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