Hauteur

One of the reasons why I'm convinced that Stanley Kauffmann is the best film critic of his time (1958-2013) is because he never wasted his time attacking any of his colleagues. His contemporaries, among whom were John Simon, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris, were too often sidelined by their gainsaying of one another's opinions - to the extent that their fighting (critically useless) became famous in itself. As passionate in the defense of their opinions as they too often were, it is the opinions themselves that will stand or fall.

Kauffmann quietly went about his job holding every film and filmmaker up to his own standards of quality, regardless of their broader "significance" to the medium, to the culture at large, to history, or to art. He had plenty to say over a career of 55 years, but he had nothing to prove. On the rare occasions when Kauffmann found it necessary to take a stand - for example, on the subject of the "auteur theory" introduced by the French critics of Cahiers du Cinema and by Andrew Sarris in translation - it was always in the context of evaluating specific films for consideration. Reading Kauffmann's second collection of film criticism, Figures of Light,(1) which covers the crucial period 1966-1970, an era that saw often unfortunate shifts in international film production, I occasionally found him commenting directly on the claims of the auteurists, and you couldn't find a more concise and more thorough dismantling of the theory anywhere else.

He concentrates his argument in his discussion of Targets, the film debut of Peter Bogdanovich, a few of the post-Jules and Jim films of François Truffaut, and of one of the auteurists' most highly touted masterpieces, Max Ophuls' Lola Montes.

Regarding Targets:


Peter Bogdanovich is twenty-nine, the author of several brochures for the Museum of Modern Art Film Library and of numerous articles about film. He has now written, directed, and produced Targets and also plays a substantial role in it. As a film, it's minor; as a phenomenon, significant. So far as I know, Targets is the first picture made in Hollywood by an American critic of the auteur school. France has had many new auteur directors in the last decade, but Bogdanovich is the first American auteur to appear in the city that is a particular heaven for auteurs. All those Hollywood elements of commerce and popularity-groveling that seem restrictive to many of us have meant little to auteurs.

Their chief concern is with the way a director handles the material he chooses or is assigned. Many of us think of Hollywood as, in general, the home of hacks or of good men hampered. Here is an intelligent, utterly hip young man who chooses Hollywood. His action and his beliefs have nothing whatsoever to do with that other group of young filmmakers, the Underground or Free Cinema. They are anti-Hollywood. The auteurs are, in one sense, the first pop artists and cultists, but with a difference: they can see a fourth-rate melodrama and know it is fourth-rate as a melodrama at the same time that they glory in the director's use of the camera and his expertness in film mythology.

To argue for more than filmic content in films is taken by some as an argument for literary or theatrical film. But such new directors of the past decade as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, De Seta, Olmi, Jessua, de Broca, Lester, Teshigahara, and Nichols have shown that film can be truly film without being only film. Bogdanovich, however, has grown up in an esthetics that exalts manner over matter - no, it tells us fundamentally that manner is all: that Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor and Nicholas Ray's Party Girl and Preminger's The Cardinal and Hitchcock's The Birds and Hawks's Hatari! are excellent artworks because of the directors' styles, that objection to the tacky stories is misplaced because the film is not in the story but in "the relationship between the director and his material" (Gavin Millar). To me, this seems the equivalent of the theatrical legend about the great actor who could pulverize you by reading the telephone book. I have never had the luck to be thus pulverized, but the legend does not maintain that the ideal is to have great actors read telephone books. I am unconvinced that any of those directors is as good when (even because) he uses fourth-rate material as when he uses material and performers that satisfy other expectations in us as well.(2)

On Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid:

Truffaut was a leading formulator of the auteur theory; in fact, as explicit theory, it is usually said to date from an article he wrote in Cahiers du Cinema in January 1954. One tenet of that theory holds that material is less important than its cinema treatment, thus these directors have often taken stock genre material, like American thrillers, in order to prove that film art can be made out of the film's "own."

Sometimes (as in Shoot the Piano Player), the transmutation succeeds; more often, the result is only a combination of smugness and camp, accompanied in the theater by the purring of the viewer who gets the "in" references and relishes the exaltation of pop over pompous old "elitist" art. When the transmutation fails, as it does in Mississippi Mermaid and as it does in most cases, the auteur theory shivers. André Bazin, the late French critic who was early associated with the theory and who was Truffaut's mentor, wrote a corrective article in 1957 which is generally disregarded by his disciples. Bazin said: "All that [the auteur supporters] want to retain in the equation auteur plus subject = work is the auteur, while the subject is reduced to zero....Auteur, yes, but what of?" The answer, in regard to Truffaut's recent films, is: Not much.

After detailing the good and the bad things about Max Ophuls Lola Montes, Kauffmann proceeds:

Some of the Lola admirers might agree with all of this; all of them might agree with some of it. Together they reject its relevance. Why? Because they subscribe, with passionate and unquestionable conviction, to a theory of the hierarchy of film values. They believe in selecting and exalting sheerly cinematic values, like the matters I praised earlier, and in subordinating or discounting such matters as those I objected to. To them, this is exultation in the true glory of cinema.

To me, it is a derogation and patronization of cinema. To me, this hierarchy says: "This is what film can do and we mustn't really expect it to do any more, mustn't be disappointed if this is all it does." A chief motive behind the hierarchy is to avoid discussion of the strictured elements forced on filmmaking by the ever-present money men. Lola was commissioned as an expensive showcase for Martine Carol. The money men foisted Miss Carol and a cheap novel by the author of Caroline Cherie on Ophuls, so let's not criticize those elements, let's concentrate on Ophuls' marvelous decor, detail, and camera movement and, by the simple act of appropriate omission, presto, we have a masterpiece.

I disbelieve in this hierarchy. There are money men involved in every art. No one would dream of praising an architect because he designed his interiors well, if he had debased his overall form to please his client's pocketbook. Why a special leniency for film?

Why indeed in the face of the fact that film has proved it doesn't need it, has achieved thoroughly fine work? The worst aspect of this approach is that it crimps the film out of its cultural heritage - the cinematic and the literary and theatrical and psychological and social-political - and says to it, "Just go and be cinematic. If anything else is achieved, good. If not, no great matter." It is an esthetic equivalent of the Victorian ethic of "knowing your place."

This concentration on part of a work leads to inflation of the value of that part. Ophuls, who in some ways was masterly, is extolled as a master of romance. To speak only of Lola, I see him sheerly as cynic, burdened with this trumpery novel and this mammary star and deciding to give it back to the world in spades. One critic envisions Lola in the circus as a presence "redeeming all men both as a woman and as an artistic creation." This woman? This artistic creation? The last scene, in which the crowd presses forward to buy kisses of the caged Lola, gave me a vision of Ophuls himself chuckling at the Yahoos who are wonder-struck by this earlier Zsa Zsa Gabor, this "celebrity" in the word's synthetic present-day sense, a crowd scrabbling to pay for a touch of this scandal-sheet goddess. And I also had a concentric vision of Ophuls chuckling at his film audiences, as they press forward to pay for a chance to adulate his caged talent.

Let me give the last word, on this matter of exalting a medium in itself, to the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing about McLuhan in the latest Partisan Review, Enzensberger says:

"It is all too easy to see why the slogan "The medium is the message" has met with unbounded enthusiasm on the part of the media, since it does away, by a quick fix worthy of a card-sharp, with the question of truth. Whether the message is a lie or not has become irrelevant, since in the light of McLuhanism truth itself resides in the very existence of the medium, no matter what it may convey...."(4)

Despite Kauffmann's total rejection of auteurism, its pernicious influence persists among an older generation of film critics whose god appears to be Jean-Luc Godard, the sole survivor of the Nouvelle Vague. Kauffmann reviews quite a number of Godard's films in Figures of Light, and finds merit in some (Les Carabiniers, Weekend), but not in others (La Chinoise, Pierrot le fou). This is something the auteurists seem incapable of doing. To them, every film made by an auteur is of more or less equal value. In fact, evaluation isn't what auteurists do. They are content to catalog and classify - not to quantify.

In an extensive analysis of Godard's Weekend, Kauffmann quotes an article in support of Godard by Susan Sontag, and concludes:

I cannot summarize all of Miss Sontag's article (it should be read), but, for me, it leads to and away from this sentence: "Just as no absolute, immanent standards can be discovered for determining the composition, duration and place of a shot, there can be no truly sound reason for excluding anything from a film." This seemingly staggering statement is only the extreme extension of a thesis that any enlightened person would support: there are no absolutes in art. The Godardians take this to mean (like Ivan Karamazov) that therefore everything is permissible. Others of us take it to mean that therefore standards have to be empirically searched out and continually readjusted, to distinguish art from autism; that, just as responsive morals have to be found without a divine authority if humanity is to survive, so responsive esthetics have to be found without canonical standards if art is to survive. The last may be an open question, but it is open as long as men continue to make art.(5)

"Standards" and "responsive esthetics" are among the words most foreign to auteurists.



(1) Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
(2) Ibid, p. 96-99.
(3) Ibid, p. 255-256.
(4) Ibid, p. 160-164.
(5) Ibid, p. 132-133.