When James Agee died of a heart attack in a taxi in New York City on May 16, 1955 (my birthday, three years later), the tributes to him from his friends approximated the enormity of their personal loss as well as the loss to American English prose. In the seventy years since, those tributes haven’t really come to an end. All of the poems, stories, essays, letters and fragments have been collected and published. Few American writers are now as celebrated or as regretted as Agee.
The bulk of Agee’s writing consists of the movie reviews he wrote for Time (November 1941 to February 1948) and The Nation (December 1942 to September 1948). As uninspiring as the overwhelming majority of movies on which Agee was obliged to comment were, he took his job seriously. So we have his one-liner appraisals of The Affairs of Susan to Up in Mabel’s Room without very many people now living having seen either of them. Movie critics then weren’t what they are today, who provide nothing more than consumer advice.
I want to take a moment to recall just one of the reasons why Agee was not just a fine minor poet and a great writer of prose, but also a great critic. We know how enthused and encouraged Agee had been by the always struggling art of the movies. He had seen greatness in it, enough to recognize what it was capable of doing, but he hadn’t seen enough greatness and it whetted his appetite for more.
So he took on the job that few had ever really wanted: the movie desk at Time, Inc., which made him easily the most powerful critic writing for a non-daily in America. His knowledge of movies had been acquired the hard way, by seeing as many films available in New York City as he could get his eyes on. By 1942, when he began writing for Time, Hollywood was already past its prime – its so-called golden age was over. The war put the industry on a different footing – keeping the home fires burning with heavy-handed propaganda, most of which probably didn’t hold up even then. After the war budget strictures pushed Hollywood back into the streets, with a greater feeling for real locales but burdened with the same old phoney scripts.
Agee was in such despair over the paucity of worthwhile films that he often rounded up a dozen or so of them in a single column. His one-liners still sting. Leafing through the book Agee on Film is to be transported to a Manhattan theater seat, like the Fifth Avenue Playhouse, with the light from the projection booth shining through layers of cigarette smoke. Movie admission cost 55 cents in 1946. (A gallon of gas was 21 cents.)
An excellent illustration of the difference between a perceptive critic like Agee and a mere reviewer can be found in his back-to-back analysis of the last two films (he only made four) of Jean Vigo, written for The Nation in 1947-48. The conventional wisdom today is that Vigo’s only feature-length film, L’Atalante, is his most mature work, one that displays his genius at integrating sound and image most acutely, and that his earlier short film Zero de Conduite, though more personal and inventive, is “experimental,” its ideas not fully developed. Agee thought the opposite was true, that Zero was the better film and L’Atalante a disappointing attempt to domesticate Vigo’s feral genius. Agee goes a great deal further to defining the extent of Vigo's contribution to film language.
Of Zero de Conduite:
It was the one film which worked deeply within pure motion picture style, and it extended the possibilities of style and expression as brilliantly, and germinally, as the best work of Griffith, Chaplin, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and Murnau. It was made fourteen or fifteen years ago, and nothing so adventurous in terms of pure movie expressiveness has been made since.
Of L’Atalante:
Vigo was a more experienced director by the time he made L’Atalante, and the picture shows gifts fully as great as those shown in Zero de Conduite. But for all its quality L’Atalante suggests the struggles of a maniac in straight-jacket; whereas in Zero he moves freely, and it turns out that he is dangerous only to all in the world that most needs destroying.
Agee, who learned the few details of Vigo’s short life from the Hollywood Quarterly, challenges the conventional views of Vigo’s place as an artist:
On a foggy day, indeed, or with a prejudiced eye, it would be possible to confuse his work with the general sad run of avant-garde movie work, as several reviewers, including some whom I ordinarily respect, have done. But Vigo was no more a conventional avant-gardist than he was a Hollywood pimp; he was one of the very few real originals who have ever worked on films. Nobody has approached his adroitness in handling reality, consciousness, and time on film (in Zero); or has excelled his vivid communication of the animal emotion, the senses, the inanimate world, and their interplay (in L’Atalante); nor have I found, except in the best work of the few masters, a flexibility, richness, and purity of creative passion to equal his in both these films.
Most movies, including many of the best, have been made timidly and under great handicap, with fragments of the movie alphabet which were mostly shaped and frozen around the year 1925. In an important sense Vigo is far from “unconventional”; he is merely making much of the rest of the alphabet available. He has gone as far in this, I think, as Eisenstein and Dovzhenko – in a very different direction, of course – and a great deal that he has done in [Zero], bold as it is, should be regarded less as inimitable experiment than as the conquest of more of the full ground on which further work can be done. It is as if he had invented the wheel. Many others were fumbling at it; some still are; but nobody of anything remotely like his ability is trying to find further uses for it; and one is sure to be branded as a solemn snob, incapable of “enjoying” movies, if one so much as dares to speak in favor of these elementary devices by which enjoyment could be enlarged.
After reading how a film gourmand like Agee relished the chance to dine on haute cuisine like Vigo’s films, it is all the more dispiriting to see him having to gorge more sausages from the Hollywood grinder in his column the following week. Clearly, Agee on Film is, like Vigo's L'Atalante, made up of the struggles of a maniac in a straight-jacket.
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