Nouvelle Blague

Diligently digging through 60-year-old Film Quarterly issues (digital copies, of course), I came across a few tidbits that I thought would be a nice addition to my notice of Godard's passing (q.v.).

The first was Stanley Kauffmann's otherwise perfect assessment of Godard's first film, Breathless: "Godard's Breathless may be a happy accident, but it certainly is happy." (Vol. 15, No. 2 Winter 1961-62) 

But the following summer Dwight Macdonald chimed in with his dim view of the politique des auteurs: 

Truffaut is a great director but a bad critic - there may be a connection - and his politique des auteurs is a foolish notion, especially when it gets into the hands of Anglo-American enthusiasts, as Pauline Kael demonstrated in your last issue. I offer the above as supporting evidence to her thesis; the p.d.a. boys doubtless have their rationalizations ready but I think they will be put on their mettle by this past season's crop. 

Finally it occurs to me. as an ironic afterthought, that one of the few directors today for whom M. Truffaut's theory works is himself: everything of his I've seen up to now has been on a consistently high level. Could it be that, in 1957, before he had made any films, he was far-sighted enough (second-sighted would be more accurate) to have devised a theory which he alone could later live up to? (Vol. 16, No. 4 Summer 1963) 

In the early 1960s, Macdonald had been a contributor to Film Quarterly's "Films of the Quarter" along with Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Gavin Lambert, and Jonas Mekas. By the Summer 1963 issue, however, Macdonald found his own remarks placed side by side with a column by Andrew Sarris - the American critic who took up the auteur theory and ran with it - that opened with the sentence "The Birds finds Hitchcock at the summit of his artistic powers." This prompted Macdonald to opt out of further contributions to "Films of the Quarter." 

I've been wondering, for various reasons, whether to keep on contributing to "Films of the Quarter," but now that Andrew Sarris has been addd to the stable, I feel the decision has been made for me. I am not willing to appear under the same iubric as a "critic" who thinks The Birds "finds Hitchcock at the summit of his artistic powers," not to mention similar recent ukases by the Mad Tsarris of Greenwich Village. Nor am I willing to pretend that it's just a matter of taste, a difference of opinion, etc. For I don't consider Sarris a critic; a propagandist, a high-priest, even an archivist; but not a critic. His simplistic coarsening of Truffaut's auteur theory has produced a dogma so alien to the forms of reasoning and sensibility I respect as to eliminate any basis of discussion. Even if I chance to agree with him on some specific movie, as has happened, it is irrelevant. Sometimes a Chinese fortune cookie will hit the mark, too. 

Jonas Mekas was not my ideal of a critic, but, since he is a poet and anarchist by temperament, his vagaries are unsystematic and so gleams of perception sometimes shine fitfully through the mist. But Sarris, like certain Marxist sectarians I used to know, is a systematic fool. His judgments have nothing to do with criticism, since he merely applies the party line to each movie, as they did to each event; the actual, concrete film he sees (or rather does not see) is just one more brick to be fitted into his System. That Film Quarterly sees Sarris as a bona fide critic like Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Gavin Lambert, and myself, to name the four other contributors to the current "Films of the Quarter" - this is one more symptom of that mush-headed confusion and lack of standards I have long observed in most "serious" writing about the movies. (Why, for instance, is the level of "little" movie magazines invariably lower than that of their literary and political counterparts?) Knowing this fact of life, I have made allowances for Film Quarterly. I put up with Mekas, I forgave that entire issue recently devoted to Ian Cameron's stolidly uncritical blurb for Antonioni (those auteur pundits are most depressing when they praise a director one admires), and I might even have been willing to try co-existence with the increasingly auteur orientation of recent issues. But I draw the line at Sarris as a fellow-critic. Include me out. 

Yours more in anger than in sorrow, 

DWIGHT MACDONALD. (Vol. 17, No. 4 Summer 1963)

(In case you've forgotten - as I had - an ukase is an edict of the Russian Government.)