Mifune

Today is the centenary of Toshiro Mifune’s birth. The only reason I know of him is thanks to Akira Kurosawa, who saw him as the embodiment of the man of action that made so many of his films unforgettable. Incredibly, TCM honored him in a 24-hour marathon (ongoing as I write this) of ten of the films he made with Kurosawa. I’ve been lucky enough to have seen every one of them over the many years of my filmgoing life. But I must admit that I don’t really regard Mifune as a standard of greatness in film acting, the way I think of Marcello Mastroianni and Max von Sydow. He was very good in just about the same type of role in film after film. He is powerful, yes. But his very power limited him.

When Dwight Macdonald saw Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he wrote: “Toshiro Mifune plays Macbeth; at first his style is exciting, but it soon becomes monotonous, all that snarling and baring of teeth, those vulpine laughs.” Harold Bloom remarked that Kurosawa’s film, despite dispensing with all of Shakespeare’s poetry, was the closest film to Shakespearean that he had seen. I find myself standing somewhere in between these opposing opinions. 

By the time he got around to seeing Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Macdonald was even more skeptical not only of Mifune’s talent but disappointed by Kurosawa, from whom he expected a great deal more:

A satire (or a parody) needs a norm to be successful. Mifune isn’t it, even though he rescues the peasant’s pretty wife (by treacherously carving up her six guards) and is on friendly terms with the peaceably-minded innkeeper and cooper. Tigerish as always, Mr. Mifune is just another wild beast let loose on the unhappy town. (I don’t understand his reputation as an actor; he seems to me to be permanently stuck in his first role, that of the bandit in Rashomon.)”

While I don’t hold completely with Macdonald’s views of Mifune’s performances (and Kurosawa’s films), he does have a point. He was, however, apparently ignorant of the fact that, prior to his playing the bandit in Rashomon, Mifune played, in four other films for Kurosawa, a small-time gangster in Drunken Angel, a crusading doctor in The Quiet Duel, a police detective in Stray Dog, and an artist (painter) in Scandal. Granted, his international reputation was kick-started by Rashomon, and he became largely typecast by the 1960s. It is as a sword-wielding samurai – albeit the most awe-inspiring – that Mifune will be remembered. 

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

After writing for sixteen years for Fortune, Time and The Nation, James Agee, whose first love had been movies, wrote the narration and dialogue for the nonfiction film The Quiet One (1948). Having published a long, flattering essay for Life about John Huston, he was invited by Huston in 1950 to join him in California to work on film scripts. Agee adapted the Stephen Crane story "The Blue Hotel," which Huston liked, but chose not to accept (the script was later published and can also be found here). It was while he was with Huston that Agee suffered his first heart attack. Agee drank heavily, and so did Huston. But Huston liked living a hard physical life as well, and he may have pushed Agee too hard. Once Agee had recovered, Huston persuaded him to write the script for The African Queen (based on the book by C. S. Forester). Prior commitments prevented him from working with Huston to adapt Moby Dick a few years later. One of those commitments was The Night of the Hunter (1955).

In 1952, Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P fortune (1) and patron of the arts, produced the "anthology film" Face to Face, based on a rather odd pairing of stories by Joseph Conrad ("The Secret Sharer") and Stephen Crane. Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is a charming story about Jack Potter, a small town marshall who impulsively marries a young lady in San Antonio and, abashed at not telling the townsfolk about her and wanting to avoid embarrassment, he tries to sneak her back to town. Unfortunately, at the very moment he arrives with his bride by train, the town drunk, Scratchy Wilson, has gone on a rampage and is looking for the Marshall, who alone has had the ability to disarm him.

Agee wrote the script for the film, directed by Bretaigne Windust. It takes up only about a third of Face to Face, which is all the time it needed. Robert Preston plays Jack Potter. Never known for his subtlety, he is perfect playing the assured, resolute town Marshall, whose tenderness toward his bride is conveyed in small looks and gestures.(2) Marjorie Steele plays the bride, and she is probably the reason the film was made, since she was Huntington Hartford's second wife at the time. He helped her movie career along as long as he could until he gave up in 1960 and divorced her. But she is excellent as Jack Potter's bride - a role that is otherwise nebulous in Crane's story. She contributes to the mystery of just exactly how and why the two of them got married in San Antonio. Scratchy Wilson is played by Minor Watson, who had a long and prolific career that started at the Essanay Studio in 1916. Some clever camera work introduces us to him drinking a bottle of whisky and cleaning his pistols, preparing to "settle" things once and for all with Jack Potter. Agee himself appears in a small role (Dwight Macdonald called the role "the town drunk") in the Yellow Sky saloon.

Agee's script invents a few funny details not in the slight story, such as Scratchy actually scratching himself in his first scene (how else did he get the name?), shooting the preacher's doorbell so that it gets stuck ringing, and, at the film's conclusion, walking away from his confrontation with Potter, Scratchy looks at his pistols (while everyone watching holds their breath) and, instead of holstering them, he merely drops them on the ground.

Dwight MacDonald called the film "a delightful short comedy". It's delightful for its giddiness - it is Fred Zinneman's self-reverent High Noon spun around on its axis - Jack Potter, marshall in Yellow Sky, doesn't know that his nemesis awaits him there and that he is planning to shoot him just as soon as he appears. But, unlike Gary Cooper in High Noon, who goes around town, accompanied by that prodding song, "Do not forsake me, o my darlin'," searching for reinforcements, Potter confronts Scratchy unarmed. And instead of Grace Kelly lighting out on a wagon when zero hour draws nigh, Potter's bride is standing right beside her husband when he meets Scratchy.

The production certainly has a backlot look to it, with housefronts instead of real houses, and all the paraphernalia of a Western town without the usual rough justice and the moral rectitude of it. In its gentleness, the film is exactly what Stephen Crane would maybe have intended it to be: a send-up of all the dime novel Westerns so popular from 1860 onwards, that promoted a purely fictionalized image of the American West for the consumption of Easterners in cities starved for excitement. Crane would examine the effects of this fictional image more seriously in his longer story, "The Blue Hotel," set in a Nebraska town on the verge of the West, as close as a "Swede," his imagination filled with dime novel delusions, would ever get to the genuine article - even if the genuine article had disappeared completely by the 1890s, when Crane wrote the story. James Agee's script for "The Blue Hotel" is so rich in details of blocking and camera placement, it's a wonder it remains "unproduced."(3)

James Agee had done so much writing-to-order for so long, sometimes unsigned, that when he finally had the time to write as he pleased, he almost didn't know where to begin. His work on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men went largely unheralded (the necessarily oversized book, to do justice to Walker Evans's great photographs, was finally published by Houghton Mifflin), and his only novel, A Death in the Family, was left unfinished. That leaves us an early volume of poetry, his voluminous film writings and his film scripts. The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, now all but forgotten, is a beautiful short film, deserving of preservation and restoration, quite separable from The Secret Sharer, that occupies the rest of Face to Face.

Dwight Macdonald wrote a moving tribute to Agee when A Death in the Family was published. His long essay includes the following paragraph:

"James Agee died in 1955 at the age of forty-five. He died of a heart attack in a taxicab, and the platitudes about 'shock' and 'loss' suddenly became real. A friend I had for thirty years respected intellectually and sympathized with emotionally and disapproved of temperamentally and been stimulated by conversationally had vanished, abruptly and for good. I had always thought of Agee as the most broadly gifted writer of my generation, the one who, if anyone, might someday do major work. He didn’t do it, or not much of it, but I am not the only one who expected he would. He really shouldn’t have died, I kept thinking, and now this posthumous book makes me think it all the harder."


(1) A&P, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, was the largest grocer chain in America in the 1950s.
(2) Preston played the father who is killed in a car accident in the 1963 film adaptation of Tad Model's play All the Way Home, which was a stage adaptation of James Agee's novel A Death in the Family.
(3) The story was adapted in 1974 to a television film by Harry Mark Petrakis and directed by Czech filmmaker Jan Kadar. Except for the vivid performance by David Warner as the Swede, its alterations of Crane's story were unnecessary and the film is now in limbo where it belongs.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

Finding a new (old) essay by Dwight Macdonald I've never read before is always an event in my life. The fact that Macdonald wrote voluminously on just about every subject that caught his critical eye makes the search for all of his individual pieces that much harder. In the essay "The Triumph of the Fact" he examined how facts have gradually come to dominate Americans' lives, at the expense of some rather more precious things:

"Our mass culture—and a good deal of our high, or serious, culture as well—is dominated by an emphasis on data and a corresponding lack of interest in theory, by a frank admiration of the factual and an uneasy contempt for imagination, sensibility, and speculation. We are obsessed with technique, hagridden by Facts, in love with information."

He begins this wide-ranging (11,000+ word) essay by pointing out something that can be found in the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, that will come as something of a shock to fans of the Benedict Cumberbatch television series or the Guy Ritchie films:

Soon after he started sharing quarters in Baker Street with Sherlock Holmes, young Dr. Watson was shocked to find that his brainy friend was an ignoramus:

Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naïvest way who he might be or what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican theory and of the composition of the solar system. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled around the sun appeared such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it, I shall do my best to forget it.

Holmes then develops a rather bogus theory about the brain being like an attic with a fixed capacity. “Depend upon it,” he concludes, “there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” This is too much for the good doctor:

“But the solar system!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently. “You say that we go around the sun. If we went around the moon, it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Macdonald then asserts that "Holmes's attitude is American" - but of the old fashioned kind, like Ben Franklin's. Dr. Watson, a physician, was a perfect foil to Holmes's kind of intelligence, relying on the collection of facts to back up his conclusions. Watson is, after all, the amanuensis who wrote all the Holmes stories (with the considerable help of Arthur Conan Doyle).

But Macdonald isn't trying to change anyone's mind about the genius of Sherlock Holmes. He is trying to demonstrate how our American preoccupation with facts is eclipsing another approach to the world around us. As to Holmes's willful ignorance of the Copernican solar system, Macdonald goes so far as to agree with him:

"There is something magnificent about this carrying the principle of utility to its logical conclusion. And Holmes was right to insist that the only good reason for acquiring any knowledge, even of whether the earth goes around the sun or the moon, is its utility for the individual knower. But his idea of utility was too narrowly practical. Like Holmes, I know little about the physical sciences and am not curious to know more— pace Sir Charles Snow—but my lack of interest is due not just to their irrelevance to my professional needs but, more important, to my feeling that they aren’t useful to me in a broader sense, one which Holmes’s logic doesn’t recognize—they don’t appeal to my kind of mind and feelings. Others do find the physical sciences “useful” in this sense, as I myself find literature and history and philosophy “useful,” and so they are rightly concerned to know that the earth goes around the sun rather than the moon. (I do happen to have picked up that particular bit of information somewhere, but in general, when the solar system is on the agenda, I feel like echoing, “What the deuce is it to me?”)(1)

Holmes is purely a work of fiction, but in creating him, Doyle did something to detective fiction that transformed it completely. It's no accident that an American writer, Poe, invented the detective story, "the only literary genre" Macdonald asserts, "whose point is the discovery, by scientific method, of a Fact (whodunit?)". But the circumlocutions through which Holmes arrives, as if by a miracle, at the solution of the most mysterious crimes are in defiance of the common rules of crime detection. His famous powers of deductive reasoning are the fruit of lightning inspiration, insight, imagination. The route he follows in order to arrive at a solution to the most seemingly complex problems can't be mapped - if it could, then anyone could be a Sherlock Holmes by simply following the same steps. That is the scientific method. Yet Watson discovers that his flatmate at No. 221b, Baker Street has abundant practical knowledge on some subjects, but it is undisciplined and "unsystematic," whereas his knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, literature, and politics is nebulous. Though he seems to possess vast intellect, Holmes is not, strictly speaking, much of an intellectual. He is demonstrably closer to being an artist.

As Macdonald concludes,

A hunter looks at a wood in one way, an artist in another. The latter’s eye takes in every twig, branch, trunk, shadow, color, highlight, etc. The former’s eye also records all this data, but his mind rejects everything except the particular Fact (brown fur, speckled feathers) it is looking for. The hunter knows what he will see (or rather, what he hopes he will see) before he looks. Since the artist’s aim is to render the wood in itself and as a whole (he may do it by three lines, as in a Chinese landscape, or by a Dutch proliferation of detail) his problem is how to be conscious of everything. The hunter’s problem is just the reverse: to be conscious of only what he has decided, in advance, to see. The same distinction could be made between the way a Wordsworth looks at a field and the way a farmer looks at it.

We Americans are hunters rather than artists, a practical race, narrow in our perceptions, men of action rather than of thought or feeling. Our chief contribution to philosophy is pragmatism (pragma is Greek for factum); technique rather than theory distinguishes our science;[9] our homes, our cities, our landscapes are designed for profit or practicality but not generally for beauty; we think it odd that a man should devote his life to writing poems but natural that he should devote it to inducing children to breakfast on Crunchies instead of Krispies; our scholars are strong on research, weak on interpreting the masses of data they collect; we say “That’s just a fact” and we mean not “That’s merely a fact” but rather “Because that is a fact, there is nothing more to be said.”

This tropism toward the Fact deforms our thinking and impoverishes our humanity. “Theory” (Greek theoria) is literally a “looking at” and thence “contemplation, reflection, speculation.” Children are told: “You may look but you mustn’t touch,” that is, “You mustn’t change what you look at.” This would be good discipline for Americans, just to look at things once in a while without touching them, using them, converting them into means to achieve power, profit, or some other practical end. The artist’s vision, not the hunter’s.

One of the things that Macdonald wrote that I remember most often is his debunking the Latin saying "De gustibus non est disputandum" or "There's no arguing about taste." Macdonald asked the simple question, "if you can't arvue about taste, what CAN you argue about?" You can't argue with facts. It's why so many people probably prefer them to expressions and demonstrations of taste. 

(1) Then there was George Bernard Shaw's argument: "I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe."

They Shall Not Grow Old

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

-Laurence Binyon, "For the Fallen," Fourth Stanza, 1914


The publicity surrounding the BBC broadcast of Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old last Sunday has been rather unprecedented and unusually emotional for a documentary, more specifically a film made up of century-old documentary footage. Finished in time for the centenary of the end of the Great War on November 11, critics have expressed an overwhelming awe of Jackson's film, which was a "labor of love" that took him four years to complete.

In his review of the film, Peter Bradshaw of The Manchester Guardian writes: "The effect is electrifying. The soldiers are returned to an eerie, hyperreal kind of life in front of our eyes, like ghosts or figures summoned up in a seance. The faces are unforgettable." Over at The Observer Mark Kermode writes, "As we watch a line of soldiers marching through mud towards the front, something extraordinary happens. The film seems almost miraculously to change from silent black-and-white footage to colour film with sound, as though 100 years of film history had been suddenly telescoped into a single moment. Stepping through the looking glass, we find ourselves right there in the trenches, surrounded by young men whose faces are as close and clear as those of people we would pass in the street. I’ve often argued that cinema is a time machine, but rarely has that seemed so true."

Kermode reminds me of a wonderful moment in Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois in which Langlois is standing before a screen on which is projected a film made in 1895, and he says, "My goal was to show shadows of the living coexisting with shadows of the dead. For that's the essence of film. It supercedes time and space. It goes beyond the 4th dimension. Here we see Seville in a fragment of a re-framed Lumière film. It's a procession there in 1895. But that's not what counts. What matters is that these people are like us and as they walk, we walk along. So the audience is right there with them."

I'm not sure what Langlois, who collected 50,000 films for his Cinemathèque Française, would've thought about Peter Jackson's tampering with the sacred shadows of the dead. For tampering is what it is. I have a problem with revisionists. When, in 1952, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published, which sought not only to correct mistakes made in the 1611 King James Version, but to produce a text "written in language direct and clear and meaningful to people today,” a Bible as close as possible to “the life and language of the common man in our day,” the result provoked Dwight Macdonald to ask, 

And why this itch for modernizing anyway? Why is it not a good thing to have variety in our language, to have a work whose old-fashioned phrases exist in the living language, to preserve in one area of modern life the old forms of speech, so much more imaginative and moving than our own nervous, pragmatic style? As it enriches us to leave beautiful old buildings standing when they are no longer functional or to perform Shakespeare without watering his poetry down into prose, so with the Bible. The noblest ancient fane must be trussed and propped and renovated now and then, but why do it in the slashing style of the notorious Gothic “restorations” of Viollet-le-Duc? In any event, I think the Revisers exaggerate the difficulty of K.J.V. Almost all of it is perfectly understandable to anyone who will give a little thought and effort to it, plus some of that overvalued modern commodity, time. Those who won’t can hardly claim a serious interest in the Bible as either literature or religion.

Ask Kevin Brownlow, who has devoted most of his life to finding very old - sometimes "lost" - films and restoring them to something close to their original glory, ask him if it's OK to remove these old black-and-white silent films from their context, from their place not in history but as history, and resuscitating them from dead black-and-white to living color. And adding not just actor's voices seamlessly lip-synced to the people in the films, but all of the ambient sounds that couldn't be recorded in 1914-1918. Then there's the creation of additional frames to eliminate the accelerated, jerky motion caused by cameras hand-cranked at anywhere from 16 to 26 frames per second, so that people not only look and sound as good as new, but they move normally, at the standard 24 frames per second. And all this just to make the films more “accessible” to the modern viewer, who probably has never had patience enough to watch an old "grey" movie made before his lifetime - any time prior to 1990, that is.

In the November 14 BBC article, "Viewers were floored by the colour added to WW1 footage in They Shall Not Grow Old," Declan Cashin writes,

Adding colour to black and white historical images has its own kind of intense
emotional power - mostly because it can make an event that seems so far in the
past become instantly more recent and relevant. Think of the work of artist Marina Amaral, whose painstaking colouring of a picture of a young Holocaust victim went viral earlier this year.

“It is much easier to relate to people once we see them in colour," Amaral said of her project. The colourisation of World War One in They Shall Not Grow Old - and the effect of seeing so many young men brought to life in vivid hues - provoked a similarly big reaction from viewers.

The article includes a reproduction of the image mentioned above (someone attached it to a tweet!). It does indeed have an almost supernatural power. But am I alone in finding this digital fixing up of the past, especially the image (a "registration" photo taken by the Germans) of a helpless victim of the Holocaust, disturbing? Is that poor little girl more "alive" merely because a computer has colorized the obvious look of terror on her face? I thought about reproducing it here, but thought better of it. I'd rather not participate in the trivialization of tragedy. I feel sorry for a generation that cannot make the human connection with people now dead because photographs of them have heretofore been black-and-white.

It is true that the technology of the motion picture has gone through several developments - what some people might call "improvements", the most important of which are the transition from silent film to film with synchronized sound, and the much slower transition from black-and-white film to various color processes like Technicolor and Eastmancolor. But as technology was advancing, artists were doing what they always have done by making a virtue out of necessity and developing an aesthetics of film with or without sound and color. Just as black-and-white photography is distinguished by much more than simply the absence of color, a silent film is a great deal more than simply a film deprived the dimension of synchronized sound. Great films were made during the silent era, and their greatness is separable from anything like historical or cultural importance. Charlie Chaplin's Tramp was not deprived of the power of speech. In every one of his silent films he talks like everyone else. We simply couldn't hear his voice until the end of Modern Times when he sings a nonsense song. But the essence of Chaplin's art was silence. Later film clowns like Tati and Étaix used the pretense of silence, as an homage, perhaps, to Chaplin and Keaton. But it isolated them from the world in their films, in which everyone else spoke in voices we could hear. Chaplin's and Keaton's world was silent, but they were substantial parts of that world.

I can't escape the feeling that Jackson's film, however scrupulously well-intended, is in the service of the same philistinism that led Ted Turner to colorize classic American films, misguided tamperings, trying to put old wine into new skins, that were universally condemned at the time. Jackson's palette of colors is far more presentable - not as "tutti frutti" - as Turner's, but they are equally deplorable. The people who were "floored" by the images in Jackson's film should examine their emotional reactions more closely and ask themselves why they were so unmoved by the images when they were black-and-white.

If filmgoers today can't sit through a feature length silent film, it's only because they're not up to the level of concentration that a film like Abel Gance's Napoleon or Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin requires of them. It's the difference between the poetry of silent film that relies exclusively on images and the prose of contemporary film that is closer to nature, with all of the colors and sounds of nature that is ubiquitous today. Knowledge of the technical limitations of films housed in the Imperial War Museum, not to mention a generation of people captured in those films whose lives and understanding of the world and of history have set them far apart from us and from our time, requires an adjustment from the viewer that is tantamount to an act of the imagination. The direct connection between now and then, us and them, has long since been broken. Like a break in an electrical connection, an increase in the current can cause the electricity to "jump" or arc across the broken connection, and an act of concentrated imagination can re-establish contact with the past.

The title of Jackson's film, which is a line from the Laurence Binyon poem written on the occasion of the first great battles, and first great losses, of the war for the British Expeditionary Force, the battles of Mons and of the Marne, is beautiful but it is also double-edged. They shall not grow old ... because they were all killed when they were young. We grow old, which is one of the prices of being alive. Being revisited by them in Jackson's film may bring them closer to us as human beings, but it's a disservice, I think, to them as individuals, even when every face is given a name.

I was reminded of John Donne's famous Ode, "Death Be Not Proud," which assures us that death's victory is, at best, only temporary, since, in killing us, Death sends us to our immortal afterlife.

why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Written in 1609, but published posthumously in 1633, Donne was a member of that last generation of English poets, like Herrick, who, according to George Saintsbury, "have relished this life heartily, while heartily believing in another." But who believes in personal immortality any more? Only religious hysterics, perhaps, whose faith is not impaired by knowledge when knowledge is thoroughly lacking. A better view is presented by Drummond Allison (1921-1943), a British war poet (of the Second World War), in "Come, Let Us Pity Not the Dead But Death":

Come, let us pity not the dead but Death
For He can only come when we are leaving,
He cannot stay for tea or share our sherry.
He makes the old man vomit on the hearthrug
But never knew his heart before it failed him.
He shoves the shopgirl under the curt lorry
But could not watch her body undivided.
Swerving the cannon-shell to smash the airman
He had no time to hear my brother laughing.
He sees us when, a boring day bent double,
We take the breaking-point for new beginning
Prepared for dreamless sleep or dreams or waking
For breakfast but now sleep past denying.
He has no life, no exercise but cutting;
While we can hope a houri, fear a phantom.
Look forward to No Thoughts. For Him no dying
Nor any jolt to colour His drab action,
Only the plop of heads into the basket,
Only the bags of breath, the dried-up bleeding.
We, who can build and change our clothes and moulder,
Come, let us pity Death but not the dead.

Alas, Drummond himself was a casualty of war. Unlike him, Death cannot live on through poetry.

Remastering the Film: Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni's death on the same day as Ingmar Bergman's (30 July 2003) was comparable to the deaths of F.Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West within twenty-four hours of each other, December 21-22, 1940 (West was on his way to Fitzgerald's funeral when he was killed in a car accident). And although Antonioni was 94, and had not made a film unassisted since 1982, his very existence was a reminder of how brilliant film was capable of being.

With the three films that make up a loose trilogy, L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'eclisse (1962)(1), Antonioni expanded the supposed limitations of film expression. He proved that imagery alone was capable of supporting immense thematic and emotional weight.(1) And he arrived, in L'eclisse, at a nearly plotless narrative. Prior to L'avventura, with his adaptation of the Cesare Pavese novel Tra Donne Sole, known as Le Amiche (1955), Antonioni had already demonstrated an impatience with conventional plotting. In his next film, Il Grido (1957), he moved even further away from pat explanations for his characters' actions. He also drew the ire of his actors, who were never given what they regarded as proper motivation in their roles. (Richard Harris, who would appear in Red Desert (1964), called Antonioni a "quasi-intellectual".)

In 1957, actress Monica Vitti joined Antonioni's Milan theater group, Teatro Nuovo. Whatever her shortcomings as an actress, Vitti became something of a muse for him - so much so that her departure from his work was disproportionately felt. In 1965, Antonioni signed a contract with Carlo Ponti for three films to be made in English, which necessitated his departure from Italy, first to England for Blow-Up (1966). Though it inspired alot of spirited discussion, Blow-Up is a beautiful but ultimately hollow film. While Dwight Macdonald commented that it was a relief to get away from "the miseries of Monica," Vernon Young wrote that Blow-Up "pleaseth the eye but sticketh not in the memory."

His second film in English, Zabriskie Point (1970), was an embarrassing failure, a paean to the youth "counterculture" movement which was then all the rage. After his controversial documentary on Mao's China, Chung Kuo, Cina, which was not shown until 2004, Antonioni fulfilled his contract with Ponti with The Passenger (1975). Regarded highly by some (3), it is handcuffed by a preposterous, pseudo-Pirandellian plot about the ultimate shakiness of identity.(4) Stanley Kauffmann commented that, if viewed simply as a thriller, it is successful.

In 1985, Antonioni suffered a debilitating stroke which left him unable to walk or to speak. He managed to make himself understood to a female companion, who became his unofficial interpreter thereafter. This enabled him to work, and he made Beyond the Clouds (1985), with the help of director Wim Wenders. Antonioni repudiated Wenders work, however, and cut out nearly all of it from the finished film. Visually refulgent, it was welcome but saddening. He also contributed an episode to the anthology film Eros (2004).

While John Simon continues to insist that Ingmar Bergman is the greatest artist the cinema has yet produced, I think that Antonioni is far more integrally important. And Bergman, great as he was, never made a film to equal L'Avventura, which holds riches that will be prized for generations to come.


(1) In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Orson Welles once again showed off his cluelessness: "I don't like to dwell on things. It's one of the reasons I'm so bored with Antonioni - the belief that, because a shot is good, it's going to get better if you keep looking at it. He gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, 'Well, he's not going to carry that woman all the way up that road.' But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she's gone." (This Is Orson Welles, Bogdanovich, 1992.)
(2) Some critics have attempted to make it into a quartet with the inclusion of the inferior Red Desert (1964).
(3) Roger Ebert, who originally called the film "pretentious," now says, "I admire the movie more 30 years later. I am more in sympathy with it."
(4) The credit for the script lists Antonioni, Mark Peploe (brother of Clare, who was Antonioni's mistress at the time) and Peter Wollen, author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), which is easily one of the most impenetrable books ever written about film.

Sight Unsound

In 1962 , Dwight Macdonald - political radical and cultural conservative - was asked to contribute to a poll being conducted by Sight & Sound for, to use their own words, the ten "best films of all time." Macdonald duly submitted his list (1) with the following comment, "What no Chaplin, no Stroheim, no Dovchenko, no Pudovkin, no Clair, no Pabst, no Murnau, no De Sica, no Rossellini, no Visconti, no Fellini, no Ford, no Wellman, no Flaherty? Well, it's your idea." He then wrote a piece for Esquire about the poll, comparing the previous list from 1952 to the results of the 1962 poll (2).

Since I like exercise for its own sake, and since there have been four more Sight & Sound Critics' Polls since Macdonald compared the first two, I will try to bring Macdonald, who has been dead - and sorely missed - since 1982, up to date by examining the polls, their consistencies and inconsistencies. I have expressed my own opinion of such polls elsewhere (3), but there is a mania for them among critics and filmgoers, which is a direct reflection of the absense of serious thinking and discussion about films.

The point of conducting the critics' poll only every ten years is, I suppose, meant to bestow on it some sense of historicality. But by waiting so long between polls, during which time a new generation of critics has appeared with their own pet peeves and axes to grind, not to mention a new generation of filmmakers that has its own ideas about what a film should be, the very notion of consensus is challenged. I am, for one, rather glad that there were no pollsters in the 1940s, '30s and '20s to remind us what a wilderness the film world was before De Sica and Kurosawa, Renoir and Carné, or even before sound was added to sight. Trying to imagine what a 1932 Critics' Poll would have looked like (4), with its purists hanging on tenaciously to the lost art of the silent film, while newcomers dismissed them as prehistoric, is proof of how far film has come in a relatively brief period of time. But even such attempts at comprehensiveness have not prevented the poll from being topical.

In the 1972 poll only five titles survived from the '62 poll: Citizen Kane (#1), Ugetsu (#10), La Regle du Jeu [why the pretense of titles in French but not in Russian or Swedish or Italian?] (#2), Battleship Potemkin (#3) and L'avventura (#5). The rising and falling fortunes of old artists was more to blame than the introduction of new talent. The rest of the list shows the extent to which the reputations of two filmmakers dominated critical thinking then: Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (in the shattered edit, tied for #8) and Ingmar Bergman's Persona (tied for #5) and Wild Strawberries (tied for #10). The dropouts were Greed, Bicycle Thieves, Ivan the Terrible, La terra trema and L'Atalante. (5)

The disappearance of Greed from the poll was encouraging. Stroheim's star would never rise again, not even after the 1999 "restored" version was released to some acclaim. Nor would Visconti's, whose La terra trema was a rather unsettling combination of neo-realism and homoeroticism (Visconti had a predilection for casting catamites in all his films). Ivan the Terrible seems almost sclerotic today. L'Atalante is utterly charming and would reappear in the 1992 poll at #5. Periodically, certain films are re-discovered when restored prints are made available, as with L'Atalante, The Rules of the Game, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vertigo, Sunrise, etc.

Of the new additions in the '72 poll, the most pleasant surprise is Keaton's The General (tied for #8). the realization of Keaton's superiority to Chaplin, even if it does not lessen Chaplin's genius, was one of the most heartening mutations in cinematic taste of the past fifty years. What puzzles me is the rather back-handed tribute paid Ingmar Bergman, whose Wild Strawberries and Persona are considerably overrated. The biggest movement on the '72 poll was the appearance, at #4, of Fellini's 8 1/2.

Not surprisingly, then, by the time the '82 poll appeared, both Bergman films had dropped out, along with Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, although it would reappear in '92 tied for #10. Welles still clung to the cat-bird's seat with his Kane and Ambersons. Between '72 and '82 an unprecedented seven films clung to a place in the polls: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), 8 1/2 (#5), Potemkin (#6), L'avventura and Ambersons (tied for #7) and The General (tied for #10). Three new titles on the '82 poll show the direct impact of the auteur theory: Singin' in the Rain (tied for #3), Vertigo (tied for #7) and The Searchers (tied for #10). That all three are American genre films did not seem to faze the critics who voted for them. The happiest addition was Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (tied, unbelievably, with Singin' in the Rain). None of the films on the list happened to have been made during the intervening ten years, which is a trend that continued through the present 2002 poll.

Five titles survived the next decade for the '92 poll: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), Vertigo (#4), The Searchers (#5) and Potemkin (in a four-way tie for #6). Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc reappeared in the tie for #6, along with L'Atalante, which makes me wonder if the critics were beginning to keep tabs on the old polls. Kurosawa, #3 in '82, is replaced by Ozu's Tokyo Story. Though magnificent, it seems to be the token Japanese title of the decade. The victims of the interim decade were Singin' in the Rain, 8 1/2, L'avventura, Ambersons, and The General. Two new titles to the poll were Ray's Pather Panchali (#6) and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (#10). The Kubrick film that belongs on the poll is, of course, Dr. Strangelove. But the pseudo-intellectuality of 2001 made the critics seem smarter than they are. The Ray film is obvious lip service, since he died in April of that year.

Having lived with the choices for the latest poll, published in 2002, for seven years, I am as astonished at the persisting critical reason represented by Kane (#1, as usual), Rules (#3), Tokyo Story (#5), Potemkin (tied for #7), and 8 1/2 (tied for #9) as I am at the growing critical aneurism that put Vertigo at #2, The Godfather(s) at #4, 2001 at # 6, and Singin' in the Rain at #9. But where discrimination is most needed, and most to be expected, as when a person involved in the life of international film who has some knowledge of its history and the ability to distinguish between the films that conform to his subjective tastes (gustibus) and those that take powerful exception to them, is called on to submit his list of the Top Ten Films, it is sorely lacking in at least half of those critics consulted by the British Film Institute. But like all the other arts, the talent necessary to make a great film, and to a lesser extent the faculty needed to recognize it, is a matter of only a few. The size of an audience for, say, The Passion of Joan of Arc is miniscule compared to the number of viewers who flock (which best describes it) to see the latest X-Men or Tarantinto film. In fact, to adapt the Matthew Arnold maxim, you can clear a crowd faster with the word "Ozu" than with a firehose. But many critics like to pretend that there is a middle ground on which a popular film can also be deemed art, and that this extremely narrow ground is as broad as the Susquehanna River Valley.

No music critic who is worth reading would argue that Beyoncé is a good singer. No decent food critic would state that pizza is good food. No theater critic worth a damn would claim that Spamalot is a good play. And yet film critics routinely hand out praise for trash like Inglorious Basterds (or is it Basturds?) and The Dark Knight.

While I understand that such things as the Sight & Sound Critics' Poll is compiled from extremely divergent sources, and that de gustibus non est disputandum, I believe there is good reason to question the sanity of a critic who thinks that Touch of Evil and L'Avventura can be mentioned in the same breath. Placing a film like Vertigo or The Searchers alongside The Rules of the Game and Tokyo Story is tantamount to saying that Patricia Highsmith is the equal of William Faulkner or a Japanese manga is comparable to Kawabata.

Singin' in the Rain is a good musical, but it belongs to a genre and is subject to a specialized set of standards that Citizen Kane, obviously, is not. No one would think of judging Seven Samurai according to the quality of its songs or its choreography. And no one would argue, who has any reason at all to argue, that Silk Stockings is a poor musical because its characters and its situations are unbelievable.

So when Sight & Sound persists, as it has for the past sixty years, in proudly publishing the results of its Critics' Poll, with films like 8 1/2 and The Passion of Joan of Arc sticking out between recognizable rubbish like The Godfather(s) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the significance of the poll is seriously compromised, if not nullified.



(1) Macdonald's list: 1. The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith) 2. Intolerance (D.W. Griffith) 3. October (Sergei Eisenstein) 4. Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) 5. The Gorky Trilogy (Mark Donskoy) 6. The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir) 7. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) 8. Les Enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné) 9. Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais) 10. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni. (see http://jdcopp.blogspot.com/2007/12/sight-and-sound-ten-best-films-in.html)
(2) The polls can be viewed here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/.
(3) See http://tangodelviudo.blogspot.com/2008/12/critical-cretinisms-top-tens.html.
(4) If I had been around in '32, and lived in Paris, my list would look like this (in no order): The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer), M (Lang), I Was Born, But... (Ozu), The Gold Rush (Chaplin), Potemkin (Eisenstein), L'Age d'Or (Buñuel), Sherlock Jr. (Keaton), The Blue Angel (Sternberg), Le Million (Clair), The Phantom Carriage (Sjöström).
(5) A conspicuous lacuna: from 1952 to 2002, there has never been a film from the French New Wave anywhere near the top ten.

Critical Kudos

First things second, a word about my critical leanings. A long time ago I "liberated" a book from a library merely because it was one that I found myself consulting frequently and because it was a "reference" book not in circulation. It was a hardback copy of Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films, published by the University of Califoria Press. Later I paid for a paperback copy of Sadoul's Dictionary of Filmmakers. In them I learned about films that I, stuck at the time in a middlebrow Southern city (Columbia, South Carolina), could only dream of some day seeing. Some of them I still haven't seen.

Sadoul was a sensible, usable film critic. At the time I discovered his writings, I was also reading all of the American critics I could locate - James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, Stanley Kauffmann (who, amazingly, still writes his column for The New Republic), and John Simon. I knew about Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris but I never read them avidly. The one critic who became - and remains - my personal favorite was Vernon Young, who wrote for the literary quarterly The Hudson Review for thirty years.

Among my contemporaries, the best film critic writing in English in America is Bert Cardullo. I recently unearthed a bit of plagiarism on his part in my Senses of Cinema piece A Hard Act to Follow. Despite this as yet unexplained (and unaccountable) lapse, he is a worthy successor to Agee, Macdonald, Kauffmann, Simon, and Young.

I read a few others infrequently, if only because, while I sometimes disagree with them, I never seem to learn anything from the disagreement - which is never so with a great critic. Also, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J Hoberman, and Godfrey Cheshire have the unfortunate habit of foisting their politics alongside their aesthetic judgements, a practice that is distracting because it is ultimately unedifying. Granted, I would find it more irritating if their politics weren't progressive, so I suppose I should probably count my blessings. To his credit (as a critic, not as a person), John Simon admitted in 1993 that "I have always sympathized with the autobiographical hero of Anatole France's Le Lys rouge who declares, 'I am not so devoid of all talents as to occupy myself with politics.' Yet this credo, which makes some sense coming from a French artist and intellectual, would foul the breath of an American speaker. For if politics has been one of the two enervating preoccupations in France (need I name the other?), it has trailed just about everything, notably sports, in this country."

I should point out that, after Vernon Young, John Simon is a close second among my favorite film critics.