Flight of the Eagle

Max von Sydow, who died last Sunday at the age of 90, was more than just one of the great screen actors who, like too many others I could mention, lavished his talents on mediocre star vehicles. Though he finally succumbed to the lure of Hollywood in 1965, he was lucky enough to work multiple times with two great filmmakers in his native Sweden - eleven films with Ingmar Bergman and seven with Jan Troell. Although it was with Bergman that he received the most attention, in iconic roles like the knight Blok in The Seventh Seal, who outwits Death in a game of chess, and Töre in The Virgin Spring, who savagely avenges the rape and murder of his daughter, it was for Troell that von Sydow gave his most convincing (and comprehensive) performances. He is at the center of the six-and-a-half hour Emigrants saga, playing Karl Oskar, the patriarch of a Swedish family that emigrates to Minnesota in the mid-19th century. He was totally convincing playing Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun. But it was in the relatively overlooked Flight of the Eagle (Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd, 1982) that von Sydow gave what one critic called "a magnificent, stricken-oak performance,"(1) and that I wish to use as his memorial.

Troell derived the story of the film from Per Olof Sundman's 1967 documentary novel of Salomon August Andrée, an engineer and a staunch technocrat with an interest in ballooning, who came up with the bold idea of flying a hydrogen balloon across the North Pole. In 1896, nearing the very end of the Age of Discovery, Andrée managed to persuade the Swedish King, Oscar II, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Alfred Nobel that the expedition was feasible. It was accepted as a bold plan that would bring prestige to the nation and funding was provided.(2) Andrée recruited two men, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg, and together they trained and outfitted themselves for the journey. The film devotes all the time it needs to these preliminary stages, with its private and public details, to establish not just their historical context but to give convincing life to the three men, to salvage them from history. Troell is abetted in these efforts by his actors, Sverre Anker Ousdal as Fraenkel and Göran Stangertz as Strindberg. Max von Sydow gives us Andrée, a man of some accomplishment who is quite overwhelmed by the efforts of those he has inspired in the realization of his dream. He is neither a fool nor a dreamer, but a practical man of science who, the film makes clear, gets in over his head when he is given the opportunity, in the summer of 1897, to put his plans into action.

The balloon, christened the "Eagle," doesn't leave the ground in Spitzbergen until fifty-five minutes into the film.  Just after it is airborne, the balloon is caught in a downdraft and nearly sinks in the ocean. The crew throw enough ballast overboard to raise the balloon, but the accident also severs two of the three long guide-ropes which were going to be used to navigate the balloon. The men notice this, as do members of the ground crew, but the balloon continues on its way. And just sixty-five hours later - thirteen minutes in the film - it is on the ice, never to rise again. What ultimately brought the balloon down was ice buildup on the rigging and gondola, making it too heavy to gain the altitude it needed. From the time when the balloon drifted out of sight in Spitzbergen, the script had to rely on notes taken by Andrée to re-create events, simply because the fate of the expedition remained unknown until 1930. Troell opens the film with photographs taken of the remains that were discovered, including the bones of Andrée himself.

The last hour of the film, when the balloon is brought down and the men have packed sledges to make the trek across pack ice to the nearest island, is one of the most grueling stretches of film ever recorded.(3) Even so, I wondered at Troell’s use of flashbacks, as all three men find in their memories something to give them comfort or strength for the days ahead. I think the last hour would’ve been more harrowing if it had been unrelieved by the men’s glowing (and so splendidly colorful) flashbacks. One moment, however, is unforgettable: Strindberg opens a locket containing a picture of his fiancée and a lock of her hair, he removes the hair and touches it to his swollen and chapped lips.

Once they arrive on Kvitoya, a small island east of Svalbard, the film enters its final phase. Strindberg, whose photographs appear throughout the film (his photographic plates were discovered among the team’s remains) is the first to go. His body was found in a makeshift grave on the island, but there is speculation about the circumstances of his death. Some believe he may have committed suicide, others that he was killed by a polar bear. Troell simply shows him collapsing suddenly on the ice. When only Andrée and Fraenkel are left, Troell shows them, near the end, having a bitter argument, but they embrace pitifully when they realize that all they have left is each other. It is a heartbreaking moment.

It was a time when no one was around to ask the simple question, "What could possibly go wrong?" Flight of the Eagle is more than just a careful record of a doomed expedition. Yes, it was Andrée’s folly. But Troell gives the account a tragic dimension. In the film’s last moments, in which Fraenkel is killed by a polar bear and Andrée begs him not to leave him on the blasted island entirely alone, Max von Sydow emerges from the tent and peers around him at the eventless horizon, one that seems to merge the sky and the earth, and the look in his eyes is devastating. It is a moment that calls to mind a speech by Hamlet:

... this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. (4)

(1) Vernon Young.
(2) It was the same spirit of adventure that Terry Jones and Michael Palin so brilliantly mocked in their Ripping Yarns episode, "Across the Andes by Frog."
(3) When Flight of the Eagle was in limited release in the US, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, unwitting defenders of middlebrow taste, singled it out for derision on their popular TV show, Sneak Previews. When they showed the clip from the film of the balloon lying, deflated, on the ice and the three men saluting it, Siskel and Ebert both laughed, proving that a jackass can look into a mirror, but a philosopher can't look back.
(4) Act 2 Scene 2.

Mr. Hulot's Holiday

    For some inexplicable reason, I decided yesterday to watch the 1953 debut of Jacques Tati's screen character Monsieur Hulot, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, known to English-speaking audiences as Mr. Hulot's Holiday.(1) I haven't seen it since I wrote about it ten years ago on this blog in a post I called "A Brief Vacation." But I remember the experience of watching it for the first time in a theater almost forty years ago. I felt then that it was charming - sufficiently delightful to justify its reputation. It is a bonafide classic - which means that most people accept it unquestioningly as an untouchable masterpiece, to place proudly alongside Chaplin's City Lights or Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. But what, then, is a "classic"? In his 1975 piece, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," Vernon Young makes an oh-so-necessary point: "If the word classic has any value left (after being attributed to movies which are merely old and, if truth be said, often inhumanly tedious), Here Is Your Life and the brace of Emigrant films are classics; they define with unique richness the material of which they are composed."(1)

In his 2004 essay for Criterion, David Ehrenstein called Mr. Hulot's Holiday, "One of the most original—and hilarious—comedies ever made."(2) Really? Even Roger Ebert had reservations. "The first time I saw Jacques Tati's 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday,'" Ebert wrote in 1996, "I didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to. But I didn't forget the film, and I saw it again in a film class, and then bought the laserdisc and saw it a third and fourth time, and by then it had become part of my treasure. But I still didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to, and now I think I understand why. It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday' gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature--so odd, so valuable, so particular."(3)

In my experience of Tati's film, the trajectory was reversed: the film has shrunk with each subsequent viewing. I get Ebert's point about the film's evocation of "memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer." The film is dripping with the mood of summer vacations - even of the strange compulsion to have them once a year, along with everyone else in the Western world. The crazy rush to the train station, the panic and congestion and the long journey off the been track to arrive - at last - at the beach. I am there completely. And the wistfulness of the end - it hurts a little every time I see it.

But after seeing it again on home video in the '80s, then on laserdisc, and DVD (every new medium gives us an excuse to watch all these old films again), it got smaller, thinner, less substantial each time. The word "charming" continues to rise to my fingertips. But I feel less obliged than ever to call the film great. Sixty-six years after it was made, if the word classic still has a meaning, Mr. Hulot's Holiday is not one.


(1) But why the Anglicism "Holiday" when Vacation is closer to "Vacance"?
(1) Vernon Young, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," reprinted by permission from Jan Troell, edited by Lars-Olof Lothwall (Stockholm: The Swedish Film Institute, 1975).
(2) "Mr. Hulot's Holiday," David Ehrenstein
(3) "Great Movie: Mr. Hulot's Holiday," November 6, 1996.

Trespassing Bergman

In the documentary Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember (1997), the great Italian actor describes how, in the 1960s, busloads of foreign tourists would stop outside the house of Federico Fellini in Rome to maybe catch a glimpse of the great filmmaker. Fellini was as much a part of their Roman itinerary as the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and the Trevi Fountain. Fellini's life was a part of the show.

But Ingmar Bergman's life was nobody's business. Once he had become world famous, he sought to protect his privacy from goofball fans who trekked all the way to his home on the remote island of Fårö to catch a glimpse of him. In 2013, five years after Bergman's death, a documentary was released called Trespassing Bergman. The title of this curiously mocking documentary comes from the garrisoned house on Fårö (off Götland, if that is any help) to which some of the people in the film - all filmmakers - come to visit, where Bergman lived and worked (on and off) for forty years. To any true cinephile who ever held the work of Ingmar Bergman in high esteem (and I don't believe it's possible to be one and to not do the other), the film lurches from touching reverence to effrontery and back again.

There is a quite bizarre fetishism at work here, almost as if Bergman's corpse was in the room while some of the people invited inside were poking around his inner sanctum (his study, his movie-viewing room), rifling through his books and collection of videos. Daniel Espinosa confesses that he feels like he is "trespassing" in Bergman's home, and Claire Denis becomes strangely spooked and has to leave the house. But a number of them had clearly shown up to bury Bergman rather than praise him. And what a very odd bunch of people they assembled to trespass on Bergman! Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Michael Haneke, John Landis, Lars von Trier, Tomas Alfredson, Daniel Espinosa, Claire Denis, Wes Craven, Ang Lee, Thomas Vinterberg, Isabella Rossellini, Harriet Andersson, Zhang Yimou, Woody Allen, Laura Dern, Francis Ford Coppola, Takeshi Kitano, Holly Hunter, Wes Anderson, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Pernilla August, Alexander Payne - all of them have something to say about Bergman's films, sometimes illuminating, sometimes not.

Ask your average movie fan today to name a "great" director and you might get answers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, or Ridley Scott. Further down the scale you might get J. J. Abrams, James Gunn, or Matthew Vaughn. Ask them to name a great foreign director and you would probably get the name of one of the many foreign directors who, early in their careers, defected to Hollywood. Like Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Denis Villeneuve, or Alfonso Cuarón.

Well, none of these "great" directors comes even close to my standard of greatness - a standard established by Ingmar Bergman and a handful of other filmmakers. I simply can't use the word in connection with them without putting it between quotation marks. Some of them have made good films. Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou. And I got the feeling that the makers of Trespassing Bergman at least sensed this as well. At one point, John Landis calls The Seventh Seal, the film that made Bergman almost a household word, a "joke" and Alexander Payne claims that it "doesn't hold up" and its once "profound" qualities are now "laughable." One of the problems that The Seventh Seal presents to the viewer is its solidity and concreteness. It isn't in the least abstract, which was Bergman's point. He wanted to show how, in the Middle Ages, things like death and hell weren't just concepts but extremely real, and he used medieval church paintings that represented death and the devil almost as everyday, familiar objects, as his jumping off point. Just because the film has been parodied so much doesn't diminish its power. People can parody the pared-down writing style of Ernest Hemingway without diminishing the greatness of The Sun Also Rises.

The worst offender by far is Lars von Trier, the Danish imbecile who appears to lack the ability to control the puerilities coming out of his mouth. After showing off an obscene figurine on his desk, he asserts that, because Bergman supposedly claimed to be in a constant state of sexual arousal, even into old age, he must have been masturbating nonstop. Coming from someone who has by now made several quite ineffective hardcore pornographic films, Trier's remarks are merely asinine.

Martin Scorsese speaks about his first encounters with Bergman's early films, especially Summer With Monika, but then points out that, for a Roman Catholic like him, Bergman was on the "condemned list." And Robert de Niro appears briefly to inform us that, because he was too busy to watch the Bergman films with which the filmmakers provided him, he wasn't able to comment on them. Wes Anderson, whose Paris home is shown off to no purpose, makes some remarks about the lack of "comedians" among Bergman's actors. Anderson is becoming somewhat legendary for producing the longest string of totally pointless films on record. He should be in the Guinness book by now.

But before we're halfway through the film, the focus shifts abruptly from Bergman's work to Bergman's women. One of the things that the film points out is how Bergman was attacked by a new generation of Swedish filmmakers and critics and how Bergman responded to them in The Silence and Persona, radical departures from conventional narrative films. Bergman could have easily ignored the new generation and relax in his renown, without making another film to stand alongside Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal. The fact that he continued to make films that challenged viewers, like Winter Light and A Passion attests to his stature as an artist.

The 1970s were by far the most turbulent and difficult years for Bergman. He gave up asking difficult questions about God and death and focused instead on marriage and family. He had to flee charges of tax evasion in Sweden and work in Germany. I think his work during this period began to parody itself. When Woody Allen, who has always revered Bergman, made Interiors, which was released almost simultaneously with Bergman's Autumn Sonata, Vernon Young suggested that Bergman was copying or even parodying the style of Allen's film, rather than vice-versa. Isabella Rossellini makes the pertinent point that Bergman's portrayal of a successful woman ( Ingrid Bergman is a concert pianist in Autumn Sonata) who neglects her children and her family obligations is quite sexist, not to mention outdated.

Finally arriving at Fanny and Alexander, which was the most expensive film ever made in Sweden, earning the Swedish Film Institute some criticism for spending its entire budget for the year on one film, some actresses mention their nervousness working with Bergman, but Lars von Trier expresses his - justified, I think - outrage about how "blasphemous" Fanny and Alexander is because it is little more than a travesty of his life's work.


The film returns repeatedly to shots of Fårö, its stark landscape and stony beaches, its occluded horizons. You get a sense of how much it might have inspired Bergman, looking out on that denuded island, blasted by Baltic winds. It doesn't seem lonely so much as it might be populated by ghosts. There is a starkness that is beautiful, even lyrical, that only someone like Bergman would notice. After covering so much ground, the film closes with a touching moment when, in still photographs, a very old Bergman embraces Ang Lee. It offers us a kind of forgiveness for the trespassing we have all committed by watching this exasperatingly uneven documentary.

Somewhat Less Than a World

"Without preferences a critic would be a monster."

- Vernon Young(1)


As taste deteriorates, lists proliferate. The BBC, evidently always looking for ways to kill time, has compiled yet another "Top 100" list. Not, this time, of the 100 Greatest Orchestra Conductors from Birkina Faso. Nor of the 100 Greatest Opera Tenors who prefer Pepsi to Coke. (Maybe I shouldn't give them ideas.) This time, it's THE 100 GREATEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILMS. Here's what they came up with, in their proper order (titles in bold are my own favorites):

1. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
2. Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948)
3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1956)
4. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
5. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
6. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
7. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)
8. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
9. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
10. La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
11. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)
12. Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993)
13. M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
14. Jeanne Dielman ... (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
15. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
16. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
17. Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
18. A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)
19. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
20. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
21. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
22. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
23. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1928
24. Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
25. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
26. Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
27. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)
28. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
29. Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)
30. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
31. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
32. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
33. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
34. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)
35. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
36. La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
37. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
38. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)
39. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
40. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
41. To Live (Zhang Yimou, 1994)
42. City of God (Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund, 2002)
43. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
44. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
45. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
46. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945)
47. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
48. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)
49. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
50. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
51. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
52. Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
53. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
54. Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994)
55. Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
56. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)
57. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
58. The Earrings of Madame de ... (Max Ophuls, 1953)
59. Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)
60. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
61. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
62. Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)
63. Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948)
64. Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993)
65. Ordet (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1955)
66. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)
67. The Externinating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
68. Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
69. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)
70. L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
71. Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)
72. Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
73. Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
74. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
75. Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)
76. Y tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
77. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
78. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
79. Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
80. The Young and the Damned (Luis Buñuel, 1950)
81. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
82. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
83. La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
84. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)
85. Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
86. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
87. The Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)
88. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)
89. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
90. Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
91. Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)
92. Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)
93. Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991)
94. Where Is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)
95. Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)
96. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
97. Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
98. In the Heat of the Sun (Jiang Wen, 1994)
99. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958)
100. Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, 1988)

Though this list isn't as bad as some others (only because it's about foreign language films), it won't satisfy anyone. If you asked 200 literary critics to name the Top 100 Foreign Language Novels, you would probably reach a much better consensus. Literature doesn't attract fans in anything like the numbers film does. There is simply no other way to account for Claire Denis's Beau Travail outranking L'Avventura, or Amélie sitting there stupidly three jumps ahead of Umberto D. 

I haven't seen 28 of the films on the list. But that's preferable to simply forgetting magnificent films like Le Jour se Leve, Open City, Smiles of a Summer Night, Lacombe Lucien, The Sorrow and the Pity, and the great filmmakers Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Ermanno Olmi, Mario Monicelli, Masaki Kobayashi, and Jan Troell. These lists are good for critical parlor games: what they reveal is sometimes counterproductive to their intentions. As someone has already pointed out, there are more films on the list from directors named Jean than from women. The statistics have changed dramatically in the past few decades, but exactly what percentage of filmmakers worldwide are women? Far from anything like parity, my guess. It has been forty years since Lina Wertmüller burst onto the world film scene, and a backlash (led, amazingly, by Feminist critics) has brought her down several pegs, but I still regard her as the greatest woman filmmaker. Just thinking about her makes me want to watch Love and Anarchy again, the story of a hapless, pimple-faced anarchist hiding out in a Roman brothel, waiting for an opportunity - that never materializes - to assassinate Mussolini.

How long does it take - should it take - for a new film to enter a canon? In the 1950s and '60s, it took only three years. I wrote about this in 2012, when the latest Sight and Sound Top Ten Critics' Poll was published: "The sense of permanence has long since, I think, gone out of discussions about films - especially Great Films, which the polls have inadvertently, decade after decade, demonstrated. Simply examine the newest film in each of the polls. In 1952, Bicycle Thieves was number one (it now ranks thirty-third) and was just three years old. In 1962, L'avventura was also just three years old. In 1972, Persona was the newest film in the poll, but it was made six years before. This sense that the art of film was a contemporary, ongoing phenomenon quickly began to fade. In 1982, 8 1/2 was the most recent film in the poll, made nineteen years before. In 1992, 2001: A Space Odyssey made its first appearance in the poll, thanks to its restoration and subsequent rediscovery. But it was a twenty-four year old film by then. By 2002, film's slide into the past was to The Godfather, a thirty year old film. In the latest poll, 2001 is again the newest film, except it has got twenty years older since 1992. So the latest film judged great enough to be in the top ten was made forty-four years ago."(2) (Written six years ago.)

So these attempts to create a canon, while filmmakers were engaged in the process of discovering a unified aesthetic for the medium, and while critics were struggling to account for their struggles, are stymied because the works that were central to our understanding of what constitutes film art kept shifting positions. The only answer to the question, What makes a film a work of art? has got to be, When it is made by an artist.

I can always tell an auteurist (but I can't tell him much). They are big on bestowing auteurship on the unlikeliest people (I get the feeling that eventually everyone who ever made a film will be an auteur), but they are terrible at naming what films made by each and every auteur are better than others. The list gives them away in several places. 4 Andrei Tarkovsky films, each one progressively worse than Ivan's Childhood (1961, which is at least unpretentious). I am not fond of Fassbinder, but surely Berlin Alexanderplatz , though a long way from the Döblin novel, is his best? I like Buñuel very much, but surely The Exterminating Angel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Belle de Jour are poor examples of his surrealist art? I would replace them with L'Age d'Or (1930), Simon of the Desert (1965) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Krzysztof Kieślowski is a bit overrated, but surely Three Colors: Blue is the worst part of the trilogy. Why not Dekalog (1989-90)? Bresson has only one film on the list, but it is neither Diary of a Country Priest (1950) nor A Man Escaped (1956), better examples of his austere style by far than Au hasard Balthazar. Godard is represented by three films, #s 11, 60, and 74. Breathless was his breakthrough, but Band of Outsiders (1964) and A Married Woman (1964) are immeasurably preferable to Contempt and Pierrot le fou. Making room for 4 Fellini films, then leaving out I Vitelloni (1953)? 5 Bergman films, including his muddled Fanny and Alexander, but ignoring Smiles of a Summer Night (1955 - easily one of the half-dozen most perfect films ever made), the early masterpiece Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), and the best of his chamber films, Winter Light (1962)? I realize that Rossellini's boat has sailed (so has Mizoguchi's), but Open City (1945) remains historically important. Shoah is ranked 96th. According to what aesthetic criteria? I don't mean to suggest that Claude Lanzmann's epochal film is not artfully made (it is deceptively, hypnotically fascinating), but however formidable its artistic merits are, Shoah stands alone and shouldn't have to jockey for position among the likes of Rififi and Amélie.

Further Objections. If you're going to limit Alain Resnais to one film, and you've included Chris Marker's short film La Jetée, why not let Resnais's sole film be Night and Fog (1955), which not only has great artistic merit, but historical relevance as well.

According to the BBC's list, the best decades for film were the 1950s (21 films) and the '60s (19 films). The worst decades were the 1920s and '40s (each with only 4 films).

What is most revealing in the latest lists is the critics' apparent inability to distinguish between what they like and what is good. How can one tell the difference? I like hotdogs, but I know what they're made of. No one is claiming that hotdogs are good food. So why are some critics so enamored of hotdogs like In the Mood for Love or The Spirit of the Beehive or All About My Mother?

But all these lists, which are increasing in number and absurdity, are a symptom of a serious problem among educated people. You can see it in all of the television talent competitions, each more irritating than the next, and even with the cooking competitions and the bake-offs. Self expression, which comes in a myriad of forms, can't be compared or reduced to a competitive sporting event. Some people won't read a book unless they see it listed as a Best Seller. And others want everything to be classified before they can bring themselves to read it or listen to it or watch it. They want to know beforehand if it's worthy of their attention, supposedly because they think that they have so little time to waste. Before they will consent to consuming it, they need it to be pre-digested. The very last thing they want is to be left out of a conversation, but the cultivation of taste that is exclusively their own, without the reinforcement of a support group, is inconceivable. The notion that they could be alone in their preference for a particular book or film or television program terrifies them. What good is personal taste if it isn't shared by others?



(1) Vernon Young, "Somewhat Less Than a World," The Hudson Review, Spring 1967.
(2) see "Poll Position," Widower's Tango, August 9, 2012.

Barry Lyndon

When it was first released in 1975, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon suffered the fate of being labelled (by Pauline Kael) a "coffee table movie" - like a coffee table book, oversized, too unwieldy for a paperweight or a doorstop, beautifully illustrated but otherwise useless. Many, even Kubrick fans, were puzzled at his choice of subject, after the technical wizardry of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the physical energy of A Clockwork Orange, both set in a not-too-distant (or not distant enough) future.

Thackeray's novel, serialized as The Luck of Barry Lyndon but published later as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., is not up to his best work.(1) He labored over it and was only satisfied when it was finished. In Malta, on a journey he described in From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, he wrote in his journal "Wrote Barry but slowly and with great difficulty." "Wrote Barry with no more success than yesterday." "Finished Barry after great throes late at night." Intended as a throwback to the picaresque novels of Fielding and Richardson, it lacked the robustness and humor of the originals, and Redmond Barry's adventures are not very edifying. What goes up must invariably come down. But it is also a short novel, just two hundred pages with nineteen chapters. So it comes as no surprise to read Thackeray's title to chapter eleven "In Which The Luck Goes Against Barry".

Kubrick's adaptation of the novel required changes, the most obvious of which was dispensing with Barry's first person narration and creating a third person narrator. This alteration distances us from the narrative, which was clearly part of Kubrick's design. (A significant part of Kubrick's design with A Clockwork Orange was the retention of Alex's first person narration, which makes the viewer root, however reluctantly, for Alex.) It isn't that Barry is an unreliable narrator. Kubrick's narrator merely helps gloss over the scenes that Kubrick had deemed superfluous - or logistically impossible. Near the end of his tale, Barry says unapologetically of himself, "I am of the old school; was always a free liver and speaker; and, at least, if I did and said what I liked, was not so bad as many a canting scoundrel I know of who covers his foibles and sins, unsuspected, with a mask of holiness."

As for the film narrative, Kubrick follows Thackeray closely, without placing emphasis on one incident more than another. Some details are altered or eliminated. For example, in the novel Barry recognizes the Chevalier de Balibari to be his uncle, whereas in the film he is only a fellow Irishman. Also in the novel, Redmond, a child of Nora's (Barry's first love) to whom Barry is godfather (it is easy to infer, given his first name, that he is Barry's son) is the source of considerable trouble to Barry in the late stages of the story. And Lord Bullingdon is sent to America to fight the rebels, is reported killed, but returns to England, by then a Viscount. He delivers a thrashing to Barry, but there is no duel, Barry is not wounded and does not lose part of one leg. Barry dies in prison in the novel, but the film tells us nothing of him after his return to the Continent. Aside from its dramatic impact, Kubrick may have added the duel with Bullingdon because Andrew Robinson Stoney, the adventurer whose exploits inspired Thackeray to write his novel, had once fought a mock-duel to trick his titled lady into marrying him. The film leaves us believing that Lady Lyndon still loves Barry, whereas the situation in Thackeray is much more complicated.

In Kubrick's films, he seems to have been driven by problems of visualization, like how to intelligently depict ape-men as well as man-made space ships in their element, or how to realize a dystopian vision of a world deeply different from our own that yet appears only slightly different. With Barry Lyndon, Kubrick apparently wanted to reproduce an 18th-century Europe that exists today only in paintings from the period, and to do so while being faithful to the light that he saw in them. "Natural lighting" is a misleading term. It doesn't always mean using existing light, the light we can see with the naked eye. To capture that would require the use of "fast" film lenses with adjustable irises - opening the iris to let in more light the same way the iris in our eyes dilates when the light is low. For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick acquired a still camera lens developed by the German camera firm Zeiss for NASA that they used to photograph the dark side of the moon. Kubrick had the lens attached to his film camera and used it when he wanted to photograph any interior scenes lit entirely by candlelight. Exterior scenes that required more flexibility with available light were shot with Arriflex cameras.

When looking back on the making of the film and their experiences of working with Kubrick, Ryan O'Neal and Marisa Berenso tell us a great deal about his technique. He never planned his camera positions, which required an extra amount of waiting by his actors for the setups. He kept his principal actors under contract for months (the film took a year to shoot) and in costume on the set because he never knew when he might need them. And he refused to use stand-ins for matching shots where they were not even on camera. Ryan O'Neal, stupidly ridiculed for being so out of place in the lead role, mentioned that, once stumped for an idea during shooting, Kubrick consulted a coffee table book of reproductions of 18th century paintings and, finding a domestic scene of a man and a woman seated together, told O'Neal and Marisa Berenson (who impersonated Lady Lyndon) to sit just like the figures in the painting.

The climax of the film is Kubrick's only improvement on Thackeray. The duel in the dovecote between Barry and Bullingdon is superbly staged and executed, and provides the film with its parabola, from the first duel that set Barry on his adventures, to the last that effectively ends them. Barry is banished, paid off with an annuity. The narrator (the lovely voice of lovely old Michael Hordern) tells us: "Utterly baffled and beaten, what was the lonely and broken-hearted man to do? He took the annuity and returned to Ireland with his mother to complete his recovery. Sometime later he travelled abroad. His life there, we have not the means of following accurately. He appears to have resumed his former profession of a gambler, without his former success. He never saw Lady Lyndon again."

Kubrick's terse epilogue (a closing title before the end credits) isn't Thackeray's: "It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now. Thackeray's close is neither as sad nor as weak: "The [Lyndon] estate has vastly improved under his Lordship's [Bullingdon's] careful management. The trees in Hackton Park are all about forty years old, and the Irish property is rented in exceedingly small farms to the peasantry; who still entertain the stranger with stories of the daring and the devilry, and the wickedness and the fall of Barry Lyndon."

I have watched the film several times, in a movie theater when I was 17, on video and on dvd.(2) So, after more than three hours of breathlessly beautiful photography, what does Kubrick's film leave me with in 2018? I suspect that the varying critical appraisals in 1975 can be traced to the writers' attitude toward the setting which, like it or not, Kubrick brings to vibrant life. Vernon Young in The Hudson Review took the time to describe the scene of the closing duel in detail, and concluded: "Barry Lyndon, a work of great beauty, striped with the bizarre, is substantiated by its historical location; it takes place in Europe of the 1700s." Young, of a reactionary bent, loved Europe, even as he hated what it was becoming in the 1960s and '70s.

Pauline Kael was (in)famous for never watching a movie more than once and for always going with her gut reaction. (Roger Ebert was her worthy successor in this practice.) I doubt that her assessment of Barry Lyndon had anything to do with its failure at the box office - the only Kubrick film to suffer such a snub from filmgoers. But I'm afraid she got as close to the truth as anyone in the intervening 43 years. In The New Yorker she wrote: "This film is a masterpiece in every insignificant detail. Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures. Barry Lyndon indicates that Kubrick is thinking through his camera, and that’s not really how good movies get made—though it’s what gives them their dynamism, if a director puts the images together vivifyingly, for an emotional impact."

Barry Lyndon is as useless as it is exquisite. I am not entirely utilitarian in my judgements. A film can serve no purpose whatsoever and still provide one with a rewarding expense of one's time. But, like the paintings that evidently inspired it, Barry Lyndon just sits there on the wall (or the screen) in beautiful repose. While it comes closest than any other film to capturing, not the look of the 18th century, but how the 18th century wanted us to see it, it is a series of tableaux non-vivants. So we get the architecture and the clothes and how they appeared without artificial lighting. Given the relative dark of drawing rooms lit entirely by burning candles, we can at last understand why everyone wore so much makeup - otherwise no one (not even a Zeiss lens) could see their faces. As for the wigs, none of the characters in the film appears to age, but their wigs turn grey. But isn't the reason why they wore wigs to conceal their true age?

Alfred Hitchcock once argued that complaining about the content of his films was like wondering whether the fruit in a still life painting was sweet or sour. But if the painter is any good, we would know from the fruit's appearance whether it was sweet or sour. In Barry Lyndon all the fruit is made of wax, with all the appearance of life, but inedible.

But it was also the last Kubrick film of any substance, however lifeless. His next film was The Shining, which is so overwrought that it fails miserably even as a horror movie. (I laughed when Jack Nicholson went berserk.) It made me wonder if Kubrick intended the film to elicit frights at all. Barry Lyndon was revived in theaters in 2016, prompting a new audience to marvel at it. I marvel at how precipitously movies have declined that audiences can now find Kubrick's lost art so marvelous.


(1) Thackeray was an enthusiastic gastronome. The facsimile of the 1886 edition of The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. that I have incorporates A Little Dinner at Timmin's, which presents Thackeray's talents at their best.
(2) Kubrick personally supervised and approved the video and digital transfers of all his films.

Stanley and Bert

"Is there no by-law in America to prevent dogs from entering cemeteries?" (Charles Baudelaire, commenting on the scabrous notices in the American press on the death of Edgar Allan Poe.)

 
When Stanley Kauffmann died on October 9, 2013, it was an almost seismic event in my life, as if I had lost a great teacher and mentor. His film column had been a fixture of The New Republic for fifty-five years and he had been my film guide for more than forty of them. I started reading Kauffmann at the same moment in my life that I began to discover the wider world of film, a world whose existence had been carefully kept from me by my own native film industry. It was no accident, then, that the first collection of his reviews was called A World on Film.

Kauffmann had been an informal member of a group of critics that included Dwight Macdonald, John Simon, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. It was these critics who ushered in what became known as the Golden Age of film criticism in America. Of these critics, however, only John Simon is still with us, but he gave up writing about film more than a decade ago. Consequently, I have always been on the lookout for good film critics to replace the ones I have lost. When I started to read the essays of Bert Cardullo in The Hudson Review in the 1990s, I believed that I had found one.

But something was wrong. It's one thing to recognize when a critic is in agreement not just with one's own judgements, but also with those of one's other favorite critics. It's quite another thing to discover that the likeness is more than coincidental. When I discovered that the published articles that Cardullo produced resembled - verbatim - the writings of Vernon Young and Kauffmann, my emotions ran a gamut from puzzlement to sadness, and eventually to outrage.

An Australian online film journal known as Senses of Cinema published my review of Cardullo's book, In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art in 2007. In the review I supplied direct evidence that Cardullo had stolen, for two of his articles in the book, the entirety of an essay written by Vernon Young. The Senses editor was reluctant at first to publish the piece because, she told me, it had been a few years since the book was published. She very bravely went ahead with publishing it. As far as I can tell, it was the first editorial notice of Bert Cardullo's theft of another writer's work.

Cardullo is an admirer of both Vernon Young and Stanley Kauffmann. So much so that he edited collections of their writings. This is especially worrisome when you consider that these two writers - Kauffmann in particular - seem to have been singled out by Cardullo for plagiaization.

Then, in 2010, New Yorker critic Richard Brody took the time to publish what he called, "Truffaut's Last Interview," which was reportedly conducted by Cardullo just before Truffaut's death from a cancerous brain tumor. The interview had been stolen, as I soon discovered, from various interviews that Brody later found readily available on YouTube. Brody questioned Cardullo about this by phone (Cardullo was teaching in Turkey at the time) and got a quite feeble explanation from him: that Truffaut was very ill and, in lieu of an interview, told him to glean what he wanted from other recorded interviews.

I published a blog post called François & Bert at the time, and have published several posts since then based on further information I received as comments to these posts. Cardullo has since then turned to capitalizing on the work of Stanley Kauffmann by publishing, with two different publishers, collections of the writings of Stanley Kauffmann. Last year I wrote the director of one of these publishing houses, Anaphora Press, informing her of Cardullo's widely-held reputation as a plagiarist. This resulted in my blog post "Date Due" from January 2016.   

Last week, I received an anonymous comment on that post that I have since published. It reads in part:

"A few years ago I posted on your blog some of the more blatant examples of Cardullo's cut and paste jobs, hoping they might alert publishers to his shady name and game. I also contacted many of the publishers of Cardullo's stolen work, and, like you, had a very strange exchange with Anaphora Press, whose director defended publishing Cardullo by saying that even the "Harry Potter" books contained plagiarisms. So, I shared both your obsession with exposing Cardullo as a plagiarist, and your disheartening feeling that, in spite of some very public retractions of his literary thefts, he was going to continue ransacking the work of good writers simply because publishers were not carefully checking either his dubious record or the purloined work he submitted. [...] Happy endings are so are rare in any strand of my life, that I really wanted to share this one with you. The following recent articles indicate that Cardullo has (probably) finally been stopped:

RIT faces suit over book of film critic's essays
http://www.rbj.net/article.asp?aID=238641

RIT sued over book of late movie critic Stanley Kauffmann's columns
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2017/01/31/late-movie-critic-kauffmanns-columns-prompts-lawsuit/97281672/

It's wonderful that Kauffmann's estate is very determined to make public, through the courts and the press, the extent of Cardullo's fraud. For me, your blog played an early and important part in the long campaign to expose him as a serial plagiarist."

 
One of the links the author of the comment supplied reads as follows:

'RIT sued over book of late movie critic Stanley Kauffmann's columns

Gary Craig Jan. 31, 2017

The Rochester Institute of Technology was duped by a serial plagiarist when it published a book of the works of the renowned film critic Stanley Kauffmann, a lawsuit alleges.

The RIT Press has halted publication of the book, The Millennial Critic, and tried to recall copies it has sold, court papers show. But the estate of Kauffmann, who died at the age of 97 in 2013 , is continuing with a federal lawsuit that seeks damages.

The lawsuit was originally filed in a federal court in New York City but was transferred this week, over the objections of an attorney for the estate, to a Rochester-based federal court.

Kauffmann was the lead film critic at The New Republic for five decades. Upon his death, The New York Times wrote that his reviews "set a standard for critical ease and erudition."

At the center of the controversy is Robert "Bert" Cardullo, who represented to RIT that he had the rights to Kauffmann essays and writings. Cardullo, who has taught film and theatre courses at different universities, has been accused of plagiarism in academic circles.
A letter presented to RIT Press which showed he had the rights to Kauffmann's work was a forgery, the lawsuit alleges.

Cardullo's current location appears to be a mystery. Records show he was recently teaching in Turkey, though the university there does not now list him on its website. The whereabouts of Cardullo could be important for lawyers for RIT, who are considering suing him for his representations.

The Democrat and Chronicle has unsuccessfully attempted to reach Cardullo via an email he used in late 2015.

In court papers, Kenneth Norwick, an attorney for Kauffmann's estate, argues that a simple Google search should have alerted RIT Press to many questions about Cardullo's veracity.

"If RIT made even a rudimentary first-page only Google search for 'Bert Cardullo' before relying on, if it did, any representations by him, it would have readily discovered his history and reputation as a plagiarist," Norwick wrote in the lawsuit.

RIT officials declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

Other Institutions Also Taken In

In a telephone interview, Norwick, who is based in New York City, said Cardullo also bamboozled others into publishing Kauffmann-connected works. The estate is pursuing action with those also, he said.

With the lawsuit against RIT, "there is the issue of damages and there is the issue of making an official acknowledgment of what's going on here," he said. "The lawsuit will establish that RIT infringed (on the copyright for Kauffmann's works) and Cardullo is responsible for those infringements."

After Kauffmann's death, his estate learned of the RIT Press book through an Amazon search, Norwick said.

"Once the executor ... learned about the RIT book he did some further research and found numerous other examples of Cardullo-perpetrated infringements," Norwick said. "We've settled with some and we're in contact with others."

The lawsuit was first filed in April 2016. Months before that, representatives of the estate reached out to RIT Press about the possible copyright violations.

Those contacts prompted an angry email from Cardullo, who threatened to "upload (the book) to multiple Internet sites" if RIT Press was not told it could continue to sell the book.

"I am not in this for the money," Cardullo wrote. "RIT Press and I have performed a service for the late Mr. Kauffmann, in his memory. Please honor that memory by desisting. If you do not, I have spelled out the consequences."

According to the lawsuit, Cardullo did post a copy of the book on the Internet.'
 
Like Cardullo, I am not in this - exposing his outrageous career as a plagiarist - for the money. As you, dear reader, can affirm, I opted against including ads on my blog. The number of views that my posts manage to attract doesn't enrich me in any way, except in the knowledge that one more reader knows who and what Bert Cardullo is. That is my only reward, and it is enough.

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.

Thoughts on Seeing Seven Samurai Again

I watched the Kurosawa film Seven Samurai these past two nights with my sister. I still have no idea how she could've been my sister and not been subjected to this 3-hour film by me (exactly 3 hours and 23 minutes, and with intermission it's closer to 3 1/2 hours). People sometimes exaggerate in these matters, but I can fairly accurately estimate that I watched the film, from beginning to end, possibly 15 times in the last 35 years. (I regret to admit that I've read Moby Dick only once.)

Again I was enthralled by Kurosawa's boldness and genius. Once again I wept at certain scenes - Watanabe's learning how the farmers had been eating millet instead of rice, Kikuchiyo's showing off of the samurai armor, the bloody and wet penultimate scene, which shows the merciless cruelty of war more effectively than any other film. In fact, Kurosawa's film once again demonstrated how ridicuously lacking are American films of any comparable depth and gravity. The John Sturges Western remake, The Magnificent Seven is stupid and stolid next to the original. In fact, it exists, as Vernon Young once put it, in another world - one divorced from art and even intelligence.

So, what did my sister think of the experience? I believe in her heart of hearts she saw the greatness of it. But she would probably never admit it to me.

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.

Bresson

Senses of Cinema was nice enough to publish something I wrote earlier in the year on Robert Bresson that I titled "Sins of Omission: A Dissenting View"

I wrote the piece in some haste and submitted it without a chance to edit it. Next thing I hear from Senses editor Rolando Caputo is that he'd sent it to the web designers for publication. I had already written a revised version of the piece, and sent it along to Rolando. But there was nothing he could do with it.

So here is the revised piece that I wrote. It's a much more strongly-argued and ultimately more devastating view of Bresson. While admiring many of Bresson's films, I felt somehow compelled to publish a rejoinder when confronted by all of the intolerable (and nonsensical) cant that's been written about him for going on fifty years now.


Robert Bresson, Photography, and Cinematographie

“A film cannot be a stage show, because a stage show requires flesh-and-blood presence. But it can be, as photographed theater or CINEMA is, the photographic reproduction of a stage show. The photographic reproduction of a stage show is comparable to the photographic reproduction of a painting or a sculpture. But a photographic reproduction of Donatello’s Saint John the Baptist or of Vermeer’s Young Woman with Necklace has not the power, the value or the price of that sculpture or that painting. It does not create it. Does not create anything.”[i]

“Cinematography, the art, with images, of representing nothing.”[ii]

Robert Bresson liked to remember it otherwise, but his career in film began (even if we overlook the 1934 star vehicle for Beby the Clown, Public Affairs) in the conventional way. And though he later admitted that he learned from the beginning the underlying falsity of film “acting”,[iii] his first two films, Les Anges du Peche (Angels of Sin, 1943) and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1946), employed professional actors, and Bresson managed to extract superb performances from them.[iv] But the experience of working under conditions that he believed were a betrayal of the true nature of film made him decide to follow his instincts and commit himself to a radical departure from conventional practice.

Exactly what elements of conventional filmmaking did Bresson regard as foreign to its esthetics? He has stated flatly that “For me, filmmaking is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing with that extraordinary instrument – the camera – things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.”[v] This would seem to be an insistence on documentary-like verism, if we are to take literally his notion of “real things”. But while eventually eschewing sets and actors, Bresson, with an odd exactitude, maintained the practice of placing people before a camera as proxies in a drama of his own invention. And his stories invariably reflect an implicit faith in the imperilment – and sometimes salvation – of souls.

Bresson’s first daring attempts at realizing his bold new thesis were dazzling. Working exclusively with non-professionals, Bresson accomplished an inimitable adaptation of Georges Bernanos’ novel The Diary of a Country Priest (Le Journal d’un Cure de Campagne,1950), and one of the greatest of all French films, A Man Escaped (Un Condamne a Mort s’est Echappe, 1956). These two films are extraordinary for many reasons – the most significant of which is their dependence on the barest minimum of means. By strenuously controlling the impulse for effects, Bresson achieved much with very little, and earned the respect of critics and filmmakers everywhere.

Whatever cachet Bresson earned with those two films was seriously taxed, however, when he made Pickpocket (1959). What had been a perfectly apposite marriage of style and meaning had become a discordant conflict in which both seemed arbitrary, rather than right. Critics[vi] were quick to place the blame on Bresson’s choice of subject – exchanging the problems of a cancer-stricken priest and a condemned prisoner for those of a stodgy criminal with delusions of grandeur. Comparisons to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov were unhelpful, since a petty thief has little in common with an ax-murderer. Bresson failed to ennoble Martin Lasalle’s skill sufficiently to make his eventual arrest and spiritual awakening either interesting or convincing. [vii]

It was also about this time that the first studies of Bresson began to appear, containing his own remarks about film. Filmmakers, children of the modern age, have been especially susceptible to conflating errant arguments for their work[viii] (I won’t go into the effects of “film scholarship”). And few filmmakers survive what Stanley Kauffmann recently called the “Age of the Larynx.”[ix]

In 1975, Bresson finally published his Notes sur la cinematographie – in his own words, “a gathering of notes on little pieces of paper, on cigarette wrappers; things I wrote down while shooting or on some other occasion.”[x] It is a slim volume, only 72 pages in the Urizen edition, but it contains much that is essential to any complete understanding of Bresson’s intentions, if not always his results.[xi] It is also a corrective to all of the ideas and statements mistakenly attributed to him.[xii] One detail is made abundantly clear by the book: Bresson was a painter – of what school hasn’t been divilged, but it is easy to guess from his statements about art that he was decidedly post-expressionist. His contempt for the theater and for photography, the two stools between which Bresson believed nearly all films fall, derives from a modernist painter’s mistrust of representation of any sort, whether it is an actor’s pretense of real emotion and the “suspension of disbelief” that it requires, and a photographer’s stolen moments. The quotes at the beginning of this piece sum up Bresson’s notions on theater and photography.[xiii] What they reveal is a quite naïve confusion of a medium with what it conveys. A photograph of an object, whether it is a face, a landscape, or a sculpture by Donatello, is not intended to be a substitute for those things but simply a way of looking at the physical universe. The very same thing can be said of theater and of acting. Even Picasso admitted that "Art is not truth. Art is a lie that helps us to see the truth."

Painting and sculpture used to belong in this tradition – of transmuting objects and figures from nature in a manner that renders the objective subjective and that reaches the viewer by reversing the trajectory. The ultimate result is something that is neither nature nor the artist but a conjunction, an enjambment of realities. Andre Malraux could argue all he wanted about how modern art has destroyed what once connected the artist with his subject ("Cezanne did not wish to represent apples, he wished to paint pictures."[xiv]), but every work of art – even Cezanne’s – is as inseparable from nature as from the painter. Nature is not surmounted, destroyed or even supplanted by art: a distinct creation is born from the artist’s vision. And the object in nature becomes “something owned,” as Rilke put it. When Cezanne painted his mountain again and again, from every direction, in every light and season, he was approaching, approximating, the reality of the mountain.

By extension, photography is a realization of Blake’s admonition: “We ever must believe the lie/When we see with, not through, the eye.” Its dependence on a mechanical device does not make it any less creative. But in its faithful recording of the actual, photography has the ability to bring us closer to the things of the physical world. Intelligence intervenes every time the photographer aims his lens.
And all a filmmaker does is arrange real objects – people and places – before his camera. This may have become old-fashioned with the invention of CGI, but it is the art of filmmaking in a nutshell, whether it’s Cocteau’s Orpheus walking through mirrors into the underworld, or De Sica’s Umberto D nearly run over by a train. Bresson’s querulous rejection of these realities for one of his own devising may have been instrumental in the creation of his own crypt-like universe, in which everyone is a Caligari somnambulist who monophonically mutter the words of his idiosyncratic creed, but for everyone else it is a ridiculously limiting, arbitrarily exclusive, and ultimately pointless exercise.

[i] Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, Johanathan Griffin, trans., New York: Urizen Books, 1977, p.3
[ii] Ibid., p. 59
[iii] “My first film was made with professional actors, and when we had our first rehearsal, I said, ‘If you go on acting and speaking like this, I am leaving.’” Bresson in an interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, Paris, September 2, 1970.
[iv] Both films attracted the admiring attention of a university newspaper critic named Andre Bazin.
[v] Samuels interview, q.v.
[vi] The “critics” in the 1950s were those writing for major periodicals. They were rarely, if ever, interested in – or indeed knowledgeable of – theoretical interpretation, with the exception of the radical Cahiers du Cinema, which initially attracted little attention outside France.
[vii] Dostoevsky ended his tale with Raskolnikov confessing his crime – at precisely the point at which he stood the greatest chance of getting away with it. Raskolnikov had actually proved that he was superior to the laws governing other people – which is why his discovery of Sonia’s love and his admission of guilt are so powerful.
[viii] Some of the greatest artists have drawn their inspiration from entirely spurious ideas. Robert Graves was one of the 20th-century’s greatest lyric poets, who swore lifelong devotion to a deity whom he called The White Goddess.
[ix] “In this age, sheer talk – the interview – becomes as much a part of a director’s life as anything other than directing itself.” The New Republic, Nov 27, 2006. Curiously, Bresson addressed the problem himself (without a trace of irony): “I hate publicity. One should be known for what one does, not for what he is. Nowadays a painter paints a bad painting, but he talks about it until it becomes famous. He paints for five minutes and talks about it on television for five years.” In Bresson’s case, his pronouncements on film got much wider circulation than his films, so that he was known by reputation in some cases years before his films were widely available.
[x] Samuels, q.v.
[xi] Mirella Jona Affron strains our credulity by comparing Bresson’s little book with Pascal’s Pensees. Feeble as philosophy, Bresson’s Notes have little application outside the strict confines of his work. (“Bresson and Pascal: Rhetorical Affinities”, Robert Bresson, James Quandt, editor, p.165).
[xii] “Most of what is said about me is wrong and is repeated incessantly.” Samuels, q.v.
[xiii] Bresson contradicted himself in the Samuels interview: “A book, a painting, or a piece of music – none of these things has an absolute value. The value is what the viewer, the reader, the listener bring to it.” Only a churl could not allow a photograph the same potential value.
[xiv] Andre Malraux, The Metamorphosis of the Gods, New York: Doubleday, 1964.