It might almost seem redundant for me to be reading Moritz Thomsen's "Peace Corps Chronicle" Living Poor here on a small island in the heart of the Philippine archipelago. Except that what Thomsen wrote about poverty is representatove of poor people everywhere. And in the forty years since the book's publication, in Ecuador and in poor places all over the world, nothing has changed. There is no River of Emeralds here, but the Pacific Ocean is there, as blue and as unforgiving as ever.
"Living poor is like being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a battered canoe, requiring all your strength simply to keep afloat; there is never any question of reaching a destination. True poverty is a state of perpetual crisis, and one wave just a little bigger or coming from an unexpected direction can and usually does wreck things. Some benevolent ignorance denies a poor man the ability to see the squalid sequence of his life, except very rarely; he views it rather as a disconnected string of unfortunate sadnesses. Never having paddled on a calm sea, he is unable to imagine one. I think if he could connect the chronic hunger, the sickness, the death of his children, the almost unrelieved physical and emotional tension into the pattern that his life inevitably takes he would kill himself.
"In South America the poor man is an ignorant man, unaware of the forces that shape his destiny. The shattering truth - that he is kept poor and ignorant as the principal and unspoken component of national policy - escapes him. He cries for land reform, a system of farm loans that will carry him along between crops, unaware that the national economy in almost every country sustained by a one-crop export commodity depends for its success on an unlimited supply of cheap labor. Ecuador needs poor men to compete in the world banana market; Brazil needs poverty to sell its coffee; Chile, its tin; Colombia, its cacao and coffee, and so on. The way United States pressures shape the policies of the South American governments can make a Peace Corps volunteer who is involved and saddened by the poverty in his village tremble to his very roots."
In the Philippines, whose population has been exploding for more than a decade, children are everywhere - especially small children. Imbecile politicians point to this overpopulation as a good sign for the future of the Philippines. And yet no single factor practically guarantees that poverty will endure more than the servitude of women as little more than baby-making machines.
This problem is exacerbated in Roman Catholic countries (like the Philippines and every country in Central and South America) where Papal policy strongly discourages the use of contraceptives and where abortion is either strictly controlled or even banned. The church is always there to welcome the many millions of new souls, but never willing to fill their stomachs. This life is merely a proving ground for the next one, according to their reasoning (if you could call it that), so why bother prolonging it? Why, indeed.
"Death, of course, is the great release. I lay in my house one night trying to sleep, while up the hill a fiesta went on until dawn - drums in an endless and monotonous rhythm connecting a series of increasingly complicated songs, some chanted by women, some by men, some by mixed voices. It gradually became beautiful and moving, but I was puzzled because the celebration was just a week before the great Semana Santa, Holy Easter, a fiesta that everyone saves up for and that leaves everyone broke and exhausted.
"Why were they bombiendo all night on the hill? I asked someone.
"'They were celebrating the death of Crispin's first-born,' I was told. 'He was born dead, an angelito.' There wasn't a bit of sadness in the town; it was a real celebration. Crispin's son had struck it lucky; he was one of God's angels without all of that intervening crap."
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Worst Cliches of Movieland #1: The Gun
Peter Medak's superb 1991 film, Let Him Have It dramatizes the case of a somewhat dim young man who becomes a petty criminal in 1950s England, gets caught in the middle of a robbery, and winds up being hanged for his alleged part in the shooting of a policeman. He was convicted because of something he said to his fellow thief, who happened to have a revolver pointed at a policeman: "Let him have it!" The defense claimed he was telling the guy with the gun to hand it over to the policeman. The prosecution argued (successfully) that he was using the old line from countless Hollywood gangster movies whose universal meaning was - shoot him!
Americans would've recognized the line and would've sent the young man to the gallows (or else had him fried in an electric chair) regardless. Long ago, James Agee was reviewing a British film and commented on how something comes across in British films that he never saw in American films - a higher regard for the sanctity of life and a high seriousness about killing. The film revealed something about the British - a respect or love for one another - that he didn't find in American films. Medak's film has the same effect: an attention that an American viewer would regard as sentimental or inconsequential - a loving attention to people and to their fates.
It is an ongoing, and probably endless, argument: does the violence in American films merely reflect the violence of the culture or does it somehow influence it? If mainstream American films (I won't even mention typically abysmal American television) are anything to go by, Americans are a gun-happy, unruly mob always just on the brink of exploding into violence. And you would think the same after watching or reading the news.
Never mind the influence it has had on American society, the Gun is virtually ubiquitous in American film, and by now synonymous with it. Take away the Gun and you barely even have American film. The careers of filmmakers like Coppolla, Scorsese and Tarantino would be inconceivable without the Gun. For me, this reflects the extent to which American film has distanced itself from life. When Francois Truffaut tried to justify the melodramatic conclusion of his film La Peau Douce by stating he got the idea from reading stories in French newspapers, he merely demonstrated how desperate he had by then become as an artist - gleaning ideas from yellow journalism. He had, in fact, betrayed everything else he had accomplished in an otherwise fine film - he had resorted to melodrama, the infusion of a blatant violation of his realistic art.
And 100 years of American filmmaking has done nothing to escape from its original roots in Victorian theater - the roots so plainly visible in D.W. Griffith's tawdry melodramas. If done well, and some American films have almost domesticated the Gun through sheer dumb bravado, it is acceptable on the grounds that even an "entertainment" is difficult enough to pull off successfuly. But if it is relied on merely as a prop for poor material - as it is in 99% of what passes for entertainment in Movieland - the Gun is the ultimate interloper, an intruder in the midst of life, and a whopping excuse for Movieland's worst examples of its trade.
Americans would've recognized the line and would've sent the young man to the gallows (or else had him fried in an electric chair) regardless. Long ago, James Agee was reviewing a British film and commented on how something comes across in British films that he never saw in American films - a higher regard for the sanctity of life and a high seriousness about killing. The film revealed something about the British - a respect or love for one another - that he didn't find in American films. Medak's film has the same effect: an attention that an American viewer would regard as sentimental or inconsequential - a loving attention to people and to their fates.
It is an ongoing, and probably endless, argument: does the violence in American films merely reflect the violence of the culture or does it somehow influence it? If mainstream American films (I won't even mention typically abysmal American television) are anything to go by, Americans are a gun-happy, unruly mob always just on the brink of exploding into violence. And you would think the same after watching or reading the news.
Never mind the influence it has had on American society, the Gun is virtually ubiquitous in American film, and by now synonymous with it. Take away the Gun and you barely even have American film. The careers of filmmakers like Coppolla, Scorsese and Tarantino would be inconceivable without the Gun. For me, this reflects the extent to which American film has distanced itself from life. When Francois Truffaut tried to justify the melodramatic conclusion of his film La Peau Douce by stating he got the idea from reading stories in French newspapers, he merely demonstrated how desperate he had by then become as an artist - gleaning ideas from yellow journalism. He had, in fact, betrayed everything else he had accomplished in an otherwise fine film - he had resorted to melodrama, the infusion of a blatant violation of his realistic art.
And 100 years of American filmmaking has done nothing to escape from its original roots in Victorian theater - the roots so plainly visible in D.W. Griffith's tawdry melodramas. If done well, and some American films have almost domesticated the Gun through sheer dumb bravado, it is acceptable on the grounds that even an "entertainment" is difficult enough to pull off successfuly. But if it is relied on merely as a prop for poor material - as it is in 99% of what passes for entertainment in Movieland - the Gun is the ultimate interloper, an intruder in the midst of life, and a whopping excuse for Movieland's worst examples of its trade.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Sam Peckinpah: Watching People Die
The final shootout in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch has been marvelled at for forty years. Peckinpah's singular use of slow-motion - invariably involving an explosion, a gunshot, or a falling body - was considerably abetted by his stunt-coordination. It isn't simply the manner in which Peckinpah's violence is shot, but how it is staged that gives it an extraordinarily vivid quality.
In few other films does the moment of violent death appear as balletic and simultaneously as brutally realistic. His capturing of the physical effects of bullets tearing into flesh, and often from more than one direction, is unparalleled. The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde were singled out for attack because of this. It may not have been the first nauseating argument about film violence, but it was the most intense.
Because most of the violence in films is cartoon violence - inconceivable and therefore harmless - the argument has been blunted in forty years. But because Peckinpah, unlike his contemporaries, was an artist, his interest in the representation of violence is clearly derived from an ultimate interest in truth.
So conceiving a shootout in which four men oppose possibly hundreds was not, for Peckinpah, merely an exercise in romantic heroism. Stanley Kauffmann called it the closest realization of Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. However else these four might have met their ends is inconceivable. They were at the end of their tethers as outlaws, but more importantly, they recognized a distinction in the cause for which they would die. That they chose friendship and loyalty was Peckinpah's ultimate irony. The same men who used the participants of a temperance march as cover for their getaway in the film's first sequence (another of Peckinpah's jokes) would choose a suicidal rescue of a friend from a corrupt Mexican "general" as their last act.
In few other films does the moment of violent death appear as balletic and simultaneously as brutally realistic. His capturing of the physical effects of bullets tearing into flesh, and often from more than one direction, is unparalleled. The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde were singled out for attack because of this. It may not have been the first nauseating argument about film violence, but it was the most intense.
Because most of the violence in films is cartoon violence - inconceivable and therefore harmless - the argument has been blunted in forty years. But because Peckinpah, unlike his contemporaries, was an artist, his interest in the representation of violence is clearly derived from an ultimate interest in truth.
So conceiving a shootout in which four men oppose possibly hundreds was not, for Peckinpah, merely an exercise in romantic heroism. Stanley Kauffmann called it the closest realization of Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. However else these four might have met their ends is inconceivable. They were at the end of their tethers as outlaws, but more importantly, they recognized a distinction in the cause for which they would die. That they chose friendship and loyalty was Peckinpah's ultimate irony. The same men who used the participants of a temperance march as cover for their getaway in the film's first sequence (another of Peckinpah's jokes) would choose a suicidal rescue of a friend from a corrupt Mexican "general" as their last act.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Lost in Translation
Somewhat miraculously still in the Philippines, I have had a tough time adjusting to being a resident rather than a tourist. It's easy being a tourist. You're here for a fixed number of days and you have a certain amount of money to spend. So you know exactly how much you can get away with spending every day. And even if you screw up, there's always the return ticket.
It's completely different when you come here to live. Since your stay is "indefinite," whatever amount of money you bring can never be properly budgeted. You know when it will run out, of course, and you know when and how much will be coming in next month. But you'll never know how much it will take to get you to the other side of that great divide called "indefinite." There is, in fact, no other side out there to be reached. You're already there - it's right under your feet.
It's completely different when you come here to live. Since your stay is "indefinite," whatever amount of money you bring can never be properly budgeted. You know when it will run out, of course, and you know when and how much will be coming in next month. But you'll never know how much it will take to get you to the other side of that great divide called "indefinite." There is, in fact, no other side out there to be reached. You're already there - it's right under your feet.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
So There I Was
I've been using this blog as a pseudo-diary, so I may as well admit the latest event in my life at mid-way. I have transported myself from Alaska to the Philippines in an attempt to "retire early". As my earlier entry "Hallelujah I'm a Bum" attested, I have always held the workaday world in enmity. Given the Plutocracy into which I was born, the choices were actually severely few and my chances of success haphazard.
Needless to say, I failed to succeed by the standards of my own world. I never saw the necessity of any of the wondrous things that it held out as some kind of promise. "Job Security" was nothing more than a guarantor of safe slavery until you are ready for Social Security, which "promise" is being slowly eroded by a rabid government in control of 40% of the world's largest economy.
I brought one of many books with me. Moritz Thomsen's Living Poor can at least give me the consolation that at least I am not living in an Ecuadoran jungle. Cheers.
Needless to say, I failed to succeed by the standards of my own world. I never saw the necessity of any of the wondrous things that it held out as some kind of promise. "Job Security" was nothing more than a guarantor of safe slavery until you are ready for Social Security, which "promise" is being slowly eroded by a rabid government in control of 40% of the world's largest economy.
I brought one of many books with me. Moritz Thomsen's Living Poor can at least give me the consolation that at least I am not living in an Ecuadoran jungle. Cheers.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Cinephilia or Cinephobia?
The term cinephilia has always made me squirm. Though meant to denote a "love of cinema," it has uneasy sexual overtones. And it also leaves one little room for negative criticism - something that is inevitable for a critic of film.
I'm old enough to know that hatred is too special a feeling to squander on someone or something I don't like. But I can at least specify my dislikes: too many film fans are masquerading as critics these days. It was possible, from the very beginning, to distinguish them. It was quite easy to figure out how Harry Alan Potamkin wasn't a film fan. And Otis Ferguson. And Robert Warshow. But then came Manny Farber and Bosley Crowther (redubbed "Crosley Bother" by Vernon Young, another non-film fan). Since very few people had the patience to find anything worth taking seriously in movies - in America at any rate - serious film discussion was limited to the little magazines. It was only in the 1960s that enough people were exposed to films with more than diverting ambitions. And film discussion blossomed accordingly.
Forty years later serious films are still around, still being made. But they exist almost despite the level of commensurate criticism. Glitterati have obscured what is essential to serious discussion. The unfortunate impact of this is that many so-called critics have assumed the mantle of seriousness, while their writing belies something frivolous.
One such critic is David Thomson, who is less a critic than a fan. His pseudo-serious Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fourth edition, has been overestimated in some surprising circles. I expressed my own opinion in 2003 in a Senses of Cinema number. Dedicated to that curious concept Cinephilia, I had the feeling that Senses had to squirm a bit to publish my piece. I present it here, with editorial corrections that Senses missed.
Confessions of a Film Hater
by Dan Harper
As an artistic medium, which is a distinction lost on most filmgoers, film is particularly needy of critical clarity. If this has been slowly, often painfully, realized over the years – at the expense of too many fortunes and reputations – it is no thanks to the hangers-on of the medium, who are in it for ephemeral fame or simply the vicarious thrill of rubbing up against, even in effigy, the likes of Jack Nicholson and Nicole Kidman. It is these particular people who are always there to remind us that it's only a movie. Whether chastening or maddening, every film enthusiast must contend with the prevailing uninformed attitude that L'Avventura and Tokyo Story and Smiles of a Summer Night are only movies. Yeah, and Herman Melville was a fishmonger.
In 1971, the University of California Press published Georges Sadoul's by-no-means-comprehensive Dictionary of Films. It was just about all that Sadoul, then a pre-eminent film critic, could handle. And he pulled it off splendidly. The following year, his Dictionary of Filmmakers was published. (Alas, both books were “updated” by the often antithetical remarks of a Canadian writer named Peter Morris.) If nothing else, Sadoul proved that it could be done and that it was worth doing.
After 30 years and four editions, David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film (or Cinema in Britain) at least demonstrates that perseverance has its rewards. It was an audacious undertaking when Thomson began it – an assemblage of what appeared to have been innumerable jottings, many of them doubtless written in the dark. Which is why they often seem disjointed and discontinuous, as if the person who wrote them had to pass through several sensibilities before finding the wherewithal to put them together in one volume.
A second edition followed five years later. 14 years had to elapse before the third edition hit the bookshelves, requiring extensive revising and expanding (not to mention shelf re-enforcement). The fourth edition may as well be the last, even if it probably won't. It has not grown in erudition or in taste. It has merely grown heavier (1). But its size makes it the perfect coffee table book. And if it is far less informative that Leslie Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion (which contents itself with the compiling of data rather than prickly opinions), it is incomparably more entertaining – in ways that Thomson surely hadn't intended.
For, indeed, “unintentional” would seem to be the overall effect that Thomson has on this reader. As for his outrageousness (one of the book's biggest selling points), I'm afraid that Thomson was being quite deliberate. No other critic, attempting to cover as much territory, is so erratic in his opinions. He is off the mark when it matters the most and when it matters the least. And he is so wildly inaccurate with his opprobrium that his approval quickly develops into a kiss of death.
Of the numerous examples I could cite, I will limit myself to the ones that do the most undeserved damage to genuinely deserving work (2). Fellini: “This quartet [I Vitelloni, La Strada, Il Bidone, Cabiria] needs to be put firmly in its place. They are slick, mechanical stories, feeding on superficial feelings and uncritical of sentimentality or grand effects. As to style or creative intelligence, they do not begin to intrude upon the achievement of La Signora Senza Camelie, Le Amiche, much less the films Rossellini was making at the same time.” (3) That last sentence represents a favorite tactic of Thomson's – the snobbish dismissal of one critical reputation in favor of another. For instance, Kurosawa – according to Thomson – is good, but not as good as Mizoguchi: “Rashomon is a simpleminded proof of an idea that informs many films . . . whereas Ugetsu simply incorporates the principle that people see events differently.” That Mizoguchi could not even have conceived a film as strikingly dynamic as Rashomon is, I guess, beside the point.
De Sica: “He stands now as a minor director.” No wonder, since Shoeshine, Bicycle Thief, Miracle in Milan and Umberto D are, for Thomson – if for no one else – “schematically contrived.” On Claude Autant-Lara (surely the most underrated French director of its Golden Age), he is unnecessarily snide: “He is the sort of director to film classic novels for educational television, adept at glossing meaning and arranging furniture.” And there go, at one unfair swipe, priceless film adaptations of Radiguet, Colette, even of Stendhal.
Of Julien Duvivier: “During the 1930s he was very successful commercially: Poil de Carotte, Pepe le Moko, and Un Carnet de Bal are all blandly proficient works.” Need I point out that these three films became instant classics and have made countless “favorites” lists ever since? Or is that the reason Thomson hates them? He adds, petulantly, that “It is hard to feel warmly toward a director reluctant to celebrate beautiful women.” Whatever on earth that is supposed to mean, Duvivier's films are often monuments to earthy, genuine women – Vivian Romance, Mireille Balin, Marie Bell.
Further in, Thomson upbraids too many filmmakers for their ignorance and/or maltreatment of women. He has a special circle of hell reserved for Lina Wertmuller and her fabulous films of the '70s, and takes up the altogether safe argument that she was a woman-hater. Then he pokes fun at her politics. Once more, he points out, her success – as if anyone put her up to it – would have better served the likes of Chantal Akerman, Stephanie Rothman, or Yvonne Rainer. Brave of Thomson to drag such names out of obscurity, except none of these presumably more deserving women filmmakers is otherwise mentioned in his Dictionary.
There are further howlers. “Les Enfants du Paradis is a lesser film than The Golden Coach, which balances stage and reality.” Whatever Thomson means by reality, the Carne/Prevert masterpiece is a deliberate celebration of the artificiality of the theater and the impossibility of reconciling its artifice with life. Truly the unhappiest of men is the dreamer, Baptiste, who worships his ideal Garance, even as several other men make love to her.
There is also a pervasive enmity against Charlie Chaplin that arises throughout Thomson's writing. He goes to great lengths to demonstrate why he detests Chaplin, only to make one wonder why on earth anyone else should. He even wonders at one point (and I am not making this up) if there is perhaps more than a coincidental resemblance between Chaplin and Hitler.
Lately, Thomson is even including some well-known critics, only to misinterpret both their lives (the proper subject for a Biographical Dictionary) and their work. For Thomson, James Agee – a marvelous writer and “amateur critic” (his own words) – is “far from reliable.” Yet Agee is a perfect antidote to Thomson: “Black Narcissus is that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns.” For Agee, the same film provoked this response: “Barring perhaps one in any hundred who willingly practice it, I think celibacy is of itself faintly obscene, so I admire still less the dramatic exploitation of celibacy as an opportunity for titillation in the best of taste” (4).
Thomson continually expresses contempt for the international “arthouse” circuit, without acknowledging that it managed, for a few decades, to help sustain film art and expose audiences that would never otherwise have seen a film by Bergman or Fellini or Godard to some of the more challenging – if salacious – films of the 50s and 60s. (Hilariously, Bergman's magnificent Gycklarnas Afton [The Clown's Evening/Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953] was renamed The Naked Night for the American art-house audience. As more than one critic has since observed, the latter actually a better title for that harrowing film, which – true to form – Thomson doesn't even mention.)
On more than one occasion, Thomson even outrageously belittles cinematography: “The image is so fundamental and so wonderful in and of itself, but it is a given: every day, all over the world, millions of people take wonderful or useful pictures. Is it so remarkable that a few hundred people do it for movies?” So much for Gianni Di Venanzo, Kazuo Miyagawa, and Raoul Coutard. His impertinent question begs an inescapable answer – “indeed it is.”
And he quixotically insists that films can only be fully experienced in the original context of a darkened, big screen movie theater. Not having the connections that Thomson has had, I can say wholeheartedly that the advent of video and DVD has been a godsend, after spending most of my teens and twenties chasing after films from theaters to auditoriums to classrooms (and even a few operating theaters now and then). It was an impossible task, in those days, to take in every film worth seeing. If you had told me then that it would be possible some day to own a pristine copy of Fellini's Il Bidone (1955) or Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1929) (5) I'd have said you were crazy.
But there are sins of omission as well. Again, to cite only the worst transgressions, how to account for the conspicuous absence of people such as Emilio Fernandez (1903–1986), who, aside from his unforgettable portrayal of the Federalista Mapache in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, directed some of the most luminously beautiful Mexican films of the 1940s? (6) Or the unequalled scenarist Jacques Prevert (1900–1977), who was at least as responsible for the “poetic realism” of 1930s French Cinema as the rather commonplace director Marcel Carne? Or Jan Troell (1931–), the Swedish director, writer, cinematographer and editor of masterpieces of epic naturalism (7) and the only true heir to the legacy of Victor Sjostrom? Or Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001), whose modernist fables of the '60s are among the defining works of latter-day Japanese film? And, just to include my short list, what about Jean-Jacques Annaud, Jiri Trnka, Jean Epstein, Mario Monicelli, Claude Goretta, Kaneto Shindo, Pietro Germi, Bernhard Wicki, Yves Robert, Shohei Imamura? Then there are those splendid shooting stars – all the homo unius libri who made a single film worthy of immortality and then disappeared, such as the Frenchmen Serge Bourguignon and Alain Jessua, the Italians Vittorio De Seta and Mauro Bolognini, the Russian Joseph Heifitz, the Czech Ivan Passer? Any cineaste worth his weight in celluloid knows full well who these people are and how integral they are to any recognizable overview of the medium. Surely Mr Thomson, fastidious buff that he is, has heard of them? But such omissions are glaring, and perhaps attest to some of the severe holes in Thomson's necessarily selective moviegoing experience. Against Thomson's experience of sheer numbers of films, I am just as happy with my own haphazard, parochial and entirely leisured exploration of the phantasmagoria of film history. It has, at the very least, allowed for some experience of life to sneak in during the intermissions.
Of course, the law of averages being what it is, no single critic could possibly be wrong all of the time. In this respect, Thomson sometimes emerges as a usable critic when his idiosyncratic prejudices somehow converge on a justifiable opinion. I applauded, for instance, his refreshing disrespect for Sergei Eisenstein – that purveyor of Socialist propaganda in the name of montage. He manages to defuse the current specious adulation of John Ford, who rivals D.W. Griffith for sheer pious stupidity. And he is a perceptive (if troubled) Antonioni fan. He also manages to do a few other worthy filmmakers similar justice: Marcel Ophuls, Carol Reed, Sam Peckinpah, Jerzy Skolimowski (even if he neglects to mention his splendid adaptation of the Robert Graves story The Shout [1978]), and one of my international film heroes, Dusan Makavejev.
But there is one further flaw in Thomson's book – his prose. It should become obvious to anyone thumbing through this Dictionary that it is when he is at his most passionate that Thomson is most embarrassingly bad as a writer. Here is on Juliette Binoche: “How many ways are there of watching her grave face? Are the cheeks carved by love's gaze? Did that hair fall on her head like night? And the eyes…are they part of her life, or their own living creatures? And yet…if only this magnificent, melancholy, and nearly stunned woman had just a touch of…Debbie Reynolds.” (The ellipses are Thomson's.) His metaphors are at best far-fetched and at worst meaningless. When he writes that Warren Oates “has a face like prison bread,” he is obviously assuming that the reader, like him, has no idea what prison bread looks like. Harry Dean Stanton “is among the last of the great supporting actors, as unfailing and visually eloquent as Anthony Mann's trees or 'Mexico' in a Peckinpah film.” (I'll just leave that one alone.) And, occasionally, Thomson baffles even himself: “The Shop Around the Corner may be as sweet and light as an Esterhazy honey ball – whatever that is.” Then you come across this gem, embedded in his paean to Howard Hawks: “The dazzling battles of word, innuendo, glance, and gesture are Utopian procrastinations to avert the paraphernalia of released love that can only expend itself.” Thomson describes a paper written by Pasolini in 1965 as “esoterically argued and barbarously worded”. He could as easily have been describing his own book.
I have called this essay Confessions of a Film Hater for many reasons – some less obvious than others. There has been a conspiracy afoot for decades which suggests that there is no such thing as high art and low art, and it is usually invoked to the disadvantage of only one thing: art itself. Beauty cannot be redefined by accommodating its opposite – it can only be cheapened, vulgarised. And art can only be made meaningless when it is equated with nonart, with lower forms. Thomson insists that melodrama is where film is at its best. When he obliquely praises Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) (so obliquely that he nearly breaks his neck), Thomson gives the game away: “it helps persuade this viewer that cinema – or American film – is not a place for artists. It is a world for producers, for showmen, and Schindlers.” Never mind the fuss, the Ten Best lists, the Golden Palms, Golden Lions and Hollywood's own Golden Bowling Trophies. There is a wind – and Thomson has done nothing to dissipate it – that howls that same, tired, stupid phrase, It's only a movie.
1) Much of the expansion, which has become unfortunately necessary for Thomson by now, is actually unwelcome. Surely Thomson would have been pardoned for not giving Ben Affleck a nod.
2) I write this mindful of the case of Charles Thomas Samuels, an academic, but challenging, film critic, who committed suicide in 1974 – partly because “he thought he had 'killed' others in his reviews”(John Simon, “Foreword”, Mastering the Film and Other Essays by Charles Thomas Samuels, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1977, p. ix). Thomson is in a far better position to “kill,” but he obviously derives some satisfaction from it.
3) I found Thomson's panning of La Strada particularly inexplicable, since it was the very film that demonstrated to me, at the age of 13, that film was capable of being an art.
4) James Agee, Agee on Film, Modern Library, New York, 2000.
5) It wasn't until its release on DVD that I had my first opportunity to see Dreyer's wonderful film.
6) Thomson dwells (which is his wont) on the beauty of Dolores Del Rio without even noticing her career in Mexican films – Flor Silvestre (1943), Maria Candelaria (1944), etc.
7) Here Is Your Life (1966), The Emigrants (1971), The Flight of the Eagle (1982), et al.
I'm old enough to know that hatred is too special a feeling to squander on someone or something I don't like. But I can at least specify my dislikes: too many film fans are masquerading as critics these days. It was possible, from the very beginning, to distinguish them. It was quite easy to figure out how Harry Alan Potamkin wasn't a film fan. And Otis Ferguson. And Robert Warshow. But then came Manny Farber and Bosley Crowther (redubbed "Crosley Bother" by Vernon Young, another non-film fan). Since very few people had the patience to find anything worth taking seriously in movies - in America at any rate - serious film discussion was limited to the little magazines. It was only in the 1960s that enough people were exposed to films with more than diverting ambitions. And film discussion blossomed accordingly.
Forty years later serious films are still around, still being made. But they exist almost despite the level of commensurate criticism. Glitterati have obscured what is essential to serious discussion. The unfortunate impact of this is that many so-called critics have assumed the mantle of seriousness, while their writing belies something frivolous.
One such critic is David Thomson, who is less a critic than a fan. His pseudo-serious Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fourth edition, has been overestimated in some surprising circles. I expressed my own opinion in 2003 in a Senses of Cinema number. Dedicated to that curious concept Cinephilia, I had the feeling that Senses had to squirm a bit to publish my piece. I present it here, with editorial corrections that Senses missed.
Confessions of a Film Hater
by Dan Harper
As an artistic medium, which is a distinction lost on most filmgoers, film is particularly needy of critical clarity. If this has been slowly, often painfully, realized over the years – at the expense of too many fortunes and reputations – it is no thanks to the hangers-on of the medium, who are in it for ephemeral fame or simply the vicarious thrill of rubbing up against, even in effigy, the likes of Jack Nicholson and Nicole Kidman. It is these particular people who are always there to remind us that it's only a movie. Whether chastening or maddening, every film enthusiast must contend with the prevailing uninformed attitude that L'Avventura and Tokyo Story and Smiles of a Summer Night are only movies. Yeah, and Herman Melville was a fishmonger.
In 1971, the University of California Press published Georges Sadoul's by-no-means-comprehensive Dictionary of Films. It was just about all that Sadoul, then a pre-eminent film critic, could handle. And he pulled it off splendidly. The following year, his Dictionary of Filmmakers was published. (Alas, both books were “updated” by the often antithetical remarks of a Canadian writer named Peter Morris.) If nothing else, Sadoul proved that it could be done and that it was worth doing.
After 30 years and four editions, David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film (or Cinema in Britain) at least demonstrates that perseverance has its rewards. It was an audacious undertaking when Thomson began it – an assemblage of what appeared to have been innumerable jottings, many of them doubtless written in the dark. Which is why they often seem disjointed and discontinuous, as if the person who wrote them had to pass through several sensibilities before finding the wherewithal to put them together in one volume.
A second edition followed five years later. 14 years had to elapse before the third edition hit the bookshelves, requiring extensive revising and expanding (not to mention shelf re-enforcement). The fourth edition may as well be the last, even if it probably won't. It has not grown in erudition or in taste. It has merely grown heavier (1). But its size makes it the perfect coffee table book. And if it is far less informative that Leslie Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion (which contents itself with the compiling of data rather than prickly opinions), it is incomparably more entertaining – in ways that Thomson surely hadn't intended.
For, indeed, “unintentional” would seem to be the overall effect that Thomson has on this reader. As for his outrageousness (one of the book's biggest selling points), I'm afraid that Thomson was being quite deliberate. No other critic, attempting to cover as much territory, is so erratic in his opinions. He is off the mark when it matters the most and when it matters the least. And he is so wildly inaccurate with his opprobrium that his approval quickly develops into a kiss of death.
Of the numerous examples I could cite, I will limit myself to the ones that do the most undeserved damage to genuinely deserving work (2). Fellini: “This quartet [I Vitelloni, La Strada, Il Bidone, Cabiria] needs to be put firmly in its place. They are slick, mechanical stories, feeding on superficial feelings and uncritical of sentimentality or grand effects. As to style or creative intelligence, they do not begin to intrude upon the achievement of La Signora Senza Camelie, Le Amiche, much less the films Rossellini was making at the same time.” (3) That last sentence represents a favorite tactic of Thomson's – the snobbish dismissal of one critical reputation in favor of another. For instance, Kurosawa – according to Thomson – is good, but not as good as Mizoguchi: “Rashomon is a simpleminded proof of an idea that informs many films . . . whereas Ugetsu simply incorporates the principle that people see events differently.” That Mizoguchi could not even have conceived a film as strikingly dynamic as Rashomon is, I guess, beside the point.
De Sica: “He stands now as a minor director.” No wonder, since Shoeshine, Bicycle Thief, Miracle in Milan and Umberto D are, for Thomson – if for no one else – “schematically contrived.” On Claude Autant-Lara (surely the most underrated French director of its Golden Age), he is unnecessarily snide: “He is the sort of director to film classic novels for educational television, adept at glossing meaning and arranging furniture.” And there go, at one unfair swipe, priceless film adaptations of Radiguet, Colette, even of Stendhal.
Of Julien Duvivier: “During the 1930s he was very successful commercially: Poil de Carotte, Pepe le Moko, and Un Carnet de Bal are all blandly proficient works.” Need I point out that these three films became instant classics and have made countless “favorites” lists ever since? Or is that the reason Thomson hates them? He adds, petulantly, that “It is hard to feel warmly toward a director reluctant to celebrate beautiful women.” Whatever on earth that is supposed to mean, Duvivier's films are often monuments to earthy, genuine women – Vivian Romance, Mireille Balin, Marie Bell.
Further in, Thomson upbraids too many filmmakers for their ignorance and/or maltreatment of women. He has a special circle of hell reserved for Lina Wertmuller and her fabulous films of the '70s, and takes up the altogether safe argument that she was a woman-hater. Then he pokes fun at her politics. Once more, he points out, her success – as if anyone put her up to it – would have better served the likes of Chantal Akerman, Stephanie Rothman, or Yvonne Rainer. Brave of Thomson to drag such names out of obscurity, except none of these presumably more deserving women filmmakers is otherwise mentioned in his Dictionary.
There are further howlers. “Les Enfants du Paradis is a lesser film than The Golden Coach, which balances stage and reality.” Whatever Thomson means by reality, the Carne/Prevert masterpiece is a deliberate celebration of the artificiality of the theater and the impossibility of reconciling its artifice with life. Truly the unhappiest of men is the dreamer, Baptiste, who worships his ideal Garance, even as several other men make love to her.
There is also a pervasive enmity against Charlie Chaplin that arises throughout Thomson's writing. He goes to great lengths to demonstrate why he detests Chaplin, only to make one wonder why on earth anyone else should. He even wonders at one point (and I am not making this up) if there is perhaps more than a coincidental resemblance between Chaplin and Hitler.
Lately, Thomson is even including some well-known critics, only to misinterpret both their lives (the proper subject for a Biographical Dictionary) and their work. For Thomson, James Agee – a marvelous writer and “amateur critic” (his own words) – is “far from reliable.” Yet Agee is a perfect antidote to Thomson: “Black Narcissus is that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns.” For Agee, the same film provoked this response: “Barring perhaps one in any hundred who willingly practice it, I think celibacy is of itself faintly obscene, so I admire still less the dramatic exploitation of celibacy as an opportunity for titillation in the best of taste” (4).
Thomson continually expresses contempt for the international “arthouse” circuit, without acknowledging that it managed, for a few decades, to help sustain film art and expose audiences that would never otherwise have seen a film by Bergman or Fellini or Godard to some of the more challenging – if salacious – films of the 50s and 60s. (Hilariously, Bergman's magnificent Gycklarnas Afton [The Clown's Evening/Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953] was renamed The Naked Night for the American art-house audience. As more than one critic has since observed, the latter actually a better title for that harrowing film, which – true to form – Thomson doesn't even mention.)
On more than one occasion, Thomson even outrageously belittles cinematography: “The image is so fundamental and so wonderful in and of itself, but it is a given: every day, all over the world, millions of people take wonderful or useful pictures. Is it so remarkable that a few hundred people do it for movies?” So much for Gianni Di Venanzo, Kazuo Miyagawa, and Raoul Coutard. His impertinent question begs an inescapable answer – “indeed it is.”
And he quixotically insists that films can only be fully experienced in the original context of a darkened, big screen movie theater. Not having the connections that Thomson has had, I can say wholeheartedly that the advent of video and DVD has been a godsend, after spending most of my teens and twenties chasing after films from theaters to auditoriums to classrooms (and even a few operating theaters now and then). It was an impossible task, in those days, to take in every film worth seeing. If you had told me then that it would be possible some day to own a pristine copy of Fellini's Il Bidone (1955) or Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1929) (5) I'd have said you were crazy.
But there are sins of omission as well. Again, to cite only the worst transgressions, how to account for the conspicuous absence of people such as Emilio Fernandez (1903–1986), who, aside from his unforgettable portrayal of the Federalista Mapache in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, directed some of the most luminously beautiful Mexican films of the 1940s? (6) Or the unequalled scenarist Jacques Prevert (1900–1977), who was at least as responsible for the “poetic realism” of 1930s French Cinema as the rather commonplace director Marcel Carne? Or Jan Troell (1931–), the Swedish director, writer, cinematographer and editor of masterpieces of epic naturalism (7) and the only true heir to the legacy of Victor Sjostrom? Or Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001), whose modernist fables of the '60s are among the defining works of latter-day Japanese film? And, just to include my short list, what about Jean-Jacques Annaud, Jiri Trnka, Jean Epstein, Mario Monicelli, Claude Goretta, Kaneto Shindo, Pietro Germi, Bernhard Wicki, Yves Robert, Shohei Imamura? Then there are those splendid shooting stars – all the homo unius libri who made a single film worthy of immortality and then disappeared, such as the Frenchmen Serge Bourguignon and Alain Jessua, the Italians Vittorio De Seta and Mauro Bolognini, the Russian Joseph Heifitz, the Czech Ivan Passer? Any cineaste worth his weight in celluloid knows full well who these people are and how integral they are to any recognizable overview of the medium. Surely Mr Thomson, fastidious buff that he is, has heard of them? But such omissions are glaring, and perhaps attest to some of the severe holes in Thomson's necessarily selective moviegoing experience. Against Thomson's experience of sheer numbers of films, I am just as happy with my own haphazard, parochial and entirely leisured exploration of the phantasmagoria of film history. It has, at the very least, allowed for some experience of life to sneak in during the intermissions.
Of course, the law of averages being what it is, no single critic could possibly be wrong all of the time. In this respect, Thomson sometimes emerges as a usable critic when his idiosyncratic prejudices somehow converge on a justifiable opinion. I applauded, for instance, his refreshing disrespect for Sergei Eisenstein – that purveyor of Socialist propaganda in the name of montage. He manages to defuse the current specious adulation of John Ford, who rivals D.W. Griffith for sheer pious stupidity. And he is a perceptive (if troubled) Antonioni fan. He also manages to do a few other worthy filmmakers similar justice: Marcel Ophuls, Carol Reed, Sam Peckinpah, Jerzy Skolimowski (even if he neglects to mention his splendid adaptation of the Robert Graves story The Shout [1978]), and one of my international film heroes, Dusan Makavejev.
But there is one further flaw in Thomson's book – his prose. It should become obvious to anyone thumbing through this Dictionary that it is when he is at his most passionate that Thomson is most embarrassingly bad as a writer. Here is on Juliette Binoche: “How many ways are there of watching her grave face? Are the cheeks carved by love's gaze? Did that hair fall on her head like night? And the eyes…are they part of her life, or their own living creatures? And yet…if only this magnificent, melancholy, and nearly stunned woman had just a touch of…Debbie Reynolds.” (The ellipses are Thomson's.) His metaphors are at best far-fetched and at worst meaningless. When he writes that Warren Oates “has a face like prison bread,” he is obviously assuming that the reader, like him, has no idea what prison bread looks like. Harry Dean Stanton “is among the last of the great supporting actors, as unfailing and visually eloquent as Anthony Mann's trees or 'Mexico' in a Peckinpah film.” (I'll just leave that one alone.) And, occasionally, Thomson baffles even himself: “The Shop Around the Corner may be as sweet and light as an Esterhazy honey ball – whatever that is.” Then you come across this gem, embedded in his paean to Howard Hawks: “The dazzling battles of word, innuendo, glance, and gesture are Utopian procrastinations to avert the paraphernalia of released love that can only expend itself.” Thomson describes a paper written by Pasolini in 1965 as “esoterically argued and barbarously worded”. He could as easily have been describing his own book.
I have called this essay Confessions of a Film Hater for many reasons – some less obvious than others. There has been a conspiracy afoot for decades which suggests that there is no such thing as high art and low art, and it is usually invoked to the disadvantage of only one thing: art itself. Beauty cannot be redefined by accommodating its opposite – it can only be cheapened, vulgarised. And art can only be made meaningless when it is equated with nonart, with lower forms. Thomson insists that melodrama is where film is at its best. When he obliquely praises Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) (so obliquely that he nearly breaks his neck), Thomson gives the game away: “it helps persuade this viewer that cinema – or American film – is not a place for artists. It is a world for producers, for showmen, and Schindlers.” Never mind the fuss, the Ten Best lists, the Golden Palms, Golden Lions and Hollywood's own Golden Bowling Trophies. There is a wind – and Thomson has done nothing to dissipate it – that howls that same, tired, stupid phrase, It's only a movie.
1) Much of the expansion, which has become unfortunately necessary for Thomson by now, is actually unwelcome. Surely Thomson would have been pardoned for not giving Ben Affleck a nod.
2) I write this mindful of the case of Charles Thomas Samuels, an academic, but challenging, film critic, who committed suicide in 1974 – partly because “he thought he had 'killed' others in his reviews”(John Simon, “Foreword”, Mastering the Film and Other Essays by Charles Thomas Samuels, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1977, p. ix). Thomson is in a far better position to “kill,” but he obviously derives some satisfaction from it.
3) I found Thomson's panning of La Strada particularly inexplicable, since it was the very film that demonstrated to me, at the age of 13, that film was capable of being an art.
4) James Agee, Agee on Film, Modern Library, New York, 2000.
5) It wasn't until its release on DVD that I had my first opportunity to see Dreyer's wonderful film.
6) Thomson dwells (which is his wont) on the beauty of Dolores Del Rio without even noticing her career in Mexican films – Flor Silvestre (1943), Maria Candelaria (1944), etc.
7) Here Is Your Life (1966), The Emigrants (1971), The Flight of the Eagle (1982), et al.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Style as Meaning (Part I)
While I must admit to having found Jun Ichikawa's 2004 film Tony Takitani strangely beautiful, it is additionally remarkable for having so little that is edifying to say about its characters or the world it glances at - the word explores simply doesn't fit. It moved Stanley Kauffmann to write: "The effect is strange: it makes the director the protagonist of his picture. We cannot be much moved or amused by the leading characters: we are held only by the way the picture is made, thus by the intelligence that created this style. Not many of us, I think, would want to see many films made this way, possibly not one more, but this one is an intriguing glance at the director-as-god, deigning to treat human frailty with imperial sway, assuming that his art justifies this slender material." (8.15.05)
What struck me about the comment was how Kauffmann could have been writing about the entire oeuvre of Robert Bresson. To be fair, I found Ichikawa's film more moving for its use of genuine actors.
What struck me about the comment was how Kauffmann could have been writing about the entire oeuvre of Robert Bresson. To be fair, I found Ichikawa's film more moving for its use of genuine actors.
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