Quotes from Tag Gallagher's a_film_by posts
Tag Gallagher, one of my very favorite writers on film, posted on the Internet discussion group a_film_by for a short while (from August 6th, 2003 to January 6th, 2004). I tried to summarize here some of the great stuff he wrote in his five months stay.
This page does NOT try to represent Tag Gallagher's views and does not claim to include his complete view on film or art or the world. There is a very clear personal bias on my part too since I only picked the stuff "I" found inspiring.
If you'd like to have a grasp of Tag Gallagher's infinite perspective, you can and you should read his wonderful biographies on Roberto Rossellini and John Ford. You should also read every single word there is in his website. Even if you haven't seen the films he talks about, his unique way of looking at everything is bound to inspire you...
Finally, it was his posts on a_film_by and this article of his (one of the best things ever written on film and art) that inspired me to read Benedetto Croce. In his posts, Tag Gallagher recommends Gian N.G. Orsini's "Benedetto Croce" (Southern Illinois Press). I didn't read this but I read "Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic" (Cambridge Edition) and I kept crying while reading because it was the first time somebody was talking about my experience of art with such clarity. The book is available on the web for free but this is not the translation I read so I don't know how good it is. Tag Gallagher always underlines that different translations have different perspectives on Croce and according to him some of them misrepresent Croce’s views.
If you have time to read all the posts he wrote, please do so. It's much better to read them without my selections and also you can see what he's responding to by clicking around. Click here to see a full list of his a_film_by posts.
You can (and I encourage you to) follow the links to the post numbers to find out what he's responding to or read the responses to what he said. > I asked Tag Gallagher's permission before posting this on the web. NOT all the spelling mistakes are his, I noticed there are some due to copy-pasting I did between different programmes.
I apologize for such a long introduction, THIS is where the real thing starts:
Art
Auteurism
Books
Film Criticism
Ford
Genre
Hawks
History of Auteurism
Hollywood & France in 30's
Materialism
Mizoguchi
Negative Criticism
Realism
Rossellini
Sirk
Style
Art
1085
Art is when the cloud dissipates.
1062
The problem is that this sort of thinking assumes that poetry is a sign,
whereas (says Croce) a sign stands for something other than itself,
poetry stands only for itself. It's the uniqueness of the poetic that
attracts us in art; not its location within a nexus of superficial
similarities with "conventions" (also a pseudo-concept, for Croce).
(...)
"Auteurism"
1850
The attention to "auteur" directors has served to bring a lot of
attention to various films that would otherwise have been neglected, and
along with that attention, attention to the writers. Would Hermann
Mankiewicz be so well known if Hathaway had directed Kane? This is not
to denigrate writers, only to point out that, as I said, screenwriters
have profitted from the sun of auteurism. Screenwriters are also
auteurs. No one ever denied this, least of all Truffaut, Ford or me.
(...)
Myself, I think that if a hundred people contributed to a film in ways
that leave trace of their personality, then each of those hundred people
is an auteur. Ford said it was wrong to compare directors to writers,
that it is more appropriate to compare them to architects. But others
directors do it all themselves...
The question isn't if someone is an "auteur." It's whether their
artists and what the peculiar nature of their art is. For me, any great
artist entirely redefines "cinema."
1884
No, it still has not been theorized. There is no definition of
"auteur." Even on this group, it's a free-for-all, and that's the way
it's always been. How can you talk about how "it" is wrong before you
define what "it" is? Every damning critique of "auteurism" I have ever
read has been logically true, because the criticizer has incorporated
the "flaw" is his initial definition. There's not even a sense of an
obligation to go back and read what people wrote in the teens, 20s and 30s.
[Much more on the "20s and 30s" on the History of Auteurism section]
Books
1062
My problem with what you write is that I wish you would not use words
like realism and genre.
I do not think they have meaning.
"Genre" simply does not exist -- other than as an academic conspiracy.
It's an artistic form of racism... Croce damned "genre" as a
"pseudo-concept" (along with a bevy of other cherished academicisms,
like "myth"). You'd be fascinated by this, I think. Try Gian N.G.
Orisni, "Benedetto Croce" (Southern Illinois Press).
1085
Croce is a discrepancy. He's wonderful.
If you want to know more, get hold of the Orsini book. It's well written.
If you want to know more about Croce as a historist, begin with the chapter
in R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History -- which shows up in every used book
store an Oxford paperback, a really great book!
1752
No one has bothered with JVS [Joseph von Sternberg] in a million years,
except in Dietrich's shadow, and in some wonderful passages in Maria Riva's
book, in which a very different man emerges than the one created by the cess
pools of journalism and rumor.
1885
Don't know about Cukor. But Hawks was virtually an independent producer
in the 30s (as were most of our "auteurs," by the way). I don't have
references handy, but if you dig up what was published about the other
names in the 30s, you'll be impressed by it. In Ford's case, the two
most noted ones are: Howard Sharpe, The Star Creators of Hollywood,
Photoplay, October 1936; reprinted in Richard Griffith, ed, *The
Talkies*, Dover 1971. and Emmanuel Eisenberg, in New Theater, April 1936.
5603
[In response to Fred Camper, asking:
"Let's say I wanted to know how an "auteurist" director is generally assessed.
As of the early 80s I would look to Sarris, Roud's two volume book, JPC's
two volume book, and perhaps the St. James Press dictionary of filmmakers.
Are there more current volumes with essays assessing the work of directors?"]
John Wakeman, ed. "World Film Directors" (vol. 1: 1890-1945. vol. 2:
-1985). New York: H.W.Wilson, 1987. Each volume is nearly 1300 pages,
double-columned. Most of the contributors are British but the essays
are often pretty good notwithstandings.
David Thomason: Dictionary of Film [Directors].
JPC & Bertrand Tavernier: 50 ans de Cinéma américaine. (also nearly
1300 pages, double-columned). There's an attractive paper edition,
revised, that sold for 150F a few years ago. (The annoying thing is
that one doesn't know which of the authors wrote which sentences.)
Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du Cinéma: Les Films. Laffont,
paperback. More than 1700 pages, doubled-column. His essays are
auteurist, not just of the separate movies, and he's often quite
interesting. There are probably a dozen Maltin-like books out in French
and Italian, all of them nonchalantly auterist, generally not worth
consulting.
"Film Criticism"
3121
I really think this is a snare and a delusion and that such searches for
objective science have done great harm to cinema studies over the years.
Semiotics, montage-theory, culture theory: all of these have been like
bubonic plagues. The primary reality of cinema studies is the
experience of films. The problem is not to be objective but to be
honestly subjective. If you find a unified theory of human experience,
then you can go on to verbalize a unified theory of human experience of
films. But I don't know how relevant it will be to my experience of
Walsh compared to my experience of, say, Godard. Or of my wife. Art is
about experience of individuals, not of experience of theory. It makes
no sense to speak of "close-ups" in the abstract (or any other
arbitrarily defined film element), because each really true artist
re-invents close-ups in each authentic movie. The problem is to
experience the individual close-ups in the individual movie, and then to
account, honestly, for your experience.
This is the problem. This is the challenge. More than one person in
this group has remarked that it is easy to say what you don't like about
a movie, difficult to say what you do like.
5625
There's a certain type of critic who finds "profound" and
"anti-bourgeois" to be indistinguishable.
3229
Elizabeth, there are no Rules!
There is a terrible past of a hundred years in which bad people tried to
formulate rules, whose effect was merely to stop people from opening
their eyes. (I could go on for a thousand pages giving examples.)
There is no canon. There is no agreement. There are no accepted
definitions or even a vocabulary.
You have to forge out for yourself and discover the movies you love and
then discover your own ways of dealing with them.
(Of course I don't want to discourage you from reading MY writings.
But, seriously, you have to find your own way.)
Ford
1047
In response to your invitation to elaborate, may I quote a long footnote
from my book about John Ford, dealing with Jean-Marie Straub's assertion
(to the fury of Richard Roud, who loathed Ford and adored Straub) that
Ford is more Brechtian than Brecht? This was written in reaction to the
"diammetrically-counter" academics.
Here we go:
When Straub made this remark to the author in 1975 (after seeing
Pilgrimage and Donovan's Reef) he was referring not so much to Ford's
acting styleóin that sense no films are truly Brechtianóas to Ford's
manner of stripping naked social ideologies that are elsewhere
unacknowledged. To Joseph McBride, Straub said Ford is the most
Brechtian offilmmakers, "because he shows things that make people
think...by [making] the audience collaborate on the film" (McBride and
Wilmington, John Ford, p. 108). McBride analyzes Fort Apache in this
light, pointing out how Captain York donning Colonel Thursday's hat at
the end is a Brechtian device [like the cardinal donning the pope's
robes in Brecht's Galileo], and that we see clearly that an insane
system needs the dedication of noble men to perpetuate itself.) Less
simply, one might call Ford Brechtian because every element in his
cinema is engaged diaIectically with every other element (whether one
speaks of elements ofóor betweenóstyle, content, myth, ideology, or
whatever), with the result that Ford's films are self-reflexive and
transparent in their workings.
This notionóessentially the thesis of this bookóflies violently in
the face of a recent critical tendency to regard the ìclassicalî cinema
of Hollywood as a monolithic system that sought to mask its "codes"
(e.g., its montage) in order to create an apparently unmediated
representation of the real world; it sought to entertain passively and
left unacknowledged its own governing ideology. (Cf., Stagecoach: my
argument with Browne ("Spectator-in-the-Text"); also Burch, Distant
Observer; Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye [New York: Oxford,
1983]; Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres [New York: Random House, 1981]).
ìModernistî (i.e., some post-1960) cinema, on the other hand, subverts
our absorption in emotion, story, or character, and exposes its "codes"
(e. g., by showing the camera, discordant editing, having an actor speak
directly to us), in order to force us to relate intellectually rather
than through emotional identification.
In these circles, Straub is admired as epitomizing 'modernist'
cinema, while Ford is often derided (although not by most of the
above-named critics) as a sentimental reactionary. Thus Straub's
comparison of Brecht and Ford caused considerable head-shaking. It is,
of course, generally agreed that many films cater exclusively to an
audience's desire for passive spectacle (e.g.. Star Wars, some of
Hitchcock); and all research shows that audiences generally watch movies
in order not to think. Nonetheless, the fallacies of "modernist"
critics are multitudinous (even including their arrogation of the label
"modern"). Firstly, their premise of a monolithic classical system is a
pure fantasy that reveals little sensibility for the complexity of
pre-1960 cinema and almost no acquaintance with the actual films
themselves. Secondly, they naively assume that audiences can be forced
to think, whereas "modernist" techniques soon lose their initial shock
and audiences happily re-immerse themselves into the fictional worlds of
even the most determinedly antipathetic movies. Thirdly, because their
basis is exclusively materialist, they, like Grierson and Aristarco
before them, distrust emotions and aestheticism and would destroy the
art of cinema in favor of a cinema of political propaganda.
An examination of Brechtís 1930 table, in which he gave cursory
comparison between the (bad) "dramatic" and the (good, Brechtian) "epic"
theaters, will, in the light of Straub and this book, show Ford very
much on the "epic" sideóthe "modernist":
[He posts the chart again in 1048 and it's clearer than the previous one.]
It's a series of oppositions. I have marked the EPIC qualities with *.
DRAMATIC THEATER * EPIC THEATER
plot * narrative
implicates spectator into drama
*makes spectator an observer
wears down his capacity for action
* arouses his capacity for action
provides him with sensations
*forces him to make decisions
provides experience
* provides a picture of the world
involves the spectator *confronts the spectator
suggestion *argument
feelings are preserved
*feelings are propelled into perceptions
man is assumed known *man is the object of inquiry
man unalterable * man alterable and altering
suspense about the outcome
* suspense about the progress
each scene exists for another
* each scene for itself
linear development * in curves
evolutionary determinism *evolutionary leaps
the world, as it is * the world, as it becomes
what man ought to do
*what man is forced to do
man as a fixed point * man as a process
his instincts * his motivations
thought determines being
*social being determines thought
(Brecht did not intend, obviously, that epic theater be absolutely one
way and not at all the other way; it is a question more of tendency.)
1656
The people in Air Mail are so alienated; still I think they manage to be about as
charismatic as one can be while simultaneously being miserable or obnoxious.
2316
I beg your problem, but Ford deserves signalling out because all through
the 1930s and 40s, he was virtually the only Hollywood director who
dealt with the subject. Ford's entire oeuvre is a protest against
intolerance, including of course racism. It is not coincidental than
the result is that people who don't know his work call him racist.
There are, putting it simply, perhaps two types of "protest" film.
Paths of Glory and Fort Apache. The former puts blacks hats on the
villains and makes you feel good by telling you over and over that evil
is evil, and so you emerge from the movie gloating over your own sublime
righteousness. The latter keeps changing the hats, confusing the
issues, showing that good people can be bad people and bad people can be
good people, and gets you involved and angry and gets you thinking.
3358
[In response to Jean-Pierre Coursodon who wrote: "But can you give
me an example of a character who is not subordinated to an idea? Isn't
there always an idea at the start of a character?"]
I think this is what directors aim for in their late movies. Mitry used
to say that Ford's people start out as stereotypes but then surpass the
type. Gets truer as time goes on. In some late Renoir, a constant aim
in Rossellini, von Sternberg, Ophuls...
3608
It occasionally seems to me that space underwent a terrible
deterioration in the 1950s. It eventually became impossible to compose
space in definition with the frame, because there was no way to control
or predict how, in projectio or broadcast, an image would be cropped.
If you study John Ford, one remarkable aspect is how crucially his
internal lines and angles (arguably the most geometrically obsessive
filmmaker ever!) are composed in terms of a definite rectangle. If you
alter that rectangle, terrible and unexpected catastrophes befall his
movies -- disastrous not only when Academy-ratio pictures are cropped,
but equally (or more so) when wider-ratio pictures are not cropped.
16mm print editions of Horse Soldiers and Donovan's Reef (as also of,
say, Sirk's Imitation of Life) didn't just crop off a bit of the sides,
they also added significant amounts of headroom and footroom, which
results, curiously, in a two hour movie sometimes behaving like a three
hour movie, proving the interchangeability of space and time and the
limited dimension thus far of this topic.
"Genre"
1071
(...)
Sorry, you don't follow me. My fault.
I do not feel that certain terms are useful. I feel they do a great
deal of harm and are actually a way of avoiding thinking and discourse.
Why? Because they substitute conventional theory for your own
experience. They block thought.
I understand what is intended by a term like "genre" when it is used
informally. But when it is used in supposedly serious writing, the
result for me is almost always that the writing becomes
incomprehensible. Genre gets raised to the level of a theory; an
abstraction becomes a Platonic idea. Cavell, for example, is not
content to say that he wants to talk about films with themes of
"re-marriage." He maintains again and again that there is an actually
existing Platonic Idea, "Re-Marriage," that he has discovered it, and is
revealing it to us.
And most academics seem to me far worse. There are genre "laws." There
are conventions that are being "defied." Etc., etc., etc. This is all
utter blarney, IMHO.
I think the idea should be for academics (and for all of us) to
communicate our insights and thoughts with the maximum amount of
clarity, grace and beauty. Terms which essentially have no meaning
(like "genre") are not useful. That some people THINK they are useful
(outside of informal conversation, if there) suggests to me the degree
to which "theory" destroys and inhibits experience.
I've been waiting for someone to quote Fritz Lang on theory. Seems to
me he got it right.
[He quotes Lang himself in 1080, below:]
1080
I don't see why it's necessarily reductive. Music is not reductive,
even though it based entirely on physcial sensation and intellectual
analysis of relationships between events (e.g., following a tune).
There is an almost ontological relationship between a perception and
our conceptualization of that perception even extended in time (the
tune). The point is to open ourselves to our sensations. To often
theory aborts us ("fucks" us, said Lang). One of the many pernicious
qualities of genre criticism is that it avoids entirely the individual.
Genre criticism is like an orphan asylum which classifies orphans by
age, sex, weight, etc., and never relates to any of them as an
individual. Genre criticism is an academic conspiracy to run away from
experiencing art. Art is something individual. Unique. It is not a nexus of
conventions and anti-conventions.
Hawks
1079
I'm not suggesting that moviemaking occurs in a vacuum of influences and
reasons! I am sorry if I gave this impression. Emails.
I'm saying that the art of the thing, when there is art, is not
prompted in order to do something just to be different, but rather to do
something to do what one wants to do. Are you saying that the big
reason Hawks made Rio Bravo was to counter High Noon? (He must have had
great faith in the perspicacity of American film criticism.) Are you
saying that he needed Zinnemann for inspiration? Or that the
inspiration for the movie is to show that a hero doesn't go it alone?
If so, arguably Rio Bravo was a response to Sergeant York, with the
same Gary Cooper going it alone and making the High Noon Cooper look
like a pip-squeak, no?
I concede that artists are in a dialogue with a zillion things, and that
Rio Bravo relates to everything that ever happened in the world prior to
its existence, and that artworks personify in some way their
civilization and culture, etc. But I do not think artists do art simply
by "defying" conventions. MTV always seems that way to me: films by
filmmakers who think they're genuine and aren't. The point is to go
your OWN way, not to imitate others in "defiance."
1087
I think that a film is a reponse to, possibly, everything that has gone
in the world prior to its existence. I never said anything to the
contrary. I've written about movies influencing each other all my life!
I simply said that art isn't prompted by a desire to be different but
rather by a desire to be oneself.
1062 [In response to Dan Sallitt who wrote: "Your point about the destabilizing
effect of women on Hawks' men is of course accurate, but I think the male
and female forces in his world are a bit more balanced than that account
suggests. Bogart, Wayne, Grant are disoriented by the women in the films,
but Hawks also gets pleasure from watching them maintain equilibrium,
and in some cases assert dominance."]
When? I mean: okay, maybe they "assert," but do they ever do dominance?
Am I wrong, or don't they all fall down rather frequently?
(...)
Is sanity truly a goal or even a desideratum in Bringing Up Baby, The
Big Sky, Red River ... ?
1074
I'm not sure that people are trying to cling to sanity, but I suspect
that sanity is an illusion in Hawks, and that biology rules all, and
from a male point of view (Hawks's) that's the power of women. Sanity
may be a possibility, but it's irrelevant ultimately.
1730
Hawks's style is probably impossible to convey with just words. I've
been doing criticism of late using Final Cut Pro and using clips and
various analytic methods, and it's possible that way to take a scene
(say, when Bogart meets Bacall in The Big Sleep) and show how the
cutting and framing and shot construction, which first look utterly
banal or just functional, are actually reinforcements of the gestural
play -- the exchanges of glances and looks. It's difficult to talk
about this because, as you say, almost all of our official teaching is
constructed to STOP and PREVENT you from relating to movies as movies.
My suggestion would be to put all of these formulae (damned theory!)
out of your heart and just watch a scene like this over and over, trying
as much as possible to get into empathy and sympathy with the characters
and their feelings. Eventually all will come clear like a sunrise.
History of "Auteurism"
1872
Films like these were studied in the Italian film school in Rome in the
1930s, and histories of film written around them. Vidor was the direct,
acknowledged inspiration for most of so-called "neo-realism"; De Sica
didn't hide his debt to The Crowd for Bicycle Thief. There are whole
"lineages" in Hollywood and between Hollywood and European cinemas where
leading filmmakers are stylistically and auteurishly influencing their
colleagues. DeMille and Chaplin and Lubitsch and von Sternberg were not
obscure names, their styles were not invisible, there was no need for an
Astruc to speak of a camÈra-stylo because people were already DOING it,
and had been egotistically proclaiming themselves for decades.
1880
1) I am not aware of "the approach" either before or after www2. What
is "the approach"?
2) Which approaches do you feel changed? Which approaches do you feel
were not being exercised, even embryonically, at earlier dates?
3) The policies in treating directors were virtually identical in La
Revue du Cinéma in 1930 as in Cahiers du Cinéma 1950s. True, the word
"politique" was seldom used, but it was seldom used in Cahiers in the
1950s either. It has mostly been the privileged domain of those who
write diatribes against what they call, derisively, "auteurism."
Anyhow, my point is that the packaging got updated but the policies
were much the same.
In addition, there was much more cinema worthy of being taken account
of. Keep in mind that most of Europe had been deprived of American
films since the mid or late 30s (with a few exceptions) and that in the
postwar period, about ten years worth of Hollywood productions started
flooding the European markets. This gave people a perspective and quantity.
Also, early movies were marketed in the US as cheap fun for the popular
classes, a kind of virtual reality. In Europe they were marketed as
upscale art for the middle classes, a kind of representation. This
distinction holds today. Fun assumes an authorless product, thus
directors are still not listed in TV Guide or newspapers (or even on
AMC's web site), whereas in Europe it's been automatic since I don't
know when. But in the serious coverage of movies in the US, and in
industry journals, the director was always preceived as the center of
the show -- if that person took command. The distinction was realised
that there were films that were "studio" products and other than were
fundamentally individual. The French in the 50s made a similar
distinction between "auteurs" and "metteurs-en-scène" some of whom
weren't auteurs.
(...)
There is always someone who will deem x superior or inferior to y.
There is seldom a consensus about these things. Part of the reason
Lang got dumped on is that in the 1960s it was Gospel that Hollywood
movies were shit and European movies were personal art; therefore,
Q.E.D., when Lang left Germany and came to Hollywood he left art and
made shit. Same thesis was expounded for years about von Sternberg --
Der blaue Engel versus the tinsel stuff Dietrich did at Paramount.
Ford's work in the late 1930s was deemed superior to his work in the
early 1930s. Lindsay Anderson suggested some of his postwar work was
superior to his prewar work. Cahiers championed Lang's work in the 50s
over his German films. They ignored Ford, pretty much, even panned The
Searchers in two lines; but when 7 Women came along Ford was God.
There's also the problem that you couldn't see pre-Code films in the US
until Turner bought MGM, because the films were either taken out of
circulation entirely or had scenes chopped out. The case of Fox was
different: we're still waiting, which is the difference between Turner
and Murdock, but one employee in the early 70s managed to get a lot of
stuff out of the vaults, and this was the first time in forty years that
anyone had been able to see Ford's 1928-34 pictures. People writing the
official film histories in the 1950s and 1960s had a terrible time,
because it was impossible to see anything.
1884
But you say that you're not familiar with pre-www2 writings, so how can
you make these remarks until you are?
I don't think Cahiers "obsessed" over these details. It was more the
Brits and Americans who've been pulling their hair out. Cahiers never
made any attempt to define what you call "auteurism"; they didn't have
that word. Each critic did his thing. Each of them, if pressed, would
have given you a different definition of "auteur." There was very
little in the way of theorizing. (I'm not convinced that there is a
difference between theory and criticism and bullshit, but to the extent
that theory is abstract, there was little of that, and Bazin is
deceptive, because he didn't realise his words were going to be
subjected to Noel Carroll.)
The difference between criticism that could/couldn't understand the
importance of Hawks was already apparent before Hawks's name was known.
(...)
Cahiers didn't "raise" these issues. They had been on the table for
centuries. The world did not begin in 1950.
1889
They even used the same techniques and vocabularly and critical
"methods" to try to market Rossellini in 1954 as they had for Vidor in
1930. For me Rohmer is the greatest writer on Rossellini, and no one
was writing about Rossellini in 1930, but without those people in 1930
Rohmer would not have written the way he did.
Hollywood & France in 30's
1675
George Arliss's Man Who Played God (if you like Arliss, and I love him!)
and Wellman's So Big. I think Wellman's early 30s pictures are fabulous
and I suspect influenced mid-30s French cinema.
1689
I don't know what it was, perhaps changes at Warners after Zanuck left?
but Wellman's are among the most interesting films 1931-34 (there must
be about 20 titles!) but after that the magic dissipates. Night nurse;
Other men's women; Purchase prise; The conquerors; Midnight Mary; Lilly
Turner; Hatchet Man, etc. I suspect early 30s Hollywood affected 30s
France more intensely than early 50s did the New Wave. Even if we don't
count the massive influence of Chaplin and Vidor, there's Wellman,
Sternberg, LeRoy, Bacon -- or maybe it was Warners; certainly it was
James Cagney (Have you seen Picture Snatcher!? !!!) On one hand,
there's the workingclass orientation of so much of this period, the
feminism, the critiques of religion and government and business (all of
which rudely comes to an end when the banks take over and impose much
much more than that that silly Code). There's also a mixture (amply
present in Chaplin and Vidor) of documentary and fiction (like in Renoir).
Materialism
5636 [In response to Fred Camper who wrote: "I do think it's unmistakable
that Sirk was making some sort of commentary on American materialism."]
How many filmmakers can you name who have not done so? How many French
or Italian or German or Spanish or British filmmakers have not made some
sort of commentary on their national materialsm?
Mizoguchi
1039
Some posts ago, someone questioned my saying Mizoguchi resembles Brecht,
the objection being that Mizo gets us emotionally involved whereas
Brecht alienates us. But this is an Anglo-American corruption of what
Brecht wanted, which was to increase emotional involvement.
One is certainly not less involved with music by being conscious of the
rhythm, the meter, the phrase structures, the harmonic motion, the
contrapuntal lines, which instrument is playing, how the instrumentalist
chooses to phrase and articulate. Quite the contrary, the more we are
consciously aware of these elements, the more we shall become engulfed
in the emotions, in the world, of the music.
So too with movies. Not being aware of cuts is just being oblivious,
cutting oneself off from actual sensual contact with cinema. It's a
denial of pleasure, of experience. It's stupid.
I don't think it's true that things affect us without our being aware of
it. Experiencing art is not like being etherized for an operation. It's
above all a physical and emotional awareness. If you're not intelligent,
you're not aware.
Negative criticism
1704
(...) and yet I feel strongly that negative criticism is not useful: better
someone tell me how to like what I don't like than how not to like what I do
like, and in my experience the reasons why others dislike something I like
are always irrelevant to why I like it, even when true. (...)
"Realism"
1074
And is this the same as "realism" in MÈliËs or Ford? Is Rossellini's
realism the same as De Sica's? Is there anyway to tell what you meant
when you spoke of realism in regard to Hawks? Is realism in cinema when
you have real things in front of the camera? or does it refer to the
sense that there is someone real looking through the camera? Is a film
about an historical event realistic if it convinces people or conveys
some truth, despite having the facts wrong?
Is there not a better way to say what you mean than to use a word whose
meanings shift like desert sands, never to be defined ever, anywhere?
(...)
Croce denies all of this. To repeat: a sign stands for something other
than itself, poetry stands only for itself. I cite this because by
analogy a piece of art, like a genuine person, is not art (or a person)
because of its differences or commonalities, but because of its
uniqueness.
Croce admits signs into prose, which he does not regard as language but
as a degeneration of language into a sign system. "Born as poetry,
language was afterwards twisted to serve as a sign."
(...)
Rossellini
5339
Rossellini wanted to zoom from a single cell to the whole universe...
2902
Don't say such things until you've seen them in decent prints. You've
been lied to and betrayed and deceived all your life by evil people
showing you wretched dupes of dupes of dupes. And the American edition
of OPEN CITY replaces the gorgeous maintitle sequence of the original
completely (but not in England). The technical quality is awesome if
you see a decent print.
A lot of assine American film criticism of "neo-realism" has been based
on the supposedly "authentic" look of wretched dupes.
2916
It is a studio production. All studio shot except the few exteriors
(and inside of a church, maybe a few other shots). Absolutely
traditional in its production methods. Fully scripted, argued, etc.
Amidei was one of the great champions of the "well-made play" among
scriptwrights. Highly experienced actors, mostly from vaudeville, top
stars; chosen parly because they were "bankable." And you're sure right
about Arata. Rossillini liked cameramen who PAINTED (kind of a
Vidor/Murnau look). Extremely professional, experienced bunch of
people, a good percentage of the best talent of the Fascist cinema. The
stock grain looks fine if you can see an actual original print. They
had a lot of trouble when they started shooting, but they seem to have
re-shot a lot of that later.
5260 [About Rossellini's "The Chicken" in "Siamo Donne"]
I hadn't heard it's a true story but it's a real gem of a movie.
Should be mandatory watching for film students - what you can do with
no resources except a camera and your own home. It's in English, by
the way, 17 minutes.
5526
...I'm not sure what Dan means by "the Franciscan spirit." Rossellini
seems to focus on humanism: there's not much specifically religious in
this movie (compared with Voyage in Italy or Stromboli). And I don't
know how much it has to do with any actual Franciscanism, then or now.
I can tell you that Rossellini, speaking of it, said three things. One
that Franciscanism so the birth of a new type of love, unerotic. Two
that Rossellini was "always in favor of the fools," the crazy people,
because without them there's stagnation. Third, at Yale Rossellini
said he wanted to show that "from a very humble position you can face
everything and you can revise the whole conception of the universe."
For me, this is the main theme of all of his movies.
Sirk
5641
...Sirk himself was born in Germany of German parents. He was so
alienated by the course of Germany that he stopped speaking German and
let people (like Halliday) think he was Danish. He had left his German
wife and married a Jewish woman; the first wife kept the son, raised him
as a Hitler Youth and got the courts to bar Sirk from seeing him (even
when the son, a child moviestar, was working on neighboring sets). Sirk
stayed in Germany until 1937 in an effort to rescue his son (for which
reason he was for decades condemned as a Nazi sympathizer). There's no
doubt he found considerable comfort in America and was grateful for
this. After the war, he went back to Germany, hated the place, and
tried to find out what had happened to his son -- who had been sent to
the Russian front. His movie, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, is an
autobiographical projection of this lost son.
Style
1076
(1) cuts need to be experienced physically, not just intellectually.
(2) "I may or may not be thinking about his editing strategies": In most
moviemakers whom I find interesting, such "strategies" cannot be
separated from the physical impact of the cut: e.g., how one camera
angle relates to another; how space is thus constructed. These matters
are amazingly neglected in most film analyses.
(3) No, there are no absolute "meanings" for things. But interesting
moviemakers create "rules" within the context of a single movie (or
oeuvre). Thus while "cinema" can never be defined as a whole (or an
abstraction), cinema necessarily gets defined in any great movie -- but
only for that movie. Ditto techniques.
Art
Auteurism
Books
Film Criticism
Ford
Genre
Hawks
History of Auteurism
Hollywood & France in 30's
Materialism
Mizoguchi
Negative Criticism
Realism
Rossellini
Sirk
Style
Comments