Cahiers du Cinema's best of 2001
Paul Gallagher
1) Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
2) L'Anglaise et le duc (The Lady and the Duke) (Rohmer)
3) Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
4) Time and Tide (Tsui Hark)
5) Je rentre a la maison (I'm Going Home) (Oliveira)
6) Platform (Jia Zhang-ke)
Sauvage innocence (Wild Innocence) (Garrel)
8) Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures (Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4pm) (Lanzmann)
9) The Son's Room (Moretti)
10) R-Xmas (Ferrara)
Readers' top 10:
1) Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
2) The Son's Room (Moretti)
3) Va savoir (Rivette)
Millennium Mambo (Hou hsiao-hsien)
5) Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis)
6) L'anglaise et le duc (Rohmer)
7) Eloge de l'amour (In Praise of Love) (Godard)
8) Sous le sable (Under the Sand) (Ozon)
9) What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang)
10) Ghost of Mars (Carpenter)
----
Paul
Felix Tiaka
> 4) Time and Tide (Tsui Hark)
> Readers' top 10:
> 10) Ghost of Mars (Carpenter)
Am I the only one that thinks that these choices are completely insane?
American and Hong Kong action films are considered art? This reminds me of
Assays' Irma Vep, where Maggie Cheung's interviewer inserts his own views on
current state of cinema. "No one wants to see people talk, it's boring... HK
film is done best by John Woo, his action choreography with guns is like
ballet" or something like that.
Mike and Dorcie
Felix, what's up?
Some movies on the list surprised me as well. "Ghost of Mars" just makes me
laugh.
Dorcie
Reagen Sulewski
news:a387el$15tu9n$1...@ID-51106.news.dfncis.de:
Ordinarily, but not from the people that put Space Cowboys in their top 10
last year.
Jeff McCloud
> > Critics' top 10:
> > 4) Time and Tide (Tsui Hark)
>
> > Readers' top 10:
> > 10) Ghost of Mars (Carpenter)
>
> Am I the only one that thinks that these choices are completely insane?
> American and Hong Kong action films are considered art?
You are probably not the only one who thinks these choices are insane.
I, however, have no problem with these choices. Your dismissal of
"action" films as something less than "art" is rather snobbish, if I
may say so. I consider TIME AND TIDE to be one the ten best films of
the year--its use of color, movement, and cinematic space are
phenomenal. Plus, it has a scene where a woman gives birth during a
gun fight. As for the Carpenter film, I admire it quite a bit as well.
It is obviously no THING or ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK or ASSAULT ON THE
PRECINCT, but it still works itself through in interesting ways
(flashback structure, matriarchal society as the rule, a drug addict
hero, etc.). Natasha Henstridge gives a terrific performance in this
one--on par with Sigourney Weaver in ALIENS in my humble opinion.
MARS is obviously an auterist item for the French, so it is no
surprise that some readers of CAHIERS would dig it.
I am glad that the French dudes did manage to get Abel Ferrara on
their list. Now if some distributor will get its act together, North
Americans could see R'XMAS.
Jeff McCloud
Denise Perry
This is where it's at!
http://www.will.uiuc.edu/WILL_Contents/WILL/news/livewill.ram
Jeff McCloud
Sure they did, but those other films are better. I mean POOTIE TANG
is better than MEMENTO. Really.
Jeff McCloud
QueenMag
Memento was very good (and I seriously doubt Pootie Tang is better than it),
but didn't endear itself to me. I haven't seen most of the films on these
lists - maybe only a couple were even released in my city - so I don't know
how they measure up. I was surprised to see Ghost of Mars at No. 10, though.
Was it popular in France? Who knew.
Year-end Top Ten lists can be helpful in directing a person to what might be
better films, but they say more about the critic than anything else.
-qm
"Denise Perry" <dpe...@uiuc.edu> wrote in message
news:3c585228....@news.cso.uiuc.edu...
Paul Gallagher
>may say so. I consider TIME AND TIDE to be one the ten best films of
>the year--its use of color, movement, and cinematic space are
>phenomenal. Plus, it has a scene where a woman gives birth during a
>gun fight.
I thought _Time and Tide_ was great. I'm surprised it didn't get
a single vote in the Village Voice poll for the best of 2001,
since it seemed like Tsui Hark's year. _Time and Tide_ got a wide
release and was his first film to open in NYC out of Chinatown. There was
a popular Tsui Hark retrospective in New York this summer, and a successful
revival of _Once Upon a Time in China I and II_.
Paul
Man...An Ancient Race
p...@panix.com (Paul Gallagher) wrote in message news:<a3862d$e72$1...@panix3.panix.com>...
Paul Gallagher
>hero, etc.). Natasha Henstridge gives a terrific performance in this
>one--on par with Sigourney Weaver in ALIENS in my humble opinion.
>MARS is obviously an auterist item for the French, so it is no
>surprise that some readers of CAHIERS would dig it.
Stephane Delorme had an interesting take on _Ghosts of Mars_. He
pointed out that it is a kind of response to Carpenter's _Vampires_.
_Vampires_ showed a band of macho men in effect at war with women:
the master vampire is effeminate and the only roles for women are
as prostitutes or vampires. _Ghosts of Mars_ shows a society dominated
by women, where the lead women are powerful and the men are ridiculous
or ineffectual. Delorme thinks sexual relationships are shown as
impossible: the characters' only joy is getting high alone, the two
sexual characters, Pam Grier and Jason Stanks tham, both disappear. A key
scene shows Natasha Henstridge briefly succumbing to Statham and
immediately afterwards being possessed by a phantom -- the possession is
shown as pleasurable and sexual, but Henstridge resists it. Delorme
thinks this points to the heart of Carpenter's films: the highest human
relationship isn't love or sex but friendship; its object isn't the
couple or the family but the group and in particular alliances. _Ghosts
of Mars_ is a departure for Carpenter because it ultimately depends
on friendship between a man and a woman.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>is cahiers du cinema a mainstream mag or buff rag?
It's something like Film Comment or Sight and Sound.
Paul
John Harkness
Well, yeah, sort of....
Film Comment and Sight And Sound do sort of recognize the existence of
a mainstream audience. Cahiers is a little strange, even for France.
(Put it this way -- it Film Comment puts a Farrelly Bros movie on the
cover, it's because they recognize the value of pop culture. If
Cahiers puts a Farrelly Bros movie on the cover, it's to demonstrate
that Americans don't understand the genius of the Farrelly Bros.
John Harkness
Paul Gallagher
>What? Did these people not see Memento in 2001?
Cahiers' editor, Charles Tesson, definitely disliked Memento, and thought
the concept behind it was a bad idea to begin with. However, Memento
was generally praised in France as it was in the US.
http://www.allocine.fr/film is a good site for finding out how French
critics and audiences reacted to a film.
Paul
Felix Tiaka
> >the year--its use of color, movement, and cinematic space are
> >phenomenal. Plus, it has a scene where a woman gives birth during a
> >gun fight.
>
> I thought _Time and Tide_ was great. I'm surprised it didn't get
> a single vote in the Village Voice poll for the best of 2001,
> since it seemed like Tsui Hark's year. _Time and Tide_ got a wide
> release and was his first film to open in NYC out of Chinatown. There was
> a popular Tsui Hark retrospective in New York this summer, and a
successful
> revival of _Once Upon a Time in China I and II_.
Ooops, I completely forgot about my post here.
To jeff, I'm not snobbish, and I've enjoyed time and tide as well as many
other tsui hark films. I love action films, martial arts and particularly
those that mix both. My point is that I don't think it was top ten, and
further on how come no one really says anything about the banality of some
of the choices on the Cahiers lists. Last year they had "ItmfL" below
"Mission to Mars".
Felix Tiaka
>
> Cahiers' editor, Charles Tesson, definitely disliked Memento, and thought
> the concept behind it was a bad idea to begin with. However, Memento
> was generally praised in France as it was in the US.
Did anyone see the following? very much like memento, it's smart and clever,
but not much else. I really couldn't watch Memento again.
septimus
I haven't seen that (but I sure will; I can seldom resist
watching Alien-knockoffs). However, I cannot help but
think Cahier's rationale for including this is mostly
auteurist, too. Take one of my guilty pleasures of
recent years, _Pitch Black_. It is somewhat cliched and has
major plot holes. But it is well crafted, it has enough
stuff on gender, race, religion, etc., for any academic
type to write 5 theses on; did it get on Cahier's top
ten list? I don't know but I seriously doubt it. And
judging from the few reviews of _GoM_ I've seen, I doubt
it is half as good as _Pitch Black_. This claim
that Cahier put actioners and art flicks on the same
playing field strikes me as fake, more a pretense than
a reality.
Paul Gallagher
>>Stephane Delorme had an interesting take on _Ghosts of Mars_...
>I haven't seen that (but I sure will; I can seldom resist
>watching Alien-knockoffs).
It's more of an _Assault on Precinct 13_ knockoff than an _Alien_
knockoff. Or _Rio Bravo_ with Natasha Henstridge playing a combination
of Angie Dickinson, Ricky Nelson, and Dean Martin...
However, I cannot help but
>think Cahier's rationale for including this is mostly
>auteurist, too. Take one of my guilty pleasures of
>recent years, _Pitch Black_. It is somewhat cliched and has
>major plot holes. But it is well crafted, it has enough
>stuff on gender, race, religion, etc., for any academic
>type to write 5 theses on; did it get on Cahier's top
>ten list? I don't know but I seriously doubt it. And
>judging from the few reviews of _GoM_ I've seen, I doubt
>it is half as good as _Pitch Black_.
I haven't seen the issue of Cahiers that reviewed _Pitch Black_.
_Pitch Black_ and _Ghosts of Mars_ have fairly similar stories,
but they're very different movies. They certainly look different:
_Pitch Black_ has lots of hand-held camera work and quick cutting,
which I didn't care for; Carpenter is an old-fashioned classical
filmmaker. _Ghosts of Mars_ is more of an action adventure film
than a horror film. I thought the "bat-lizards" in _Pitch Black_ were
much scarier than the phantoms in _Ghost of Mars_. I didn't
really get the point of the gender, race, and religion stuff
in _Pitch Black_, but I may be missing something.
Incidentally, one of the screenwriters of _Pitch Black_ wrote
on misc.writing.screenplays that their original idea was to have
the alien threat be ghosts of ancient warriors:
Twohy did considerable rewriting, but the film is still very
close to the final draft we wrote. We did *start out* with
the ghosts of ancient alien warriors, but they'd become the
hungry hibernating underground creatures that were in the film
by the time we were done...
The biggest change was that the "Riddick" character in our
version was a woman. Twohy has said that he didn't think a
woman could be threatening enough. Maybe not. Would've been
interesting to see.
Paul
QueenMag
news:a3jgtm$10q$1...@panix3.panix.com...
> Incidentally, one of the screenwriters of _Pitch Black_ wrote
> on misc.writing.screenplays that their original idea was to have
> the alien threat be ghosts of ancient warriors:
....
> The biggest change was that the "Riddick" character in our
> version was a woman. Twohy has said that he didn't think a
> woman could be threatening enough. Maybe not. Would've been
> interesting to see.
I'll say! Especially considering the interaction/tension between Riddick and
Fry in the final version. The film is a guilty pleasure of mine (I own it),
but listening to David Twohy in the DVD commentary really made me question
whether the film is making any statements. I really liked the character of
Fry, as well as the ending and general theme of redemption, but Twohy
sounded like he was half-asleep on the audiotrack and didn't provide much
insight into the ideas behind the film. I was left with the impression that
he set out to .... uhh, make an action thriller? And that's about it.
-QM
Paul Gallagher
of 2001 lists appear. There are several interesting articles. There is
a letter to the editor concerning "Ghosts of Mars," praising Carpenter's
mastery and regretting that "Ghosts of Mars" was a critical and commercial
failure not only in the US, but also in France. There's an article about
Chang Cheh -- people who think it's insane to call "Time and Tide" art
will have an even harder time with praise for "One Armed Swordsman." There
are retrospective articles on Sternberg and Skolimowski. There is an
interview with Sonic Youth, which is scoring Oliver Assayas' new film,
"Demonlover," and an interview with the Kirghiz filmmaker, Aktan Abdykalykov.
There is an article in praise of David Letterman. There are articles about
Tavernier's new film, "Laissez-passer," about the French cinema under
the Occupation: it depicts the Occupation as the golden age of French
film, and in particular praises the apprentice system that the New Wave
swept away, which leads Charles Tesson to conclude that Tavernier, who
has long been anti-New Wave, is claiming the New Wave did more harm to
the French cinema than the Germans during the Occupation.
Particularly interesting is an article reporting that Antonioni has completed
filming on his latest film, "Eros." It will be a film in three parts on
erotic themes. The directors of the other two parts are Pedro Almodovar and
Wong Kar-wai. Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan were also asked to direct,
but they declined. Although he is partially paralyzed, Antonioni is said
to be fully able to direct.
The article doesn't mention Antonioni's project based on Jack Finney's story,
"Destination: Verna." There were press reports about planning for
the film, which was to have starred Sophia Loren and Naomi Campbell, but
filming was postponed because of Antonioni's health. I assume the film
won't be made.
Since Wong Kar-wai is taking so long to finish "2046," it's surprising
that he took on yet another project.
Paul
septimus
>
> I finally got the January issue of Cahiers du Cinema, in which the best
> of 2001 lists appear. There are several interesting articles. There is
> a letter to the editor concerning "Ghosts of Mars," praising Carpenter's
> mastery and regretting that "Ghosts of Mars" was a critical and commercial
> failure not only in the US, but also in France. There's an article about
> Chang Cheh -- people who think it's insane to call "Time and Tide" art
> will have an even harder time with praise for "One Armed Swordsman."
I do suspect they try too hard to manufacture their own Hitchcock. But
I haven't seen _Ghost of Mars_. There is nothing in the world that
would
make me watch _Time and Tide_, but instead of my usual tiresome attacks
on
Tsui Hark, maybe I should commend his newfound internationalist
perspective
(an improvement on his xenophobic tendencies in his early days). I wish
more artist/populist/whatever you call them in China and Hong Kong do
their share to diffuse this poisonous xenophobic nationalism being
propagated in communist China.
>
> Particularly interesting is an article reporting that Antonioni has completed
> filming on his latest film, "Eros." It will be a film in three parts on
> erotic themes. The directors of the other two parts are Pedro Almodovar and
> Wong Kar-wai. Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan were also asked to direct,
> but they declined. Although he is partially paralyzed, Antonioni is said
> to be fully able to direct.
Never heard of this before. I hope it is better than _Beyond the
Clouds_!
(But the last segment starring guess-who is such a change of pace it is
absolutely the best thing about the film, according to me anyway.)
>
> Since Wong Kar-wai is taking so long to finish "2046," it's surprising
> that he took on yet another project.
>
Last I heard he is yanking the pretty boy Japanese pop idol and redoing
that part of the film. I have strong misgiving about _2046_ from the
start, but it will definitely surprise me one way or another!
Paul Gallagher
>I do suspect they try too hard to manufacture their own Hitchcock. But
>I haven't seen _Ghost of Mars_. There is nothing in the world that would
>make me watch _Time and Tide_, but instead of my usual tiresome attacks on
>Tsui Hark, maybe I should commend his newfound internationalist perspective
>(an improvement on his xenophobic tendencies in his early days).
I don't think "Ghosts of Mars" is a great film, but Robert Horton's comment
sounds right: "there is more lucid storytelling here than in almost
any other Hollywood picture of the year."
I didn't know what you thought about Tsui Hark. I'd welcome your perspective.
I'll look in google.com for your old posts. Oliver Assayas and "Irma
Vep" came up earlier in this thread. He very much admires King Hu, but
my understanding is that he doesn't care for most of the popular Hong
Kong cinema of the past twenty years, and doesn't like John Woo's work.
I don't know his specific reasons, however.
>Never heard of this before. I hope it is better than _Beyond the
>Clouds_!
>(But the last segment starring guess-who is such a change of pace it is
>absolutely the best thing about the film, according to me anyway.)
>
I agree that the segment with Irene Jacob is by far the best. I don't
think the other segments work dramatically. But there are beautiful
images and beautifully choreographed scenes throughout. It's probably
generally true of Antonioni that the images and the narrative are
relatively independent, but in "Beyond the Clouds" it's odd how
the narrative is almost deadweight.
Paul
NMacphe421
>Oliver Assayas and "Irma
>Vep" came up earlier in this thread. He very much admires King Hu, but
>my understanding is that he doesn't care for most of the popular Hong
>Kong cinema of the past twenty years, and doesn't like John Woo's work.
>I don't know his specific reasons, however.
>
From an interview I read with Assayas I got the impression that he likes Hong
Kong movies in general and takes some credit for their popularity in the West
via his work as a film critic; what he doesn't like is the reverse snobbery of
too many film fans who place HK filmmakers on a higher level that Fellini,
Bergman, etc. He didn't mention Woo specifically but he didn't seem too
enthused with the Americanization of Chinese culture evident in the
ultra-violent HK movies. .
septimus
> I didn't know what you thought about Tsui Hark. I'd welcome your perspective.
> I'll look in google.com for your old posts.
Please don't! My posts are not meant to be archived ...
>Oliver Assayas and "Irma
> Vep" came up earlier in this thread. He very much admires King Hu, but
> my understanding is that he doesn't care for most of the popular Hong
> Kong cinema of the past twenty years, and doesn't like John Woo's work.
> I don't know his specific reasons, however.
>
I like _A better tomorrow_ but the rest of Woo's work I find grotesque.
Actually MI:2 seems much more restraint and well-directed than _Hard
Boil_ and ABT2. Anyway, I am much more intrigued by the reasons of
the other critics who *like* Tsui Hark. (Reasons other than fight
choreography, which I am never interested in anyway.)
> I agree that the segment with Irene Jacob is by far the best. I don't
> think the other segments work dramatically. But there are beautiful
> images and beautifully choreographed scenes throughout. It's probably
> generally true of Antonioni that the images and the narrative are
> relatively independent, but in "Beyond the Clouds" it's odd how
> the narrative is almost deadweight.
_The Mystery of Oberwald_ (or whatever) is horribly flat too, I
thought. I like _La Notte_ and _L'Avventura_; maybe I suffer from
not seeing his work on the big screen. I hated the long takes
in _The Eclipse_ (my first Antonioni, which I did see in the
theater); given that, it's not likely I'd be crazy about
Tsai Ming-Liang.
Paul Gallagher
>From an interview I read with Assayas I got the impression that he likes Hong
>Kong movies in general and takes some credit for their popularity in the West
>via his work as a film critic; what he doesn't like is the reverse snobbery of
>too many film fans who place HK filmmakers on a higher level that Fellini,
>Bergman, etc. He didn't mention Woo specifically but he didn't seem too
>enthused with the Americanization of Chinese culture evident in the
>ultra-violent HK movies. .
I searched online and found an interview Assayas did with Steve Erickson
(who used to post on rec.arts.movies.)
SE: Are there a lot of people in France who have the same opinions as
the "journalist who loves John Woo" (Antoine Basler) who interviews
Maggie Cheung?
OA: Absolutely! He definitely represents a current in French filmmaking.
There are many people who believe the truth of today's cinema can
only be found in American and Hong Kong cinema, and that films
which don't directly depict violence are weak and out of synch
with the times. The things the journalist is saying are taken
almost word-for-word from things I've heard Matthieu Kassovitz say.
I think a lot of Hong Kong films are aesthetically interesting,
but they're successful with American audiences for all the wrong
reasons. John Woo is a really interesting filmmaker and very strong
visually, but the kind of recognition someone like him gets
says a lot about the degree of abstraction that both American movies
and audiences have gotten into.
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Village/4736/article6.html
Kassovitz directed "Hate" and is currently starring in "Amelie." Jan
Kounen ("Dobermann") and Luc Besson are similar directors. He represents
a very different point of view from Cahiers.
It would be interesting to compare the different points of view.
I mentioned Tavernier in a previous post. People like Tavernier
and Michel Ciment of "Positif" are especially critical of Cahiers and
the New Wave; so is Kassovitz; so are many people on r.a.m.past-films,
but for somewhat different reasons. For example, Tavernier and Kassovitz
might agree that "la nouvelle vague" is the major reason there is no
European film industry comparable to Hollywood. But Tavernier looks back
to the "cinema of quality" as a model, while Kassovitz looks to commercial
Hollywood and Hong Kong.
"Dobermann" might be a good example. Its attitude to Cahiers is very
much like Tom Sutpen's: in it -- pardon my French -- a guy "se torchait le
cul" with a copy of Cahiers. I get the sense Kounen learned the wrong lessons
from Hong Kong and the US: the violence is ugly and tiresome. But I'm
not sure on what grounds I prefer John Woo's gratuitous violence to
Kounen's. Is it mostly just formal excellence?
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>from Hong Kong and the US: the violence is ugly and tiresome. But I'm
>not sure on what grounds I prefer John Woo's gratuitous violence to
>Kounen's. Is it mostly just formal excellence?
>Paul
There have been some interesting discussions on fr.rec.cinema.discussion
about these topics. Here is a comment by axys:
When [Kounen] claims kinship with the great Sam [Peckinpah], I laugh!
"The Wild Bunch," for example, is the opposite of "Dobermann." It's
an unfashionable film, despairing, a twilight film on the end of an
era, on old age, death, lost illusions... nothing to do with the
"wild fun" of Kounen. With Peckinpah, the fact of killing is not fun.
axys elsewhere wrote:
Maybe I'm alone on this, but I don't feel the violence in Woo is
particularly fun... I do not think that Woo conceives of the violence
he stages as fun: the climaxes of the films of this director are
dark, tense, dramatic, even tragic. It's completely the opposite of
the "fun" violence that is distanced and ironic. It is precisely this
very juvenile, very naive side characteristic of Hong Kong cinema
that repulses some people and sometimes leads to involuntary laughter.
Pleasure -- I do not like that word, except when it is a film by
Ophuls -- but yes, what one feels when watching "choreography" like
Woo's, you see what I mean, is for me a matter of purely aesthetic
concern, even technical... I don't feel any sadistic jubilation.
Drool doesn't come to my lips (I know you'll say I drool anyway,
but it's not of my own free will).
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>_The Mystery of Oberwald_ (or whatever) is horribly flat too, I
>thought. I like _La Notte_ and _L'Avventura_; maybe I suffer from
>not seeing his work on the big screen. I hated the long takes
>in _The Eclipse_ (my first Antonioni, which I did see in the
> theater); given that, it's not likely I'd be crazy about
>Tsai Ming-Liang.
"The Eclipse" is a film that really divides people. I've read there
was a big backlash against Antonioni back in 1962, both in the US
and Europe. Some people love "The Eclipse." It's Jonathan Rosenbaum's
choice for Antonioni's masterpiece. It's the favorite film of someone
I know (he owns the newsstand on Hudson St. and N. Moore if you care
to go discuss Antonioni...)
I saw it in the theater in the 1980's, but I barely remember it
apart from the stock exchange scene. Andrew Sarris and the Cahiers du
Cinema critics didn't like it much when it came out, although both Sarris
and Cahiers later praised "The Red Desert," which is my favorite Antonioni
film. (By the way "Red Desert" was released the same day I was born;
Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" and "Gilligan's Island"
also premiered on that day. And in fact I do identify with both Monica
Vitti's Giuliana and Gilligan.)
The situation at Cahiers was complicated because Roberto Rossellini,
who was something like a father figure to them, disliked Antonioni.
Godard was likely thinking of "L'Eclisse" when he wrote:
The film ["Vivre Sa Vie"] was an intellectual adventure: I wanted to try
to film a thought in action--but how do you do it? We still don't know.
In any case, something is revealed. This is why Antonioni's cinema of
non-communication isn't mine. Rossellini told me that I almost fell into the
Antonioni error, but just escaped. I believe sincerity is sufficient
when one has this kind of problem. I think it is wrong to say that the
more you look at someone the less you understand. Obviously, though, if
you look too much you inevitably end by wondering what the point is. If
you look at a wall for ten hours on end, you begin to ask questions about
the wall, and yet it's just a wall. You create useless problems. This, too,
is why the film is a series of sketches: one must let people live their
live, not look too long at them, otherwise one ends by no longer
understanding anything.
The screenwriter, Jean Gruault, described the incident with Rossellini
to Tag Gallagher:
He came out furious [from Vivre sa Vie] and dragged me aside to ball me
out for having made him waste his time," recounts Gruault. "Next day
we saw each other again, Jean-Luc and I, at The Raphael. Jean-Luc was
to drive Roberto to Orly and I was to pay his hotel bill... On the way
to the airport, he maintained a silence heavy with menace. Suddenly
he barked, in a voice prophetically low-pitched, like Cassandra
announcing the fall of Troy or Isaiah threatening an impious people
with the greatest evils: 'Jean-Luc, tu es au bord de l'antonionisme!'
[Jean-Luc, you are bordering on Antonioni-ism!'] The insult was such
that poor Godard lost control of the car for a second and nearly made
us join the scenery.
Godard's comment about "if you look at a wall for ten hours on end"
reminds me of Antonioni's "Chung Kuo," in which there are several
protracted shots of walls. Antonioni's camera would frequently dwell
on writing on walls or pillars, but the writing would be left
untranslated.
Paul
septimus
>
> In <a43d08$h70$1...@panix2.panix.com> p...@panix.com (Paul Gallagher) writes:
>
> >from Hong Kong and the US: the violence is ugly and tiresome. But I'm
> >not sure on what grounds I prefer John Woo's gratuitous violence to
> >Kounen's. Is it mostly just formal excellence?
>
> >Paul
> axys elsewhere wrote:
> Maybe I'm alone on this, but I don't feel the violence in Woo is
> particularly fun... I do not think that Woo conceives of the violence
> he stages as fun: the climaxes of the films of this director are
> dark, tense, dramatic, even tragic. It's completely the opposite of
> the "fun" violence that is distanced and ironic. It is precisely this
> very juvenile, very naive side characteristic of Hong Kong cinema
> that repulses some people and sometimes leads to involuntary laughter.
> Pleasure -- I do not like that word, except when it is a film by
> Ophuls -- but yes, what one feels when watching "choreography" like
> Woo's, you see what I mean, is for me a matter of purely aesthetic
> concern, even technical... I don't feel any sadistic jubilation.
> Drool doesn't come to my lips (I know you'll say I drool anyway,
> but it's not of my own free will).
>
I confess to admiring the choreography in MI:2. The Iberian touches
are consistent and carried through to the end, right down to the
matador-like motor-bike duel. _A Better Tomorrow_ (notwithstanding
its terrible soundtrack) is a very good film. I like it more than
_Godfather_ itself, which may be going a little too far, but it is
a tremendously heartfelt work. It is a film about come-backs, and
I'm sure most of you have heard the story behind it. Woo was
reduced to accepting Church handouts. (He was Catholic by the way,
Ian Mcdowell and others used to have a lot to say about his religion
and his aethestics in other newsgroups.) Ti Lung, one of the stars,
was once the martial art movie idol but had fallen on hard times. The
great Chow Yun-Fat, without question one of the best Chinese actors
of his generation, never had any luck with box offices. And then
they came together and made this really passionate film about
loyalty, betray, and "taking back what is yours." It was a smashing
success. I didn't even
think of the film as particularly violent (except at the end);
it is the *threat* of violence in every scene that gives the film
such power and tension. It comes in waves, the violence: you
take a beating, then you get right back up and take your
swing; the whole thing has such a beautiful rhythm to it. There
is not much of the sentimental glorification of victimhood and
over-wrought justification of revenge that plague so many HK
action films. (Chow's character is certainly not a saint.) And such
acting and thoughtful characterizations too, which are constructed
to maximize conflict and drama. Ti Lung represents old China, all
that stuff about family and brotherhood. Chow's Mark Lee is high on
"brotherly" loyalty too, but he is also the loner, the consummate,
disconnected modern man who
lives by a gangster's code so stark it is almost abstract. Chow
gave perhaps the performance of his career (it is certainly his
most intense ever); his work, and the film, swept the Hong
Kong academy awards and deserve every one of those prizes.
I disagree with "axys elsewhere." In ABT2 there is this comic
relief character during the bloodiest of the fights; there can
be no doubt his scenes are played for laughs. (That's the
Tsang Kong (sp) character, who was the ex-con that tried
to keep Ti Lung away from gangsters in the first film; what a
sad caricature of that dignified character in the sequel.)
_Hard Boiled_ is so over the top I'd think Woo has to be out
of his mind to believe he is being serious. I wish I can say
the slaughter of the patients in the hospital juxtaposed with
the rescue of the babies is an autocritique of the film's
violence, but alas I think Woo was only trying to be manipulative
and crude. (Chow telling one of the babies smoking is bad
for his/her health is certainly meant as a joke.)
In short, when it comes to John Woo, I think there is ABT
and there are the rest. The first one is a labor of love.
I haven't seen _Bullet in the Head_ but I have a really low
opinion of the rest of his output.
septimus
>
Again, this makes for the most fascinating reading.
I've been on Rosenbaum's case a lot lately. His
failure to mention the Irene Jacob segment in
_Beyond the Clouds_ in his review -- when lot of people,
including
you and Cheshire, single that story out for praise
-- certainly doesn't endear him to the Jacob international
fan club. For that matter, his praising Antonioni
films for their existentism and neglecting to
mention Terrence Malick's philosophical pedigree
the very next week when he was writing about TTRL
didn't help, either. Like I said, I was tough
on Rosenbaum lately. But anyway, I'd really be
interested in why he thinks _The Eclipse_ is
a masterpiece. I guess I'll go hunt down one
of his older books when I have a chance then.
Paul Gallagher
>But anyway, I'd really be
>interested in why he thinks _The Eclipse_ is
>a masterpiece. I guess I'll go hunt down one
>of his older books when I have a chance then.
He writes about "The Eclipse" in "Placing Movies." He mentions how the
US critics who had supported "L'Avventura" -- Dwight MacDonald, John
Simon, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris -- all turned against "The
Eclipse." Rosenbaum continues:
In the final scene Of ECLIPSE (1962)--my favorite Antonioni feature,
and the one that concludes the loose trilogy started by L'AVVENTURA
and LA NOTTE-- a lingering over an urban street corner while night
begins to fall, effected through montage rather than an extended take,
becomes one of the most terrifying poems in modern cinema simply through
its complex poetry of absence. The lead couple in this film, played by
Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, have previously planned to meet at this
corner, in front of a building site. (Another building site figures in
the opening sequence of L'AVVENTURA.) The unexplained fact that neither
character shows up is perturbing, but because their affair has been
more frivolous than serious, it hardly accounts to the overall feeling
of desolation and even terror in this sequence.
It's almost as if Antonioni has extracted the essence of the everyday
street life that serves as background throughout the picture, and
once we're presented with this essence in its undiluted form, it
suddenly threatens and comresses us. The implication here (and in
every Antonioni narrative) is that behind every story there's a place
and an absence, a mystery and a profound uncertainty, waiting like a
vampire at every moment to emerge and take over, to stop the story
dead in its tracks. And if we combine this place and absence,
this mystery and uncertainty into a single, irreducible entity, what
we have is the modern world itself--the place where all of us live,
and which most stories are designed to protect us from.
I think this is an insightful description of Antonioni's films, which
involve constantly searching for the meaning behind appearances --
meaning which is revealed in seemingly insignificant details and empty
spaces.
Paul
monterone
>
> The situation at Cahiers was complicated because Roberto Rossellini,
> who was something like a father figure to them, disliked Antonioni.
> Godard was likely thinking of "L'Eclisse" when he wrote:
> The film ["Vivre Sa Vie"] was an intellectual adventure: I wanted to try
> to film a thought in action--but how do you do it? We still don't know.
> In any case, something is revealed. This is why Antonioni's cinema of
> non-communication isn't mine. Rossellini told me that I almost fell into the
> Antonioni error, but just escaped.
> to Tag Gallagher:
> Suddenly
> he barked, in a voice prophetically low-pitched, like Cassandra
> announcing the fall of Troy or Isaiah threatening an impious people
> with the greatest evils: 'Jean-Luc, tu es au bord de l'antonionisme!'
> [Jean-Luc, you are bordering on Antonioni-ism!'] The insult was such
> that poor Godard lost control of the car for a second and nearly made
> us join the scenery.
Interesting, in light of Antonioni's own apparent debt to Rossellini:
in particular, the seeming influence of the Ingrid Bergman films
(_Voyage to Italy_; the volcanic _Stromboli_) on _L'Avventura_, as has
often been been remarked.
Paul Gallagher
>Interesting, in light of Antonioni's own apparent debt to Rossellini:
>in particular, the seeming influence of the Ingrid Bergman films
>(_Voyage to Italy_; the volcanic _Stromboli_) on _L'Avventura_, as has
>often been been remarked.
I don't know the specific reasons why Rossellini disliked Antonioni's
films. Tag Gallagher (who, by the way, used to post in the film newsgroups)
thought that Truffaut's dislike of Antonioni's films might reflect the
influence of his friend, Rossellini. Truffaut denounced Antonioni for
being "so terribly pompous." Comparing him to De Gaulle, who said, "French
men and women, I have understood you," Truffaut wrote, "Antonioni stands
like that and says, 'Women of the world, I have understood you.'"
Truffaut also criticized Antonioni for "childishly" following fashion.
He wrote, "My hostility to Antonioni helped me make L'Enfant Sauvage.
One of the big themes today us the difficulty of human communication.
This is very nice; it makes for good communication among intellectuals.
But when you come in contact with a family that includes a deaf-mute
child, only then do you realize what lack of communication means."
According to Jean Gruault, Rossellini ended up disliking quite a few people.
"When I told him I was going to collaborate with the decadent aesthete
Alain Resnais... I was immediately cast into the outer darkness in
company with Antonioni, Visconti, Kissinger (who didn't know proper
table manners), Lizzani (who had the fault of being a Communist),
Cottafavi (whom I had the fault to think a good filmmaker), Godard,
Rivette, Vario Merdone, Solinas, and Trombadori." Vario Merdone
is a pun on Mario Verdone. Rossellini also had a strong dislike for Fellini.
Gruault provides a lot of interesting anecdotes in Tag Gallagher's book on
Rossellini. Maybe he should write his memoirs?
"Caligula" is a fairly notorious film and has a fairly interesting story
behind it. Rossellini originally conceived of the film in the 1960's, and
Gruault started work on a screenplay. In the 1970's Rossellini thought
about to going to Hollywood to make the film. But the studio insisted on
casting Dustin Hoffman as Caligula. Rossellini objected on principle to
losing control of casting and abandoned his plans. He passed on the
"Caligula" concept to his nephew, Franco Rossellini, who eventually
produced the film along with Bob Guccione and Tinto Brass, using a
new script by Gore Vidal. It ended up a film with grotesque violence
and explicit sex, but with a prestigious cast: Malcolm McDowell, John
Gielgud, Peter O'Toole, and Helen Mirren.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>Kassovitz directed "Hate" and is currently starring in "Amelie." Jan
>Kounen ("Dobermann") and Luc Besson are similar directors. He represents
>a very different point of view from Cahiers.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Christophe Gans are some other French "enfants
terribles" who are taking French film in a more commercial direction.
I still haven't seen Jeunet's Amelie, but I recently saw Gans' "The
Brotherhood of the Wolf," and I think he may turn out to be the most
talented of the group. The film doesn't show the sustained virtuosity
of some of his models, but it is a very entertaining film. And I did
notice that the film's point of view on the "ancien regime" seems
more progressive than Rohmer's in "The Lady and the Duke."
I think it's useful to accept films that are primarily exercises in
style on their own terms. "Mannerist" is usually used pejoratively,
but I think it may be useful to accept mannerism as a valid style.
Cahiers frequently refers to "mannerism" in films. One article
classified Scorsese, Coppola, and De Palma as "post-classicist,"
Ferrara, Cronenberg, and Lynch as "hard mannerists," Tim Burton as
a "soft mannerist," and Tarentino as a "hyper-mannerist." This might
be casting the "mannerist" net too wide... Mannerism is difficult to define,
but there is usually the implication of stylistic excess, artifice,
style for its own sake, playing with genre and stylistic
conventions for its own sake, play for play's sake... I'd distinguish
formal excess for dramatic purposes or formal experimentation from
mannerism. I think many of Tsui Hark's films qualify as mannerist. Maybe
John Woo's, maybe not.
I have to add that I tend to think John Shearman is closest to defining
the 16th century style that is the source of the term Mannerism: Mannerist
tendencies "should not be marked by qualities inimical to it, such as
strain, brutality, violence and overt passion. We require, in fact,
poise, refinement and sophistication, and works of art that are polished,
rarefied and idealized away from the natural: hot-house planys,
cultivate most carefully. Mannerism should, by tradition, speak a
silver-tongued language of articulate, if unnatural, beauty, not one
of incoherence, menace, and despair." Shearman was responding
to those critics who saw in 16th century art "incoherence, menace, and
despair" because the art was so strange.
In any case in the same way people learned to appreciate the previously
disparaged art of the 16th century, it may be useful to accept "mannerist"
films for what they are. This does risk losing sense of the moral tasks
of art, its role as "interrogator of reality." (I like this phrase from
Hoyveda, since it implies that film's responsibility is to ask questions,
not provide answers.) That's particularly a problem when violence is
depicted. I like Jackie Chan's comment, "I love action, I hate violence,"
but with some films it's violence, not action, that exerts its appeal.
Here's a different point of view. Hodson opposes mannerism in film on
aesthetic grounds:
One might even argue that the original Cahiers emphasis on interior
meaning and rhythm has been reversed as a pertinent critical focus.
The fascination with surface as surface and display as display
has supplanted auteur revelation with stylistic opacity. Pictorial
overlay and embellishment, once the pristine entree to the interior
meaning, can now be construed as signifiers of aesthetic self
exhaustion. We can no longer savour mise en scene for its inflective
or inspirational moment, that crucial point of narrative turning
or insight when mise en scene and directional vantage point come togther -
Ray, Ophuls, Hitchcock, Lang, von Sternberg, Ford, Minnelli, Lubitsch
and so on. In the apparent transparency of classical narrative
the great auteurs were able to bend mise en scene back upon itself
in intricate and surreptitious ways so that the alert spectator was
not only aware of direct narrative enhancement but also of mise
en scene as a form of meta-commentary. This mastery of mise en scene
was not a case of unproblematic pictorial garnishment. By comparison,
a number of contemporary Hollywood directors tend to indulge in
variations on mannerist mise en scene almost to the point of
devouring narrative interweave and resonance - Spielberg, De Palma,
Cameron, Lyne, Craven, Carpenter, Hooper, Lynch, Stone et al.
They can skillfully generate narrative energy, only to work it out in an
accelerated reflex (not reflexive) fashion. Today, many of Hollywood's
whiz kid directors are exponents of image burn out at the expense of
narrative modulation and subtlety. I would argue that today's examples
of extravagantly mannerist mise en scene are stylistic tactics
designed to trigger a form of audience blockage. Too often scenes are
played off on a one for one basis, tainting narratives with a sense of
strain or over-reach. Narrative modulation has become a lost art as
filmmakers strive to achieve instant impact. The instantaneous 'being'
and energy of popular Hollywood movies are deployed with a monotonous
intensity as though the pursuit of narrative overkill was mandatory
in order to retain power over a captive public. The public's insatiable
desire for visual stimulation results in an image 'too much'. Mise en
scene is rarely a process of sensuous visual accumulation; it is more
often a relentlesss visual stream of sock-it-to-me, throw-away icons.
The filmmaker now savagely fetishises the image at the expense of the
spectator. In this respect classicism has been reversed. But to what end?
( http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/5.2/Hodsdon.html )
Paul
septimus
>
>[Rosenbaum] writes about "The Eclipse" in "Placing Movies." He mentions how the
> US critics who had supported "L'Avventura" -- Dwight MacDonald, John
> Simon, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris -- all turned against "The
> Eclipse." Rosenbaum continues:
>
> In the final scene Of ECLIPSE (1962)--my favorite Antonioni feature,
> and the one that concludes the loose trilogy started by L'AVVENTURA
> and LA NOTTE-- a lingering over an urban street corner while night
> begins to fall, effected through montage rather than an extended take,
> becomes one of the most terrifying poems in modern cinema simply through
> its complex poetry of absence. The lead couple in this film, played by
> Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, have previously planned to meet at this
> corner, in front of a building site. (Another building site figures in
> the opening sequence of L'AVVENTURA.) The unexplained fact that neither
> character shows up is perturbing, but because their affair has been
> more frivolous than serious, it hardly accounts to the overall feeling
> of desolation and even terror in this sequence.
> I think this is an insightful description of Antonioni's films, which
> involve constantly searching for the meaning behind appearances --
> meaning which is revealed in seemingly insignificant details and empty
> spaces.
I agree. I like the last 7 minutes of _The Eclipse_, and I am almost
tempted to say that I wish the rest of the film is like those 7 minutes,
sans leading characters, who have little redeeming qualities. Alright,
just a joke. I guess part of it is my beef with Monica Vitti. I know
I'm not the only one who complains about her. Her rather inexpressive
features don't seem the stuff to carry a film like this. Even in
_L'Avventura_, I dislike the scenes of her vamping around. (Don't mind
her so much in _Red Desert_ though.) Antonioni seems to have odd
choices
for his actresses.
Paul Gallagher
>I agree. I like the last 7 minutes of _The Eclipse_, and I am almost
>tempted to say that I wish the rest of the film is like those 7 minutes,
>sans leading characters, who have little redeeming qualities. Alright,
>just a joke. I guess part of it is my beef with Monica Vitti. I know
>I'm not the only one who complains about her. Her rather inexpressive
>features don't seem the stuff to carry a film like this. Even in
>_L'Avventura_, I dislike the scenes of her vamping around. (Don't mind
>her so much in _Red Desert_ though.) Antonioni seems to have odd
>choices
>for his actresses.
I like Monica Vitti, but would it be fair to say that Antonioni casts
largely based on the performer's physical appearance. They're pictorial
elements. Since the performances are so carefully controlled, would it
make much of a difference to cast more skilled actors and actresses?
For example, Irene Jacob may be a much more skilled actor than Ines
Sastre, but I don't particularly see how casting Jacob in the first
segment of "Beyond the Clouds" would change it very much. I could be
wrong: for example, people often complain about the leads in "Zabriskie
Point."
Paul
septimus
> I like Monica Vitti, but would it be fair to say that Antonioni casts
> largely based on the performer's physical appearance. They're pictorial
> elements. Since the performances are so carefully controlled, would it
> make much of a difference to cast more skilled actors and actresses?
> For example, Irene Jacob may be a much more skilled actor than Ines
> Sastre, but I don't particularly see how casting Jacob in the first
> segment of "Beyond the Clouds" would change it very much. I could be
> wrong: for example, people often complain about the leads in "Zabriskie
> Point."
>
> Paul
How about Dominique Sanda for the lead in _The Eclipse_? To me she
may not be a much better actress but would be much more of a mystery,
a presence. (You may or may not like an actor who can challenge the
director's method, but I like her in that Bresson film.)
I'm just not convinced there is a whole lot of complex thoughts or
personality behind Vitti's pretty face, which makes it trying to
stare at her for those 10 minutes static takes. Of course I'm treading
close to blasphemy here to Antonioni fans ... but I know I'm not the
only person who has complained about Vitti (or the actors in
_Identification
of a Woman_, say).
On an absolutely unrelated topic: Oliver Stone (or Michael Mann)
is probably already starting production on a movie based
on campaign finance reform. Here is my preliminary suggestions
for the cast (in blatant Hollywood style):
Russell Crowe -- John McCain
Kevin Costner -- Mark Buse, aide to McCain
Jill Hennessy -- as yet unnamed assistant attorney with heart of gold
and acrobatic eyelashes + love interest
Gary Oldman -- Kenneth Lay
Tim Robbins -- Russell Feingold
Elizabeth Pena -- Nancy Pelosi
Carrot Top -- G.W. Bush
James Earl Jones -- Dick Cheney
As for Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, Phil Gramm, and Trent Lott, I hope
the fine actors cast as inquisitors in Dreyer's _Passion
of Joan of Arc_ can be "dug up" to do these gentlemen justice.
(Difficult to contain my glee today.)
Andrew King
The cinematography, set design, staging, and make-up from the few pictures
in Film Comment were enough to blow my mind. It seemed to me that not only
does Wisit Sartsanatieng have an unbelievable eye for Mise-en-Scene, but he
also has an unrestrained imagination. I thought the French would eat this
up, but I guess they just haven't seen it.
Film Comment raved about it.
septimus
>
> How about Dominique Sanda for the lead in _The Eclipse_?
Let me hasten to add that I have a hard time figuring out
what Vitti stands for, and in these very abstract films that
makes life difficult. This is a function of the fact that
I haven't seen her in anything other than Antonioni's films.
Sanda is a known quantity who has a certain sense of privilege
about her, for example, and Jeanne Moreau is always Jeanne
Moreau, capricous, indomitable of will. I have the same problem
with Stephane Audran -- don't know why Chabrol likes her so
much.
monterone
> septimus wrote:
> >
> > How about Dominique Sanda for the lead in _The Eclipse_?
I suppose that computers will eventually make it possible to "recast"
_Eclipse_ with "Dominique Sanda." Will films become more like
theater, capable of infinite variations?
> Let me hasten to add that I have a hard time figuring out
> what Vitti stands for, and in these very abstract films that
> makes life difficult.
"...Monica Vitti clearly represents a certain type of modern woman
found at almost any intellectual cocktail party. She is usually
searching for something, and as she strives to communicate what that
something is, the unwary male becomes enmeshed in a hopeless guessing
game. It is not marriage exactly, not money exactly, not security
exactly, not sex exactly, not companionship exactly, not a career
exactly -- in fact, not anything exactly. Ultimately, inexactitude
becomes the modern woman's secret weapon. By making the terms of
agreement vague and baiting the trap with tantalizing visions of
sexual experimentation, the woman feminizes man's instincts and
sensibilities. Because man, the eternal wanderer and truth-seeker, is
biologically incapable of woman's constancy, he is doomed to appear,
at least in Antonioni's films, as a pitiable weakling in terms of
woman's character. This, ultimately, is the cinematic psychology of
Michelangelo Antonioni." (Sarris, 1963, in _Confessions of a
Cultist_)
> This is a function of the fact that
> I haven't seen her in anything other than Antonioni's films.
Well, there's always _Modesty Blaise_. (Speaking of which, Dirk
Bogarde never made it into an Antonioni film, did he? He might have
fit in nicely, with that question mark of a face..)
I suppose I never questioned the acting in Antonioni, assuming it was
just what he wanted (a certain opacity..), but then I haven't seen
most of these films in ages. (Back then, I probably thought all
adults acted the same, anyway.) Did revisit _L'Avventura_ more
recently and was surprised at Vitti's comedienne-like vivacity,
actually; not the unalleviated "Antoniennui" I'd thought I remembered.
septimus
> "...Monica Vitti clearly represents a certain type of modern woman
> found at almost any intellectual cocktail party. She is usually
> searching for something, and as she strives to communicate what that
> something is, the unwary male becomes enmeshed in a hopeless guessing
> game. It is not marriage exactly, not money exactly, not security
> exactly, not sex exactly, not companionship exactly, not a career
> exactly -- in fact, not anything exactly. Ultimately, inexactitude
> becomes the modern woman's secret weapon. By making the terms of
> agreement vague and baiting the trap with tantalizing visions of
> sexual experimentation, the woman feminizes man's instincts and
> sensibilities. Because man, the eternal wanderer and truth-seeker, is
> biologically incapable of woman's constancy, he is doomed to appear,
> at least in Antonioni's films, as a pitiable weakling in terms of
> woman's character. This, ultimately, is the cinematic psychology of
> Michelangelo Antonioni." (Sarris, 1963, in _Confessions of a
> Cultist_)
This reminds me of Vanessa
Redgrave (there's your Antonioni connection) and her words in
David Hare's _Wetherby_. A stranger kills himself in her
apartment, and she spends the rest of the film coping ... turns
out he has been obsessed with this rather blank, uncharismatic,
blissfully self-obsessed student
with (I suppose) a casual, careless sexuality. The student stays
with Redgrave for a while, and her verdict is: this is the kind
of girl that men kills themselves over.
Paul Gallagher
I don't think this has been released yet in France. I read that Miramax
is releasing it in the US soon. Has it been shown in New York yet? Another
Thai film, "Mysterious Object at Noon," ran for a week this summer in
New York.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>I guess part of it is my beef with Monica Vitti. I know
>I'm not the only one who complains about her. Her rather inexpressive
>features don't seem the stuff to carry a film like this. Even in
>_L'Avventura_, I dislike the scenes of her vamping around. (Don't mind
>her so much in _Red Desert_ though.) Antonioni seems to have odd
>choices
>for his actresses.
Christopher Buchholz, the male lead in "Eros," talked to Cahiers about
working with Antonioni. He initially had only a vague idea of the characters.
He saw the dialogue for each scene only a hour before each was filmed, and
the dialogue was often written only minutes before. Buchholz liked this
because it allowed for spontaneity.
Antonioni had very precise ideas for each scene and carefully controlled
the images and the movements of the actors, but the dialogue was of secondary
importance. Sometimes the movements Antonioni demanded interfered
with the delivery of the dialogue, but Antonoini never wavered from
and never doubted his plan for each scene.
If this working method is typical, it might explain the weakness of
the dialogue and acting in some of Antonioni's films.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>I searched online and found an interview Assayas did with Steve Erickson
>(who used to post on rec.arts.movies.)
>SE: Are there a lot of people in France who have the same opinions as
> the "journalist who loves John Woo" (Antoine Basler) who interviews
> Maggie Cheung?
This reminds me: one of the more surprising films of 2001 was the direct-
to-video "Replicant," directed by Ringo Lam. I think it is an excellent
film, only incidentally an action film, with a moving performance by
Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>The situation at Cahiers was complicated because Roberto Rossellini,
>who was something like a father figure to them, disliked Antonioni.
>Godard was likely thinking of "L'Eclisse" when he wrote:
> The film ["Vivre Sa Vie"] was an intellectual adventure: I wanted to try
> to film a thought in action--but how do you do it? We still don't know.
> In any case, something is revealed. This is why Antonioni's cinema of
> non-communication isn't mine.
There's a 1968 interview with Godard in "Jean Luc-Godard: Interviews,"
where he is asked whether "Le mepris" was an attempt to emulate Antonioni.
Godard replied, "No, not at all. The exact contrary." He described its
relation to Antonioni:
A funny thing happened with "Contempt" and Antonioni. When I made
"Contempt" I had a certain movie in mind and I tried to make it.
But "Contempt" came out completely different than I intended, and
I forgot the kind of film I had wanted to make in the first place.
Then when I saw "Red Desert" at the Venice Film Festival, I said to
myself: this is the kind of movie I wanted to make with "Contempt."
In a recent interview Godard was still displeased with "Contempt" and
said he didn't understand why it is now often considered his masterpiece
of the 1960's. (I think of "Contempt" as Godard's best film.)
By 1970 Godard was back to disliking Antonioni. In the documentary, "Godard
in America," he's asked about "Zabriskie Point," and he replies, pointing
to an ashtray, that it holds about as much interest for him as that
ashtray. He comments that Antonioni spent six million dollars "to blow up
some Frigidaires" and that the Dziga Vertov Group could make a hundred films
with that money. He says Antonioni is no different from Darryl Zanuck (the
last of the great studio bosses left in 1970), echoing a later comment
that if Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale were to make a film for MGM on
the Chicago 7 trial with Groucho Marx as Judge Hoffman, it would not
be a militant film, it would be a MGM film.
Jean-Pierre Gorin commented that he would rather watch the X-rated films
on 42nd Street than see "Zabriskie Point." Being a person with too much
free time, I checked what was playing in New York at the time. "Weekend,"
"Sympathy for the Devil," "Two or Three Things I Know About Her", Oshima's
"Boy," Glauber Rocha's "Antonio das Mortes," and Jancso's "Winter
Wind" were in the theaters -- the 1970 film market in New York was slightly
more adventurous than nowadays. And pace Gorin's comment, it's
interesting that one of the X-rated films playing near 42nd Street was
Brian De Palma's "Hi Mom!," which was heavily influenced by both Godard
and Antonioni, as well as providing a rather perceptive critique of radical
film.
More trivia: Andrew Sarris was at the meeting with Godard and Jean-Pierre
Gorin at New York University. Here's his reaction to "Jean-Pierre something
or other": "I didn't like [Godard's] assistant at all and I fought my
dislike because the last thing I wanted to be guilty of is a Sardi's
snub to someone I thought was getting a free ride on someone else's
reputation."
Jonathan Rosenbaum also seems to dislike Gorin, his former colleague
at UCSD: "...we regarded each other more than a little warily. I resented
what I regarded as the hard-sell, closet-intellectual demagoguery of his
lecturing style and his concomitant reputation as a campus ladykiller, and
he obviously felt threatened by my relationship with Manny [Farber --
also Gorin's friend]; the air was thick with bad vibes and petty
sibling rivalries."
Paul
monterone
>
> > Antonioni's cinema of
> > non-communication isn't mine.
>
For a rapprochement of sorts, there's Godard's interview with
Antonioni from _Cahiers_ in 1964, at the time of _Red Desert_. A
translation appears in "Interviews with Film Directors" (1967), edited
by Sarris.
There may be a touch of friction. Godard asks, "But isn't this beauty
of the modern world also the resolution of the characters'
psychological difficulties, doesn't it show vanity?" Antonioni ends
his reply: "But why have me speak of these things? I am not a
philosopher and all these observations have nothing to do with the
'invention' of the film."
Godard asks, "And must the sentiments be preserved?" Antonioni:
"What a question! Do you think it is easy to answer that? All I can
say about sentiments is that they must change. 'Must' isn't what I
mean to say. They are changing. They have already changed." A bit
later: "Moreover, you too, Godard, you make very modern films, your
way of treating subjects reveals an intense need to break with the
past."
Antonioni later remarks: "It's amusing: at this moment, I am
speaking with Godard, one of the most modern talented _cineastes_ of
today, and just a little while ago, I lunched with Rene Clair, one of
the greatest directors of the past: it wasn't at all the same genre
of conversation ... he is preoccupied with the future of the cinema.
We, on the contrary (you agree, I believe), have confidence in the
future of the cinema." Godard (who elsewhere derided "tous ces Rene
qui n'ont pas les idees claires" -- "all those Rene's who can't see
clearly") must have loved that juxtaposition...
Paul Gallagher
>For a rapprochement of sorts, there's Godard's interview with
>Antonioni from _Cahiers_ in 1964, at the time of _Red Desert_. A
>translation appears in "Interviews with Film Directors" (1967), edited
>by Sarris.
I wonder why Godard thought of "Contempt" as a failure, what he thought
"Red Desert" accomplished that "Contempt" failed to do, and how this
influenced his later work. "Contempt" is in part about modern neurotic
people, Paul and Camille, failing to live up to heroic models -- both
Odysseus and Fritz Lang, who were able to act, to defy the gods, to not
allow themselves to be overtaken by events. One interpretation of "Red
Desert" is that Guiliana is like an ancient goddess brought into the
modern world and she cannot endure it. She has to learn to adjust, to
fly around the poisonous yellow clouds. Maybe one difference might
be that the solution, if there is one, to the unresolved situation
of "Contempt," lies in action, while the resolution to "Red Desert" is a
change in perceptions and sentiments. (On the other hand "Contempt" begins
and ends with the camera, and the very last shot is of the sea -- giving
the impression that the cinema is more important than the story of
"Contempt," and more important than the cinema -- the recreation of
the world according to our desires -- is the world itself.)
There are some shots of very long duration in Godard's "Vivre sa vie" from
1962 and in "Les Carabiniers" from 1964. That might show Antonioni's
influence, but Godard's tendency was toward short and fragmented shots.
Godard commented that his poetic use of nature became "much more deliberate"
in "Pierrot le fou," and that has persisted to today. Maybe Antonioni's
influence can be found here.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>There's a 1968 interview with Godard in "Jean Luc-Godard: Interviews,"
>where he is asked whether "Le mepris" was an attempt to emulate Antonioni.
>Godard replied, "No, not at all. The exact contrary." He described its
>relation to Antonioni:
> A funny thing happened with "Contempt" and Antonioni. When I made
> "Contempt" I had a certain movie in mind and I tried to make it.
> But "Contempt" came out completely different than I intended, and
> I forgot the kind of film I had wanted to make in the first place.
> Then when I saw "Red Desert" at the Venice Film Festival, I said to
> myself: this is the kind of movie I wanted to make with "Contempt."
The above post is almost four months old, but I found out more about why
Godard thought _Il Deserto rosso_ achieved what _Le mepris_ failed to
accomplish.
Cahiers: Your short film Anticipation conveys the impression of a desire to
destroy the image itself as a prop of realism ...
Godard: The annoying thing is that the actors are so recognizable. But
at the start I had no ideas of this kind. Then I got the idea of giving
the film what you might call a 'biological' side, turning it into
something like a flow of plasma, but plasma that said something.
Cahiers: In doing that you touched something virtually sacred - the precise,
clear cinematographic image.
Godard: But the image is always an image from the moment it's screened.
In fact I didn't destroy anything at all. Or rather, I only destroyed a
particular idea of the image, a particular way of envisaging what it ought
to be. But I never thought that through in terms of destruction.... What
I was wanted was to pass across to the inside of the image, since most
films are made on the outside of the image. What is the image itself
supposed to be? A reflection. Does the reflection in a pane of glass have
a depth of some kind? Usually in cinema you remain outside the reflection,
external to it. What I wanted was to see the other side of the image, like
being behind the screen rather than in front of it. Instead of being behind
the real screen you were behind the image and in front of the screen. Or
rather, inside the image. Just as certain paintings give you the sense
that you're inside them, or that as long as you are on the outside you
don't understand them. In _The Red Desert_ I had the sense that the colors
were inside the camera, not in front of it. With _Le Mepris_, on the
contrary, I had the sense that the colors were in front of the camera.
You really do get the feeling with _The Red Desert_ that it's the camera
which has manufactured the film. With _Le Mepris_ there was on the one
hand the instrument, and on the other the objects outside it. But I don't
think I know how to manufacture a film like that [like _The Red Desert_].
Except that maybe I am beginning to be tempted to try something of the
sort. _Made in USA_ was the first sign of that temptation. That's why it
wasn't understood; the audience watched it as if it were a representational
film, whereas it was something else. Of course they lost out because they
were trying to follow a representation, they tried to understand what was
going on. Actually they did understand without any trouble, but without
knowing that they did and thinking on the contrary that they were failing
to understand. What struck me for example is that Demy likes _ Made in USA _
a lot, and I've always thought of it as a film that's 'sung' by comparison
with _La Chinoise _ which is a 'talkie'. _Made in USA_ most resembles _Les
Parapluies de Cherbourg _ as a film. The people in it may not sing, but
the film does.
Godard later in the interview examines Ingmar Bergman's films.
Cahiers: But how do you see all the things in Persona which remind you
of the fact you are watching a film?
Godard: I didn't understand anything in Persona. Absolutely anything.
I watched it carefully and this is how I saw things: Bibi Andersson is
the one who is ill and the other woman is her nurse. In the end I always
believe in 'realism'. So when the husband thinks he recognizes his wife,
as far as I am concerned, since he's recognized her, it really is her.
I mean if you didn't base yourself on realism you wouldn't be able to
do anything any more, you couldn't even step into a taxi in the street,
always assuming you dared to go out in the first place. But I believe
everything. It isn't about two separate things - one 'real' and the other
a 'dream'. It's all just one thing. _ Belle de Jour _ is fantastic. And
at certain points it's the same as with _ Persona _. You say to yourself,
'Right, from here on I'm really going to concentrate so I know exactly
what's going on'. And then suddenly ... you say, 'Shit! There you go! and
you realize you've gone back again.
It's like trying to force yourself to stay awake so as to be in on that
moment when you drop off to sleep.
For a long time now Bergman has been at the stage where the film is
created by the camera, suppressing anything that's not the image. That
should be one of the axioms you start out from for the editing, instead of
some rule that says the pieces have to be joined correctly according to
that. What you ought to say is: everything that can be said should be
suppressed, but at the same time leaving room for the axiom to be reversed
so that the opposite principle applies, keeping only what is said, as
Straub does. In _La Chinoise _ I leaned to the side of what is said. But
the result is fundamentally different from Straub because it's not the same
things that are being said. Bunuel suppressed everything that was said,
because even what is said is seen. And the film has an extraordinary
freedom. You get the impression that Bunuel is 'playing' at cinema in the
way that Bach must have played at the organ towards the end of his life.
("Struggling on Two Fronts," Cahiers du Cinema, Oct. 1967. Translated by
Diana Matias in "Cahiers du Cinema: The 1960's," ed. by Jim Hillier.)
Godard's ideas about the film image recall a lot of writing about film in
the 1960's that tried to discern the differences between classical and
modern cinema (in addition to being reminiscent of Alice's desire to go
through the looking-glass). The contrast was often made between a cinema
that shows us the world, in which the filmmaker's thought is embodied in the
characters' action, and a cinema of images, in which images signify rather
than show.
V.F. Perkins, Ian Cameron, and Eric Rohmer were some of the critics at the
time who, like Godard, contrasted the "transparent" classical cinema with
the modern cinema of images, but who advocated an opposite position by
preferring the classical cinema.
Paul
septimus
Makes me want to see _Contempt_ again (which I also prefer to _Red
Desert_).
I have been listening to Georges Delerue's music composed for the film
(along with the themes in _Hiroshima, Mon Amour_ and _Jules and Jim_.
Didn't Antonioni actually painted some of the sets red in his film?
> Godard: I didn't understand anything in Persona. Absolutely anything.
> I watched it carefully and this is how I saw things: Bibi Andersson is
> the one who is ill and the other woman is her nurse. In the end I always
> believe in 'realism'. So when the husband thinks he recognizes his wife,
> as far as I am concerned, since he's recognized her, it really is her.
> I mean if you didn't base yourself on realism you wouldn't be able to
> do anything any more, you couldn't even step into a taxi in the street,
> always assuming you dared to go out in the first place. But I believe
> everything. It isn't about two separate things - one 'real' and the other
> a 'dream'. It's all just one thing. _ Belle de Jour _ is fantastic. And
> at certain points it's the same as with _ Persona _. You say to yourself,
> 'Right, from here on I'm really going to concentrate so I know exactly
> what's going on'. And then suddenly ... you say, 'Shit! There you go! and
> you realize you've gone back again.
> It's like trying to force yourself to stay awake so as to be in on that
> moment when you drop off to sleep.
Not sure what Godard is suggesting there -- sounds like one of his
put-ons!
septimus
>
> Paul Gallagher wrote:
>
> Makes me want to see _Contempt_ again (which I also prefer to _Red
> Desert_).
> I have been listening to Georges Delerue's music composed for the film
> (along with the themes in _Hiroshima, Mon Amour_ and _Jules and Jim_.
> Didn't Antonioni actually painted some of the sets red in his film?
Actually what's your take on this, _Contempt_ vs. _Red Desert_?
I actually have a hard time comparing them, because _Red Desert_
-- much of it -- takes place inside a person's head while _Contempt_
is so much about interactions between characters.
Paul Gallagher
>Not sure what Godard is suggesting there -- sounds like one of his
>put-ons!
Jim Hillier comments on how "puzzling" the response to _Persona_ appears
to "Anglo-Saxon readers." Whereas critics in Britain and the USA interpreted
_Persona_ in terms of "Bergman's vision of the world," the Cahiers critics --
Rivette, Comolli, Narboni, and apparently Godard -- saw it as a "reflection
upon the nature of film representation and narrative and their relationship
to the intentions and control of the director/artist."
Hillier quotes Robin Wood to represent the British reception of _Persona_:
"Bergman has never... shown any inclination to be avant-garde, and the
'advanced' aspects of _Persona_ were determined solely by the content:
they are not evidence of a desire for deliberate formal experiment,
but purely the expression of Bergman's sense of breakdown and disintegration."
In contrast, Rivette wrote: "Bergman's films are something completely
different from Bergman's vision of the world, which interests no one."
Hillier thinks that views like Wood's have been so influential that it has
become difficult to read _Persona_ in terms of the "crisis of traditional
forms."
Here, for example, is Comolli on Bergman's _ Hour of the Wolf _: "The film
unfolds like a dream in progress, in itself a kind of dream, resisting a
predetermined course, switching direction at will. Which gives credence to
the idea of the film as an independent object, freed at last from the
constraints of narrative and form which, powerlessly, its 'author' would
wish to impose on it: the film as a living organism: a fabrication, of
course, but also something which in a sense fabricates itself."
Roland Barthes made similar comments about Bunuel's _The Exterminating Angel _.:
"I don't think that Bunuel's warning at the beginning of the film (I, Bunuel,
assure you that this film has no meaning), I really don't think that this is
Bunuel striking up a pose, I think it actually defines the film. And when
you look at it in this way, the film is a joy to watch -- you can see how
meaning is continuously suspended without, of course, ever becoming nonsense.
The film is not in the least absurb; it is full of meaning; full of what
Lacan calls 'signifiance.' But it does not have _a_ meaning, or even a
series of little meanings. And by that very fact, it is a profoundly unsettling
film, one which calls into question far more than mere dogmatism or
narrowly held beliefs. In the normal way, if consumers of film lived in
a less alienated society, this film ought, as the common expression puts it,
to 'make people think'. You could also, if you had the time, show how
each of the meanings which are constantly gelling, whether you want them
to or not, get drawn into an extremely fast, extremely intelligent
'dispatching' towards the next meaning, which is itself never definitive...
There is also, in this film, an initial success which explains the overall
success: because the story, the idea, the argument, are so clear-cut, an
illusion of necessity is created. The rest seems to follow on automatically...
Unfortunately, for most of his fans, Bunuel is defined above all by his
metaphors, by the 'wealth' of his symbolism. But if the modern cinema has
a direction, it's in _The Exterminating Angel_ that the pointers are to
be found."
So, when Godard says, "I didn't understand anything in _Persona_. Absolutely
anything," he does seem to be echoing Rivette and Comolli's views. as well
as a critical line of the time on what the modern cinema is or ought to be. On
the other hand, the words he choses do make it sound as if he's joking or
even mocking _Persona_.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>Actually what's your take on this, _Contempt_ vs. _Red Desert_?
>I actually have a hard time comparing them, because _Red Desert_
>-- much of it -- takes place inside a person's head while _Contempt_
>is so much about interactions between characters.
I agree. They're hard to compare, and it's difficult to see this from
Godard's perspective. I admire both films. I certainly don't see _Contempt_
as a failure. In fact its use of relatively traditional forms seems to
be one of its strengths. However, I can see that _Contempt_ was a kind of
dead-end for Godard, or to put it in more laudatory terms, it was
a kind of a summation of the New Wave, and it was time to move on to a
new kind of cinema.
My impression from the interview is that the key idea Godard derived from
Antonioni and from Straub concerns the relationship between the image
and "what is said." I think I can see how _Red Desert_ could be said to
"suppress anything that's not the image": it is a film of distinct
images, a film about perception. I get the impression that Godard saw
narrative as the link between images and what is said, and that's why he
seems to equate the breakdown of narrative logic in _Belle de Jour_,
_Persona_, and his own _Made in USA_ with "suppressing anything that's
not the image." Godard's films after _Contempt_ do abandon traditional
story-telling. However, it's especially after 1968 that the relationship
between the image and "what is said" becomes an explicit subject of Godard's
films, which provide explicit critiques of images and emphasize the conflict
between images and words.
Paul
septimus
>
>
> Jim Hillier comments on how "puzzling" the response to _Persona_ appears
> to "Anglo-Saxon readers." Whereas critics in Britain and the USA interpreted
> _Persona_ in terms of "Bergman's vision of the world,"
very true in my case even though I'm not a critic
> the Cahiers critics --
> Rivette, Comolli, Narboni, and apparently Godard -- saw it as a "reflection
> upon the nature of film representation and narrative and their relationship
> to the intentions and control of the director/artist."
>
> Hillier quotes Robin Wood to represent the British reception of _Persona_:
> "Bergman has never... shown any inclination to be avant-garde, and the
> 'advanced' aspects of _Persona_ were determined solely by the content:
> they are not evidence of a desire for deliberate formal experiment,
> but purely the expression of Bergman's sense of breakdown and disintegration."
> In contrast, Rivette wrote: "Bergman's films are something completely
> different from Bergman's vision of the world, which interests no one."
Rivette is clearly wrong here. 2 decades after Bergman has directed his
last film, his world view, as expressed in Liv Ullman's films based on
his scripts, still fascinates countless critics.
I shudder to think what Rivette wrote of Godard's vision of the world.
Godard's films, no matter how experimental and how concerned
they are with "crisis of traditional forms," are also unmistakably
Godard because of their content. _Weekend_, however tedious, is
_Weekend_ because of the director's flirtation with Marxism.
_Forever Mozart_ is not just another solipsistic experiment in form and
technique.
> Here, for example, is Comolli on Bergman's _ Hour of the Wolf _: "The film
> unfolds like a dream in progress, in itself a kind of dream, resisting a
> predetermined course, switching direction at will. Which gives credence to
> the idea of the film as an independent object, freed at last from the
> constraints of narrative and form which, powerlessly, its 'author' would
> wish to impose on it ...
The penultimate sentence has a tacked on clause "switching direction
*at will*" (my emphasis), which "gives credence" to whatever thesis
the author (Comolli) is pushing. The rest of Comolli's argument
then simply comes across as a tautology. But why should one believe
that
_Hour of the Wolf_ "switches direction at will" at all? It is a film,
an inanimate object, created by Bergman and his collaboraters.
But didn't Godard and his Cahiers days come before Barthes and his
creed?
Paul Gallagher
>But didn't Godard and his Cahiers days come before Barthes and his
>creed?
Godard was an editor at Cahiers up until 1964, I think. He's been fairly
close to the magazine ever since, giving fairly frequent interviews.
I think Barthes' influence started around 1963. Even if Godard didn't read
Barthes' work himself, he did read criticism by his friends at Cahiers, who
were influenced by Barthes.
1963 was an important year at Cahiers. That was the year of Rivette's "coup."
Rohmer had been chief editor, and Cahiers' primary focus had been the
American cinema. After Rivette took over, the focus increasingly turned to
European modernist film and to current intellectual trends (such as the
semiotics of Barthes and Christian Metz.) I think you could say Rohmer wanted
Cahiers to be a magazine for cinephiles, whereas Rivette wanted it to actively
promote new cinema.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>> In contrast, Rivette wrote: "Bergman's films are something completely
>> different from Bergman's vision of the world, which interests no one."
>Rivette is clearly wrong here. 2 decades after Bergman has directed his
>last film, his world view, as expressed in Liv Ullman's films based on
>his scripts, still fascinates countless critics.
That's true. I think it's important to pay attention to the form of
Bergman's films, and people may over-interpret Bergman's films, but
Rivette goes too far.
I think this is an interesting topic for a few reasons. About this time,
after Rivette's _The Nun _ and before his _ L'Amour fou _, Rivette
was changing his approach to film-making. There might be interesting relations
with his criticism. For example, Rivette wrote:
Time was, in a so-called classical tradition of cinema, when the
preparation of a film meant first of all finding a good story, developing
it, scripting it and writing dialogue; with all that done, you found
actors who suited the characters and then you shot it. This is something
I've done twice, with _Paris nous appartient _ and _The Nun_, and I
find the method totally unsatisfying, if only because it involves such
boredom. What I have tried since-- after many others, following the
precedents of Rouch, Godard and so on-- is to attempt to find, alone
or in company (I always set out from the desire to make a film with
particular actors), a generating principle which will then, as though
on its own (I stress the "as though"), develop in an autonomous manner
and engender a filmic product from which, afterwards, a film destined
eventually for screening to audiences can be cut, or rather "produced."
So, as with the comments on Bergman and Bunuel, there is an emphasis on
how a film can develop "autonomously," without being dependent on a
conventional narrative or pre-existing ideas, and this in turn suggests
that the critic should concentrate on the actual experience of the film
and not try to reduce it to its narrative or to "the idea behind the film."
Rivette was also an admirer of New York film-makers like Shirley Clarke
(I'm not sure if he'd seen Andy Warhol's films yet), and that might have
introduced the idea of the filmmaker as a kind of passive voyeur.
However, Rivette does say, "I stress the 'as though.'" He does recognize
that a film is a created object. And I'm not sure how applicable these
ideas are to Bergman's films. I did notice this interesting quote from
Noel Burch about _Persona_, pointing out the value of not interpreting
Bergman:
The "plot" of the film is usually interpreted as hinging on an
exchange of personalities, but, even if this reading is correct,
even if that is what Bergman principally had in mind, it nonetheless
is an obstacle to any real understanding of the film. It may
admittedly "explain" a large part (though not all) of the mysterious
events that take place in this deliberately difficult work. But,
at the same time, such an explanation masks a whole network of
extremely complex and contradictory interrelationships that connect
all of the events together... The film's "secret center," whatever
that might be (and even if it is one involving the much discussed
exchange of personalities), is used by Bergman to give an aesthetic,
polysemic coherence to images and events that have many potential
meanings both because of their ambiguous nature and because Bergman
and Bergman alone possesses the key to the film, a key that is
hidden from the beginning and rightfully remains so. In individual
sequences, certainly, it would appear that possible interpretations
are constantly being suggested. Many critics would certainly find
it very easy -- and very tempting -- to interpret the sexual aggression
in the amazing sequence of the broken glass in Freudian terms. But
would such an analysis bring us any nearer to the tangible reality
of the scene? Surely, it would be better to experience this scene
as it develops, to feel the growing sense of apprehension in the
interminable waiting, which has such a powerful effect: The longer
it lasts, the stranger the characters' gestures appear to be, as
this scene, which in the beginning was not at all intense because of
the very large space the shot takes in, becomes more and more fraught
with tension. And surely it would be better to simply experience
the pain of the cut that ultimately results, a wound in itself minor
and completely ignored by the characters yet that becomes as aggressively
shocking as a major mutilation because of the place it occupies in
the plastic and dramatic progression of the scene. We have already noted
how absurd it was to seek a political explanation for the scenes
from the Vietnam war that the sick woman sees on her television set.
The horror of the images and the woman's anguish as she sees them
must be _lived_. Interpreting them is tantamount to no longer seeing
them.
I'm also curious what Bergman thought, since in interviews at the time
he emphasized that the difference between life and art. He also emphasized
his lack of interest in modernist art, how own included: "I find, and
many another with me, the western more stimulating than an Antonioni or
a Bergman." In an article in the March 1967 Cahiers du Cinema, Bergman
writes:
[A]rt is free, insolent, irresponsible, and, as I was saying the
movement is intense, almost feverish; it seems to me that it makes
one think of a serpent's skin full of ants. The serpent itself has
been dead a long time, devoured, void of its venom, but the skin
moves swollen with a vital ardor.
Now, if I observe that I find myself one of these ants, I am compelled
to ask myself if there is any reason for pursuing this activity.
The answer is yes...
I believe that in our days people can reject the theater, since they
live live in the womb of a gigantic drama that never stops breaking
out in local tragedies...
Man ... has become free, terribly, dizzily free. Religion and art
are kept alive only for sentimental reasons, like the purely
conventional politeness toward the past...
I speak without stopping, from a subjective point of view. I hope,
indeed I am persuaded, that others are of an opinion more nuanced
and (they say) more objective. If now I consider the extent of this
desolation and, in spite of everything, persist in declaring that
I want to pursue the practice of my art, the reason is very simple...
That reason is called curiosity. An intolerable curiosity,
without limits, never satisfied, always renewed, that pushes me
forward, that replaces completely that hunger for a communion of
the past...
I note, I observe, I open my eyes, everything is unreal, fantastic,
terrifying, or ridiculous. I catch in its flight a particle of dust,
perhaps it is a film-- what importance has it, in fact? None, but
this particle of dust interests _me_, so it is a film. I go
about with this particle captured with my own hands and occupy
myself with it, gaily or gloomily. I clear myself a way among the
other ants; we accomplish a collocal work. The serpent's skin moves.
That, and nothing but that, is my truth. I compel no one else to see
in it his truth, and, as consolation for eternity, it is obviously
rather meager. But as support for an artistic activity in the few
years to come, it is amply sufficient, at least for me.
To be an artist for one's own pleasure is not always agreeable.
But it presents an extraordinary advantage -- the artist shares
his lot with every living being, who, for his own part, lives
equally only for his own pleasure, In all probability, the whole
ends by constituting a rather extensive fraternity, which, in
this way, exists thanks to a purely egotistical contract, on the
warm filthy earth, under the cold, empty sky.
In a way Bergman's own viewpoint is not so far from those of Rivette
and Comolli. Bergman may be too humble, but he does not seem to think
he is communicating novel or interesting ideas about the world, but instead
sharing his experience. Rivette and Comolli's comments seem too dismissive of
Bergman's intentions and control of his films, but on the other hand
Robin Wood's comments seem to reduce Bergman's films to a message
being delivered by Bergman.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
> I note, I observe, I open my eyes, everything is unreal, fantastic,
> terrifying, or ridiculous. I catch in its flight a particle of dust,
> perhaps it is a film-- what importance has it, in fact? None, but
> this particle of dust interests _me_, so it is a film. I go
> about with this particle captured with my own hands and occupy
> myself with it, gaily or gloomily. I clear myself a way among the
> other ants; we accomplish a collocal work. The serpent's skin moves.
^
That word should be "colossal."
Paul Gallagher
>>I think Barthes' influence started around 1963. Even if Godard didn't read
>>Barthes' work himself, he did read criticism by his friends at Cahiers, who
>>were influenced by Barthes.
>I always thought Barthes didn't come into vogue until after the
>structuralists' star had faded.
There was an article in the May 1980 Cahiers, written just after Barthes'
death, that reviewed Barthes' influence on Cahiers, but I haven't read it.
I'll try to summarize my impression of his influence. Barthes was first
interviewed by Cahiers in 1963, and he was described as a "traveling
companion" of the magazine afterwards. Barthes' 1963 book, _On Racine,_
was apparently influential, showing how to re-read classic texts. Rivette
takes "On Racine" as a model in a 1963 article on Chaplin's _ Monsieur
Verdoux_, which was re-released in France in 1963.
Levi-Strauss, the leading structuralist anthropologist, was interviewed
in 1964, but even though he was enthusiastic about film, he didn't
offer ideas on how structuralist ideas could be applied to the study of film.
Comolli was particularly influenced by Barthes, and he became a chief editor
in 1965. Comolli was especially influenced by Barthes' idea of
the "suspension of meaning," as the quotations showed. A key idea of Barthes'
semiotics was to replace attempts to find the message or the meaning behind
a text with attempts to understand the codes that govern the text: this
brought increasing attention to the formal structures of films, as well
as replacing the study of auteurs with an emphasis on small portions of
particular films. Pascal Kane, who was strongly influenced by Barthes,
joined Cahiers in 1967. Another critic at Cahiers close to Barthes was
Pascal Bonitzer.
Christian Metz's first in a series of articles on the semiology of film
appeared in the May-June 1965 Cahiers. This marked a step beyond using
Barthes' ideas toward developing a "science of film." The May-June 1965
issue was the first edited by Comolli.
After 1968 Cahiers became increasingly devoted to theory, and semiotics was
one of its bedrocks. Barthes wrote a key article for the July 1970 Cahiers,
"The Third Meaning." He proposed three levels of meaning: the first is
informative -- the level of communication, the second is symbolic -- the
level of signification, but in addition to these there is a third level
which he called the "sens obtus," the "obtuse meaning" that is "in excess"
of the obvious meaning, which is usually the meaning the author intended.
"The obtuse meaning is both hard for the "intellect" to "absorb," but also
hard to escape. Antoine de Baecque summarized Barthes' essay:
This article tried to locate the "essence of the filmic" not in the
moving film but in "photogrammatic 'de/chet' [loss]," not in
Lang and Rossellini, as was the tradition at Cahiers, from Bazin to Douchet,
but in Eisenstein, not in camera movement, wide angle shots and long
takes, but in close ups and fragments. Barthes discovers there "an
equivocal, perverse region," which he calls the "sens obtus" ["the
obtuse meaning".] This article marked a key date for Cahiers because
it launched a whole series of studies. On one hand there was Pascal
Bonitzer, who leaning on the montage of fragments and close-ups in
Eisenstein's films, manages to extricate an aesthetics of the cinema
that the magazine will adopt: "There are gifted films with the "sens
obtus" and others which try to rub it out. All the cinema based on an
"economy of information", on the scenario and informative editing --
i.e., the major part of the American cinema, the cinema of great
consumption - of course rubs out this "cursed part" of meaning, which
ruins the effectiveness and the fluidity of the discourse. Our interest
starts, on the contrary, when there emerges, at the limits of the
fragment, at the limits of the content of the shot, intervening
mysteriously out of the frame."
The May-June 1965 mentioned earlier contained articles on new filmmakers
like Straub, Rene Allio, Bertolluci, Milos Forman, Skolimowski, and Oshima.
In other words it was then close to the high point of modernism in the
cinema. I think it was Comolli who wrote that while the editors still
respected the traditional cinema, it was the new cinema that was important
to them. (It is strange to see Milos Forman championed as modernist.)
The issue also contained a review of Preminger's _ In Harm's Way _, which
marked a turn against Preminger. Many of the filmmakers Cahiers had championed
in the 1950's were abandoned. This was partly because, as the studio system
came to an end in the early 1960's, these filmmakers, freed from the studio
system, were making what many of the Cahiers critics thought were bad
films. For example, Cahiers had championed Nicholas Ray as the most personal
of filmmakers, but a Cahiers critic denounced him for, once having gained his
freedom from the studio system, "obliterating" his personality in a
super-production, that is, _ 55 Days at Peking _. Anthony Mann was
similarly accused on the basis of _The Fall of the Roman Empire _.
Minnelli was called a "typical false auteur" on the basis of _The Courtship of
Eddie's Father _ and _The Sandpiper _. Mankiewicz failed with _Cleopatra_,
Richard Brooks with _Lord Jim_. In contrast one of the films most admired
by Cahiers, apart from those by the still revered Hitchcock and Hawks, was
_ Lilith _, directed by Robert Rossen, who had not been recognized as
an auteur, and which seemed to be expressionist, in violation of Bazinian
aesthetics. _ In Harm's Way _ was a particular disappointment, since
Preminger, together with Mizoguchi, was the one director every Cahiers editor
had admired and written about. Apart from Jerry Lewis, Hollywood,
which a few years before had been considered the standard against which
other cinemas were judged, now longer seemed to matter.
I think Barthes' major influence on the study of film in the US and Britain
began in the 1970's, for example in the journal, Screen, where Barthes,
Althusser, Lacan, etc. were theoretical touchstones. Post-structuralism
became popular among American academics in the 1970's and 1980's. I wonder
how important film studies was in introducing these ideas? At the conference
on Cahiers du Cinema that was held at Lincoln Center last year, some people
wondered whether Cahiers, by emphasizing in the 1950's the questions of
authorship and the meaning of texts (in this case, films), triggered the
concern with the text that was to preoccupy so many academics for the rest
of the 20th century.
Cahiers changed in the late 1970's, in particular in 1978, when its editors
decided it was not and should not be an "university review." Critics went
back to discussing mise-en-scene and the auteur's intentions and world-view
almost as if the preceding fifteen years hadn't happened.
Paul
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>And then there is the Fritz Lang character in _Contempt_, whose
>first words are "a film should have a definite point of view."
>I always thought _Paris belongs to us_ is Rivette's best film, alongside
>_Celine and Julie Go Boating_. I have seen only 5 or 6 of his works:
>_Up Down Fragile_, obviously a collaborative effort with the actors
>(Laurence Cote got a screenwriter credit) is completely pointless to
>me, even though I like Cote. _Va Savoir_ is only slightly better.
>But doesn't this Rivette exception (if it *is* an exception; a generating
>principle is still a point of view, a "world view" of the film) proves
>the point? Most directors don't go to Rivette's (or Mike Leigh's)
>collaborative length. So doesn't this mean Rivette's critical method only
>apply to a tiny fraction of cinema? If so, how does he justify his
>generalization that "Bergman's films are something completely different
>from Bergman's vision of the world, which interests no one"?
I have a hard time taking a position on these issues. On one hand I
basically agree with you write below. On rec.arts.movies.past-films,
Tom Sutpen referred to my "fanatical devotion to 'auteurism,'" and
I more or less take that as a complement. On the other hand I have over
the years tried to follow academic cinema studies, which among other
points emphasized the "death of the author."
With regards to Cahiers du Cinema, many of the changes during the
1960's seem, paradoxically, wrong-headed but necessary. Antoine de
Baecque, writing in the 1990's, stated that the old critical methods for
the analysis of classical cinema were inadequate to deal with the new
cinema of Godard and Antonioni, Bertolucci and Skolimowski. There's some
truth to that. It was questionable to try to shoehorn some directors
into the avant-garde: Bergman, you mentioned. Analyzing films in relation
to formal and narrative codes is often useful or essential, but reducing
all films to that level is a mistake.
The solution seems fairly simple: there are different kinds of films, and
sometimes different methods are needed to understand them. Although there
were a few critics at the time who were able to straddle both sides, it
does seem that in the 1960's there was a battle going on and it was
necessary to take sides, for or against the avant-garde. This was complicated
by issues of taste and issues of politics. For example, Rohmer was hostile
to the avant-garde and politically conservative. Rivette criticized many
of his fellow Cahiers critics, stating that their cinephilia, their
fascination with the film image, was closely linked to right-wing politics.
And in fact one group at the magazine -- the MacMahonists, named for the
MacMahon theater in Paris -- emphasized visual pleasure above all else,
which led to what seemed to be failures of taste -- for example, praising
Don Weis and Cottafavi -- as well as what seemed to be right-wing politics:
emphasizing the beauty of violence and praising the "right-wing eroticism"
of, for example, _ Jet Pilot _ and _The Fountainhead._
In any case many people felt the need to take sides. There's the
option of being open to everything -- a happy eclecticism, which is
something I like so much about the present-day Cahiers and which seems
to be missing in a lot of English-language criticism. Somebody once
said that it's necessary to love the whole cinema, not just a part of it.
It might have been Comolli who said that, which would be ironic since
he narrowed the focus of Cahiers to avant-garde and militant films.
>I tend to think of art as human, as something "like me." If I see
>a film that is interesting, I'd like to know what inspired the
>director (or director in collaboration with actors/screenwriters/
>cinematographers, as the case might be). Is Rivette saying the
>opposite, that art is fundamentally alien, like going to a zoo? Most
>people I know are fascinated by zoos and aquariums, and I'm not, so
>maybe I'm the exception here. Then again, most people I know don't
>go to subtitled films, so I don't really know what to make of that.
Well, I agree with you. (Except that I do like zoos and aquariums.)
Most of the time I do think of films and art in general as somebody
communicating to me. There's an interesting quotation from Godard's
_ Histoire(s) du cinema _ in an article by Adrian Martin,
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/editorials/amed12a.htm.
Martin writes:
The auteur [Godard] - casting himself with typical self-lacerating
irony as a raving curator or maybe just a clownish janitor - fields
a complaint from a spectator:
we saw endless photos of works
but never of people
that's what it was, the nouvelle vague
the auteurs' policy
not auteurs, works
Godard replies:
your friend is right, mademoiselle
the works first
then the men
Then the sophistic dialogue takes a number of successive sharp turns,
whereby this distinction - between individuals and works - is quickly
morphed into a duality of heart (which the curator/filmmaker is
accused of lacking) and labour.
you can film labour, mademoiselle
not hearts
But - in the next conceptual twist - what if we live in "a time of
unemployment"? Now hands (performing the labour that produces works) are
opposed to hearts in Godard's spiel. He turns the tables on his
interlocutor: unemployment (worklessness) means too many idle hands,
but that's not where the real challenge lies:
it's a time of too many hands
and not enough hearts
yes, a heartless time
but not workless
when a period is sick
and doesn't have work
for all the hands
it's a new challenge
that confronts us
the challenge of working with our hearts
and I know of no period
not yet
that didn't have work for all the hearts
Having found herself back to her own initial affirmation of heart,
the woman then anchors the debate in an irrefutably personal reference.
all the same
Becker
Rossellini
Melville
Franju
Jacques Demy
Truffaut
you knew them all
And Godard replies not merely for himself but also, in a sense, for all
impassioned auteurists:
yes, they were my friends
>Isn't "a generating principle" (Rivette's words, or at least translation
>thereof) precisely "an idea behind the film"? I don't see why one has to
>insist on a dichotomy here. I don't know who it is that insists on a
>conventional narrative; I certainly didn't. One can certainly enjoy the
>"actual experience of the film" without insisting it has no pre-existing ideas,
>or ideas of any sort. You can watch a film once for the narrative, once
>for the techniques, another time for the acting, once again for its expressed
>world view, etc. Why do they have to be mutually exclusive? The best films
>marry form to content; their richness and multi-layered attractions are
>*designed* to afford multiple viewings.
I might have been mistaken in linking Rivette's working methods to
the his criticism, and in particular, the influence of Barthes. Again,
I agree with you, but I would be interested to read what others, more
sympathetic to Barthes, might think. One line of argument is political:
if you approach art as a transparent window onto the world or as simply
a means of personal expression, you're reinforcing the ideological
mechanisms inherent in particular forms, in particular, narrative and
classical (invisible) editing. Another argument is aesthetic: for
example, Susan Sontag wrote in _ Against Interpretation _: "In most
modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal
to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make
us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then
interpreting _that_, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes
art manageable, conformable." Raymond Bellour commented in "The Analysis
of Film": the politique des auteurs limits "a meticulous approach
to film... through a kind of manifest circularity that tries to make
the singularity of the filmic text coincide with what the auteur thinks
or says about it..." I can't say I agree with these statements, but I
don't completely disagree either...
>See my objection above. I think that the best critics give you points of
>view and interpretations that enriches the experience. Burch seemingly
>wants to critique films by subtraction, rendering them flat and sterile by
>limiting the experience to a solitary, sanctioned way of seeing. On top
>of that, the above really doesn't make any sense to me. Is it an exhortion
>to lobotomize the audience, to shorten our attention span, so that we only
>remember one scene (or one shot) at a time? I hope I misinterpreted the
>passage, but it sure sounds like that's what it is recommending.
I should point out that Burch criticizes his early work. In the later
edition of _ Theory of Film Practice _, he added this footnote to a
paragraph in which he discusses the Vietnam images in _Persona_, calling them
non-political, and states approvingly that for Bergman "art and life are
two separate entities." In the same paragraph he defends the use of the Nazi
extermination camps as an "aesthetic object" in Hanoun's _ The Authentic
Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung _, as well as defending art such as Leni
Reifenstahl's that make "evil into an object of beauty."
Written at a time when my views on the ideological implications
of artistic practice were confused to say the least, this paragraph
is from my present viewpoint very naive pleading for a badly
defined cuase. Rather than delete or rewrite it, I have preferred
to leave it at specific testimony to the intellectual confusion
that explains many of the book's inadequacies.
>My take is different. To me, Bergman's statement, quoted twice above, cannot
>be more diametrically opposed to what I think Rivette was doing. Rivette
>seemed to be claiming some general principle, some new, true, and only
>way of watching flims, whose validity he appeared to claim for other
>filmmakers ("Bergman's films are something completely different from Bergman's
>vision of the world) and all audience ("which interests no one").
>>Rivette and Comolli's comments seem too dismissive of
>>Bergman's intentions and control of his films, but on the other hand
>>Robin Wood's comments seem to reduce Bergman's films to a message
>>being delivered by Bergman.
>Having never read Wood myself I can only quote verbatim your quote of
>Hillier's quote of Wood:
>"Bergman has never... shown any inclination to be avant-garde, and the
>'advanced' aspects of _Persona_ were determined solely by the content:
>they are not evidence of a desire for deliberate formal experiment,
>but purely the expression of Bergman's sense of breakdown and disintegration."
>I don't agree with the first three lines, but the last line sounds like
>Wood is not that far from your position. "Sense of breakdown and
>disintegration" is a lot closer to an "experience" than a "message."
>Again, I don't understand why you are insisting on a dichotomy here.
Well, I'm sort of in the middle. I don't entirely see why there should be
a dichotomy, but other people do, and I can sometimes see their point.
Also, because so much that has been written on film is informed by
semiotics, deconstruction, etc., it's hard to escape these ideas. Even
if they're wrong, they're hard to ignore.
I haven't seen Wood's book on Bergman. I should look for it. This is
only vaguely related to this topic, but Jonathan Rosenbaum provides
an interesting perspective on Wood.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/durgnat_rosenbaum.html
Rosenbaum may be unfair to Wood, but it makes for a sharp contrast:
on one hand Wood reducing films to their moral messages; on the
other, Barthes at al. rejecting the idea that there the critic should
look "behind" the text.
> x x x x x x x x
>The passage seems to cancel itself. If a film is a dream, it is *not*
>an independent object. It is inseparable from the dreamer and reflect/
>his/her experience, albeit in strange ways. A dream is *not* a living
>organism, unless Comolli lives in the Dark Ages and believes in evil
>spirits and such. There also seems to be confusion about "author" and
>"dreamer." I am assuming that Comolli means that *watching* a film is
>like having a dream. So does "author" refers to the audience? Or the
>to filmmakers? Neither interpretation seems to make sense.
Well, Barthes saw the reader as being potentially just as much the
author of the text as the "author" who signed his name to it. He
distinguished the "readerly" text, in which the reader is a mere
consumer, and the "writerly text" in which the reader plays an active
role in producing meaning. Also, he thought various codes are at work
in the text, and they exist independently of the author,
and in this way they are similar to myths or dreams, which according
to structuralist anthropologists and psychoanalysts are also governed
by certain codes or rules independent of individuals. So I think what
Comolli wrote is similar to Barthes' criticism. Of course both Comolli
and Barthes may be wrong. I'm not especially familiar with Barthes, but
this seems to be a good summary of his ideas:
http://omni.bus.ed.ac.uk/opsman/quality/SEM_black_run_5.htm
>I believe there is too much self-aggrandizing going on in academia.
>If you write a rigorously argued paper, you get a pat on the head and
>is soon forgotten. If you start from minority, exceptional cases, and
>weave a gross overgeneralization out of them, all of a sudden you are a
>Star. We should discourage such behavior and to stop the feeding frenzy
>Therefore I think it is pointless to debate whether Barthes is absolutely
>right or wrong, whether authors are dead and films are living organisms
>which have wills and unconscousness. The questions to ask should be:
>what are the limitations of these theories? When do they apply and when
>do they fail? To what proportion of films are they relevant?
Those aren't easy questions. The theories do seem most suited to modernist
art. Last year I quoted Robin Wood's comments on Noel Burch. I think he
makes some good points:
Noel Burch's _To the Distant Observer _ is a very different story: it is
one of the very few books of film criticism to which I return repeatedly,
and always with profit (if also with increasing dissatisfaction). Burch's
analyses are, invariably illuminating, and he pursues his argument with
rigorous logic; his book performs to a high degree what is perhaps
criticism's most important function -- not the production of "truth" or
of "definitive" readings, but the opening up of whole new aspects of an
artist's work, or of cinema itself, rendering accessible what was
previously closed (the same quality that make Bazin a great critic, rather
than any confidence in his theories). My problem with the book -- and it
is a huge one -- is that I happen not to share most the assumptions that
form its premise.
Paul
septimus
>
> Comolli was particularly influenced by Barthes, and he became a chief editor
> in 1965. Comolli was especially influenced by Barthes' idea of
> the "suspension of meaning," as the quotations showed. A key idea of Barthes'
> semiotics was to replace attempts to find the message or the meaning behind
> a text with attempts to understand the codes that govern the text: this
> brought increasing attention to the formal structures of films, as well
> as replacing the study of auteurs with an emphasis on small portions of
> particular films. Pascal Kane, who was strongly influenced by Barthes,
> joined Cahiers in 1967.
>
That explains why the Comolli paragraph you cited (as you explained)
is actually not English (or French, originally) but is made up of
code/double talk. More on that later.
Another critic at Cahiers close to Barthes was Pascal Bonitzer.
One of the writers of the pointless _Up Down Fragile_. It is all
becoming quite clear :)
[Discussion of Barthes deleted]
thanks for trying to clarify ... I can't say I am convinced.
> I think Barthes' major influence on the study of film in the US and Britain
> began in the 1970's, for example in the journal, Screen, where Barthes,
> Althusser, Lacan, etc. were theoretical touchstones. Post-structuralism
> became popular among American academics in the 1970's and 1980's. I wonder
> how important film studies was in introducing these ideas?
>The theories do seem most suited to modernist art.
I didn't know how close Barthes was to Cahiers in the 60s. I can only
wonder what Truffaut, ex-editor of Cahiers, originator of auteurist
theory,
*and* co-founder of the French New Wave ("modern art"), thought of
this guy. To say it is ironic that Barthes has become (to some at
least)
the "authority" of modernist film must be the understatement of the
year.
Paul Gallagher
>content to leave art alone, who don't *need* to interpret. Art to them is
>just a thing, a status symbol, much like a Lexus or a country club
>membership. The idea of *interpreting* art is what make them nervous. Sad
>to say, I've come to think the same of Barthes. I've come to think of him
>as another status symbol, or worse yet, the excuse to treat art as status
>symbol. (This obviously doesn't refer to you, Paul.)
To bring up yet another academic -- what you wrote is very similar to the
ideas of the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.
>>http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/durgnat_rosenbaum.html
>>Rosenbaum may be unfair to Wood, but it makes for a sharp contrast:
>>on one hand Wood reducing films to their moral messages; on the
>>other, Barthes at al. rejecting the idea that there the critic should
>>look "behind" the text.
>Looks interesting -- will check that out.
Robin Wood is one of the editors of a Canadian magazine, CineAction,
and he writes many of the articles in it.
http://www.magomania.com/search/mag_1.epl?id=239
It's sometimes interesting, but a little dry. To be honest, I can never
finish reading the articles... In contrast Cahiers du Cinema, even at its
most obscure, always struck me as a lot of fun; the critics communicate
their enthusiasm, if nothing else.
Here's a long quote from Robin Wood in the latest issue of CineAction.
It's more or less relevant to the discussion we've been having.
My central predilection has always been Hollywood, though
essentially the classical period (roughly 1930-1960). It's a
question of which you value more highly, communal art or
personal art. All the richest periods of artistic achievement --
Renaissance Italy, the Elizabethan drama, the Vienna of Haydn
and Mozart -- have been instances of communality: the
availability of established genres, the constant interaction among
artists, the sense of belonging to the culture, of being supported
by it, of speaking to and for a wide audience that cuts across all
divisions of class and gender. Compare the isolation of the
modern artist, the emphasis on self-expression, 'originality', great
novelty, the audience dwindled to a small elite. But art that is
mere 'self-expression' tends to become increasingly impoverished
and uninteresting. With Fellini, for example, self-expression
reached its apotheosis in _ 8 1/2 _, which fully deserves its
established position as a modern masterpiece; everything since
seems variously (and comparatively) thin, repetitive, strained.
Bergman's work, which once seemed to me the peak of cinematic
achievement, has come to satisfy me less and less. His
personal psychodramas in which the characters (aspects of the
artist's psyche?) appear totally isolated from all social realities,
stripped of all social/political context, come to seem increasingly
limited in their interest, while the great films of Hawks,
Ford, Hitchcock, McCarey, Preminger, Ophuls, Cukor, Sturges
(Preston!), Mann (Anthony!), Ray, Sirk... retain their amazing
freshness and vitality today. Aside from Ophuls (who returned
to Europe), none of these directors survived the collapse of
classical Hollywood system in the 60s, though some continued
making films. One could list with ease 300 films from the
classical period that remain of great interest, of which about a third
can be claimed as masterpieces; because of the existence of
shared conventions, genres, forms, shooting methods, stars,
even certain works by otherwise quite undistinguished directors
retain their vitality and resonance. One would be hard-pressed
think, to find a comparable tally in the last 30-year
period.
I would evaluate many films differently from Wood, but I think there's
a point to the communal art vs. personal art distinction.
Paul
septimus
> I would be interested to read what others, more
>sympathetic to Barthes, might think.
Me too.
>One line of argument is political:
>if you approach art as a transparent window onto the world or as simply
>a means of personal expression, you're reinforcing the ideological
>mechanisms inherent in particular forms, in particular, narrative and
>classical (invisible) editing.
Again, I never insisted on classical or invisible editing, and I don't
believe making art a window into the world or a means of personal
expression
are equivalent to narrative or classical (invisible) editing.
> This was complicated
>by issues of taste and issues of politics. For example, Rohmer was hostile
>to the avant-garde and politically conservative. Rivette criticized many
>of his fellow Cahiers critics, stating that their cinephilia, their
>>fascination with the film image, was closely linked to right-wing politics.
>And in fact one group at the magazine -- the MacMahonists, named for the
>MacMahon theater in Paris -- emphasized visual pleasure above all else,
>which led to what seemed to be failures of taste -- for example, praising
>>Don Weis and Cottafavi -- as well as what seemed to be right-wing politics:
>emphasizing the beauty of violence and praising the "right-wing eroticism"
>of, for example, _ Jet Pilot _ and _The Fountainhead._
If we have to rely on the likes of Comolli (at least judging from your
quotes) to defend us against politcal conservatism we are all doomed.
Maybe that's why we already are. Comolli makes George W. Bush look like
a model of lucidity and uncluttered thinking.
This *is* a very interesting issue.
For example, Rosenbaum once wrote somewhere (my recollection is a bit
vague now) that he wants to change the world (either by his criticism
or via cinema, somehow). This is a little difficult when Rosenbaum
champions 11-hour long movies less than one hundred people in the world
have seen. But leaving that for now -- I hope you (or anyone) are not
claiming that against Barthes = right wing. All the
self-aggrandizingand
name calling aside, what exactly have Rivette and _Up Down Fragile_ done
for
social justice?
>Another argument is aesthetic: for
>example, Susan Sontag wrote in _ Against Interpretation _: "In most
>modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal
>to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make
>us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then
>interpreting _that_, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes
>art manageable, conformable."
I don't know how exactly Sontag feels about Barthes, but this seems
as much a criticism of Barthes and Rivette and the people we have
discussed here as anyone else. After all, it is suggested semiotic
criticism of film arise from a "crisis" due to a supposed lack of
adequate method to analyze New Wave cinema. Although I have little
doubt the semiotics-inclined can easily dodge that criticism by
blurring definitions and double-talking it away.
If someone else wants to jump into this thread please do! I personally
think much too much has been claimed for critics like Barthes and
will definitely play the devil's advocate until I run out of time.
septimus
from other news-servers. The reason is that I dislike
arguments where one side is not making real contributions but
merely criticizing, and I think I'm playing that role right
now. So ignore that message if you do see it. I think the
discussion about Barthes and company arose because Paul
suggested that Angle American and French critics are different
when it comes to certain films. And my point is that that is
probably very true; I genuinely detest the rationale associated
with the Comolli explanation you quoted. But I've already
made that point and don't need to repeat it further.
Paul Gallagher
I value your contribution, and I certainly don't mind disagreement
because I haven't thought through most of these issues or developed
a strong position.
Paul
monterone
"Paul Gallagher" <p...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:aev3va$dep$1...@reader1.panix.com
> Cahiers changed in the late 1970's, in particular in 1978, when its editors
> decided it was not and should not be an "university review." Critics went
> back to discussing mise-en-scene and the auteur's intentions and world-view
> almost as if the preceding fifteen years hadn't happened.
That may be, but the damage (at least in this country) had already been
done -- auteurist studies (the major directorial retrospectives of the
'70s) nipped in the bud, the wells poisoned in and out of the academy
... I gave up on film for years, partly because it became difficult to
talk, read or write about it without coming up against this lingo that
only made me feel moronic (or semi-[idi]otic, as one writer put it?).
And, there's still no real book in English on Preminger. I hope Chris
Fujiwara, who has a piece on him in Senses of Cinema, will eventually
write one.
George Sidney wasn't Preminger, but his recent passing should at least
have been noted, as was Wilder's. Of the better known Hollywood classic
directors, evidently only De Toth, Donen, (and Jerry Lewis) are still
with us.
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
septimus
>
> What a great thread. I'm still trying to explore it.
Thanks to Paul's knowledge in film criticism and his patient
excerpt of many critics. I wish I know a fraction of this
stuff and feel bad about criticizing some of these critics
without reading them in detail ...
>
> "Paul Gallagher" <p...@panix.com> wrote in message
> news:aev3va$dep$1...@reader1.panix.com
>
> > Cahiers changed in the late 1970's, in particular in 1978, when its editors
> > decided it was not and should not be an "university review." Critics went
> > back to discussing mise-en-scene and the auteur's intentions and world-view
> > almost as if the preceding fifteen years hadn't happened.
>
> That may be, but the damage (at least in this country) had already been
> done -- auteurist studies (the major directorial retrospectives of the
> '70s) nipped in the bud, the wells poisoned in and out of the academy
> ... I gave up on film for years, partly because it became difficult to
> talk, read or write about it without coming up against this lingo that
> only made me feel moronic (or semi-[idi]otic, as one writer put it?).
Personally I agree with you, of course. I had one painful brush with
a newly minted semiotic convert just a couple of years ago. Her
fanatical devotion to Barthes was a thing to behold. (Which is not
to say my self-righteous response to her was less than obnoxious.)
Dave Kehr wrote a recent article on the New Wave auteurs and suggested
that, in the early days, when they were making a name for themselves,
they were very unfair and acted like thugs. I think Paul also alluded
to some of this. I suppose all movements started out like this. The
New Wave resulted in films that obviously have stood the test of time.
I think it is also time for the semiotic critics to show some
perspective,
to acknowledge that their way is not the only way. Instead of using
Barthes to blackmail dissenters into acquiescing that _Days of Heaven_
is about the pre-teen Linda "spreading her legs," maybe there can be
more specific discussions of what useful insights these theories can
shed
on specific films. I invoked Rosenbaum's name quite a bit because he
was so close to Rivette (the object of much of my uninformed attacks).
He was definitely influenced by these ideas, and he didn't become a
foam-
at-the-mouth adherent to semiotic
theories. Most of us here like him. Of course, maybe I am so against
these theories it is possible that I will dismiss their insight into
particular films anyway. Or maybe their contributions have
already become mainstream and I just don't notice that.
I just rewatched both _Nouvelle Vague_ and _Contempt_ (my two favorite
Godards). This is my fourth or fifth time with NV, and I understand
it even less than before. But (with our recent discussions) it does
remind me of _Exterminating Angels_. Maybe Godard does have Barthes
in mind when making this film. (Nevertheless, it also has all the
usual Godard themes and motifs -- Goya, capitalism, et al -- so content
is also indispensible, I'd claim.)
monterone
Wood's conclusion seems a little problematic, perhaps. He's still
talking about Hollywood, right? (In which case, no argument.) Or is
he? (The references to Bergman and Fellini suggest otherwise.) In
any case, there are, presumably, other cinemas ... and in any case, it
seems unnecessarily dogmatic to play the numbers card ("300 films").
(By the way, I guess I left out Blake Edwards in my very short list of
surviving auteurs. Anyone else?)
As it happens, I bought the last CineAction to read Wood on _Flowers
of Shanghai_, which turned out to be just the article I'd been looking
for -- notwithstanding a digression on the phallocentric nature of
capitalism (or something like that) which makes Rosenbaum, for
example, sound like Mary Poppins by comparison. I don't think many
critics of Wood's generation, at least in English, have actually
engaged with _Flowers of Shanghai_ ...
Paul Gallagher
>I can only wonder what Truffaut, ex-editor of Cahiers, originator of
>auteurist theory, *and* co-founder of the French New Wave ("modern art"),
>thought of this guy.
I don't know specifically, but Truffaut didn't seem interested in theory.
There's an interesting story about his breakup with Cahiers. This is
from Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana's biography of Truffaut
(another long quote!):
The year before, Truffaut had taken part in rescuing Cahiers du cinema,
which had become, after May '68, a spearhead of militant extreme-Left
ideology. The press magnate Daniel Filipacchi, its majority owner since
1964, felt uncomfortable with the theoretical and political commitment of
Cahiers, whose monthly pages, he felt, neglected cinema news in favor of
analyses influenced by structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In
October 1969, Filipacchi decided to disassociate himself from these views,
and on the 21st of that month the two editors in chief, Jean-Louis
Comolli and Jean Narboni, were locked out of their offices on rue
Marbeuf. Filipacchi and his associates extended the lockout. The publication
of Cahiers was therefore interrupted, the majority shareholders
formulating "specific demands concerning the liberalization of the
magazine, which, according to them, had become obscure and dense and was
completely devoid of objectivity in the hands of an uncompromisingly
totalitarian editorial staff." In ordering the magazine's suspension,
Filipacchi demanded that the journal "be solely devoted to defending and
illustrating the seventh art."
A meeting was scheduled for October 23 to try to find a compromise. In
the presence of Georges Kiejman, the lawyer for Cahiers, and the minority
partners, Truffaut and Doniol-Valcroze, Filipacchi demanded the
replacement of the current editorial staff by a heterogeneous group of
known critics, a spectrum that would include Samuel Lachize from L'Humanite
and Louis Chauvet from Le Figaro. When this proposal was rejected, he gave
the staff the opportunity to buy its independence -- at a high price:
280,000 francs. Truffaut and Doniol-Valcroze each put up 30,000 francs.
They then solicited help from all their friends -- Nicole Stephane, Jean
Riboud, Pierre Cardin, Gerard Lebovici, Michel Piccoli, Claude Beiri,
Pierre Braunberger, Constantin Costa-Gavras. Three members of the editorial
staff, Jean Narboni, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Sylvie Pierre, brought the
fund-raising to a close. A first agreement was signed on December 30, 1969,
between Filipacchi and Doniol and Truffaut, and the purchase was concluded.
Truffaut thus helped to rescue Cahiers even though he no longer
recognized himself at all in the magazine's tone, as he confided to
Sylvie Pierre on November 20, 1970: "I fear things will go from bad to
worse with regard to advertisement, cover choices, punctuality of
subscriptions, dates of publication, etc., etc. All of this saddens me,
even if it no longer concerns me. So much the better if I'm exaggerating
and if reality is less bleak." Since he disagreed with the staff and
couldn't attend editorial meetings, Truffaut soon requested that his
name be removed from the editorial committee. And so it was, in October
1970. The break between Truffaut and Cahiers was then complete; it would
last six years, a bitter memory for the film-maker.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>(By the way, I guess I left out Blake Edwards in my very short list of
>surviving auteurs. Anyone else?)
Elia Kazan and Stanley Donen are still around. They both directed their
first features in the 1940's.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>Again, I never insisted on classical or invisible editing, and I don't
>believe making art a window into the world or a means of personal
>expression are equivalent to narrative or classical (invisible) editing.
That's true. It's interesting that audiences aren't even aware of non-
traditional editing much of the time: for example, Ozu's and Kurosawa's
films, despite routinely violating the rules of classical editing,
are rarely seen that way. In particular they don't prevent most people from
identifying with the characters, suspending disbelief, or thinking that
Kurosawa or Ozu are communicating with us.
A common theme in a lot of film criticism is to denigrate the "classic
realist text" (characterized above all by plausible narrative) and those
editing techniques that give the illusion of continuity in time and
space (for example, the shot-reverse shot). These are thought to "suture"
the viewer into the film, and to be ideal vehicles for transmitting ideology,
which is to say, they construct a false view of the world that appears natural
and correct. In contrast, modernist texts, by making us aware of the
mechanisms by which they work, are thought to make the viewer think, to
encourage criticism and self-criticism.
A great deal of critical literature seems to be variations on these themes.
I'm oversimplifying, but I think this is a reasonable summary.
Like you I think this point of view is misguided, in part because it ignores
content and the relationship of the film to the viewer and to society.
Conservative critics sometimes defended modernism becase they saw it as
a repository of cultural values against mass culture. And it does seem
that modernist art has tended to be hermetic, the property of an elite,
and not in any way subversive.
Paul
monterone
> It's interesting that audiences aren't even aware of non-
> traditional editing much of the time: for example, Ozu's and Kurosawa's
> films, despite routinely violating the rules of classical editing,
> are rarely seen that way. In particular they don't prevent most people from
> identifying with the characters, suspending disbelief, or thinking that
> Kurosawa or Ozu are communicating with us.
Yes, in my youth (before reading Burch and Bordwell, etc.) I dug
various points of style (as well as content) in Ozu, but I must admit
that one thing I never noticed was that his editing was "visible" or
in any way weird. (A viewer from the silent era probably wouldn't
have noticed it either.) Today, the cutting strikes me as crucial,
practically the number one issue, but it's tempting to wonder whether
those of us for whom this is so aren't saying more about our own
supposed sophistication than about the essential workings of Ozu's
films ..
Paul Gallagher
>Yes, in my youth (before reading Burch and Bordwell, etc.) I dug
>various points of style (as well as content) in Ozu, but I must admit
>that one thing I never noticed was that his editing was "visible" or
>in any way weird. (A viewer from the silent era probably wouldn't
>have noticed it either.) Today, the cutting strikes me as crucial,
>practically the number one issue, but it's tempting to wonder whether
>those of us for whom this is so aren't saying more about our own
>supposed sophistication than about the essential workings of Ozu's
>films ..
That's true. The formal elements Burch studies are important, but
there is far to more to Ozu's films.
Burch probably made the most difference for me with Kurosawa's films.
He pointed out details of which I had been completely unaware.
Since we're discussing Hou in another thread, I thought I'd point
out an interesting website contrasting Hou and Ozu:
http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/CityOfSadness/ozu.html
Paul
Paul Gallagher
writings was published. Rohmer addresses some of the issues in this
thread, such as semiology, modernism, and Brecht. The interview also provides
some clues toward understanding Rohmer's films. (In addition Rohmer
discusses Carne, which might interest New Yorkers since several of Carne's
films are being shown now at Lincoln Center.)
NARBONI: I offered to publish your essays on film: You didn't want
them to appear as they were (even annotated), and you didn't want to update
them with a preface; you wanted instead to talk about them. I'd like to
know why.
ROHMER: You were the one who wanted to publish them, not I. Under the
circumstances, the choice had to be yours, not mine. And since I
no desire to publish these essays, I didn't really want to write a
preface either. I don't want to publish them, but I'm not opposed to
it. books by journalists are published. Sometimes they're posthumous,
and so the author isn't there. But when he is there, it's for him to
indicate the distance between his current thoughts - his thoughts at
the moment of publication - and his thoughts at the time he was
writing. But if I had to write down all the differences, I'd never
finish. It therefore is up to you to ask me questions, because I don't
know what I'd say, except for this very vague and general thought:
There are many things that I wrote at the time that I would no longer write.
There are other things that I wrote that I would still write today. But is
that at all interesting for the readers?
NARBONI: I think that for the readers, one thing may seem to be missing: a
certain piece that was very important to many film enthusiasts. It appeared
in Cahiers in five parts, entitled "Le Celluloid et le marbre," and was
almost an essay in itself. In it you began by noting generally that film
was analyzed in terms of the other arts. In response to this, therefore,
you wrote some articles on the modern novel, painting, architecture,
music, poetry, and so on. But now you don't want to publish them.
ROHMER: That is, in fact, the only restriction I made. Why? Because, as
you said, it's practically an essay in itself, and so I might want to publish
it as a separate piece, if at all. But I don't want it published as it is
now because there are too many things that I no longer believe and
that now seem horribly naive to me - so much so that I'd have to write
notes that would be longer than the essay. And since I haven't the least
desire to address this question, or even to write film theory, let's just
say that I'm putting it all off for the moment, perhaps forever.
In any case, this is how I'd define "Le Celluloid et le marbre":
I introduce myself as a film buff. That is, I speak in the name of this
film buff, not in my own. The film buff seems to judge the other arts
a bit too hastily. In fact, as a film buff, he recognizes that he lacks
the cultural background necessary to judge the other arts. So he judges them
from the point of view of a film buff, with a knowledge only of film. It's
obvious that his judgments are extremely naive, unpolished, and reactionary.
He doesn't know anything about modern art, because the aesthetics of
film date back to before modem art, before impressionism - impressionism
having been a reaction to photography. The film buff doesn't ask that the other
arts return to the past; he's not quite that pretentious; he believes
they must follow their own path, which is - in any case according to him -
a dead end. He thinks that they're going to die at any minute and that
another, younger art will take their place: film.
Now, in retrospect, many things have become apparent. I will
say quickly - that this return to the past, which seemed impossible in
the fifties, has happened in the other arts. The international style in
architecture and functionalism has been thrown into question. Likewise,
painting has returned to the figurative style. In literature, it seems
as if traditional forms are no longer ignored as they were before. Here I'm
talking about the novel, poetry, and theater. As for music, it's more
difficult to say. The greatest phenomenon of the twentieth century, I
believe, is that there are two types of music: on the one hand, concert
music and, on the other, popular music. Right now, owing to new techniques,
especially electronic ones, it seems as if there's a bit more exchange
between the two than there was in the fifties. Music is the most mysterious
art. The things I wrote about music are what would have to be explained
the most. But on the other hand, film has entered a decadent
period - I'm not using this word in a pejorative sense - it's gone beyond
its classical era. My theory, which I outlined in an article for Combat,
called "L'Age classique du cinema," was that film's classical period was
not behind us, but ahead. Now I'm not so sure. What I'm saying now
might be just as open to criticism as what I said then. I therefore don't
want to address the question. The only thing I can say for sure is that
I no longer consider film to be the savior of all other arts, an art
that could begin a new era, just as Jesus Christ began the Christian era.
This idea may be more pessimistic in regard to film but may be more
optimistic in regard to the other arts.
In addition, there are two "Celluloid et le marbre." There's
the series of articles published in Cahiers in 1955. And ten years
later in 1965, there's the television program that was completely
different but had the same title. I was no longer the film buff questioning
himself about other arts; I was instead asking the contemporary artist
about film. I spoke to artists who seemed to me to be at the forefront of
of art at that time: people like Xennakis in music, Vasarely in painting,
Parent and Virilio in architecture, Claude Simon and Klossowski in literature,
Planchon for the theater, and so forth. One day Claude-Jean Philippe
gave me the idea for the program. He asked me: "Why don't you do
something on 'Le Celluloid et le marbre'?" The program is part of a
series called "Cineastes de notre temps" ["Filmmakers of our times"],
produced by Janine Bazin and Andre Labarthe. Labarthe's collaboration
was important, especially for the selection of the artists. Labarthe
knows contemporary art very well. My way of questioning the artists
no longer was critical of the other contemporary arts; I tried to be
very open. I was the opposite of what I was in the articles. It's no longer
a question of a film buff who thinks that in order to love film, he has
to be be closed to contemporary art; it's a film buff who believes that
loving film doesn't prevent him from being open to contemporary art.
Oddly enough, at that time I found myself agreeing with Cahiers's new
viewpoint, when Rivette had interviews with people like Barthes,
Levi-Strauss, Boulez, and so forth. Today, with a new generation of artists,
things would be different still.
NARBONI: You've written for several publications, as different as Les
Temps modernes, La Gazette du cinema (which you founded), La Revue du cinema,
Cahiers ... Could you give us a history of your criticism, and tell us what
it was at each time? Who were you fighting against before Cahiers became
the champion of the politique des auteurs, the Hitchcocko-Hawksians, and
so on? What was the climate like, and who was your adversary? Even the
articles you wrote before the ones in Cahiers were always rather polemic.
ROHMER: I think it comes from L'Ecran francais. There was a disagreement
among the staff of L'Ecran francais, which was a very large weekly review
at the time of the liberation. There was one group, Bazin-Astruc, that
had its roots in La Revue du cinema, which unfortunately appeared very
infrequently and disappeared, I think, in 1949. The Revue was directed by
Jean George Auriol, and that's where I wrote my first article, "Le cinema,
art de l'espace." That group represented the aesthetic wing. And then there
was the political wing. Bazin and Astruc were, for example, the only ones
who said good I about American film. During the cold war it was not
acceptable anything good about American film. Little by little, all the
people from Bazin's group - which we could call the noncommunist wing -
left, and L'Ecran francais became communist and finally teamed up
with Les Lettres francaises. The spirit of opposition is still around
from those years.
NARBONI: What about you, weren't you writing then?
ROHMER: I wrote something in 1948 for the last edition of La Revue du
cinema, while L'Ecran francais was still in existence. I had given
Astruc an article that had appeared in Les Temps modernes, entitled
"Pour un cinema parlant." I asked him if he could publish it in L'Ecran
francais, and he told me that he'd broken off with L'Ecran francais, that
it had become communist, but that he could give the article to Merleau-Ponty
at Les Temps modernes. I left Les Temps modernes a few months later,
because of a review of the Biarritz festival. I had done it on purpose -
it was quite a feat, in fact - I had written something like: "If it's true
that history is dialectic, at some moment conservative values will be
more modern than progressive values." Jean Kanapa picked up on this and
wrote in Les Lettres francaises: "You see, Les Temps modernes is reactionary."
I don't think that Merleau-Ponty had read my article, and my collaboration
stopped there.
NARBONI: What was your first occupation?
ROHMER: I was a teacher, I taught in Parisian high schools.
NARBONI: After your break with Les Temps modernes, how did you come
to write for other publications, Gazette du cinema, Cahiers, and so on?
ROHMER: I presented films at the Latin Quarter film club, which is
where I met Rivette. Rivette wrote a remarkable article criticizing film
editing, for the film club's bulletin. We transformed the bulletin with
the help of Francis Bouchet, a television producer, into Gazette du cinema,
which published some of Rivette's articles and some of Godard's articles
signed Hans Lucas. Truffaut didn't work on the Gazette; I met him at
the Festival du film maudit sponsored by Objectif 49.
NARBONI: Did the film club have any specific orientation?
ROHMER: It had been founded by one of my former students, who was very
resourceful. He was able to show copies of films that were going to be
destroyed. We saw an enormous number of films there, especially American
films from the thirties. The good thing about this film club was that
it was for film buffs, and they showed the most films possible, without
picking and choosing. It was different from the university film club which
had its own theory, which showed film masterpieces, as judged by critics,
by Moussinac, for example. But our film club showed everything, and that
allowed us and and our audience to say: "This is a masterpiece, this isn't."
NARBONI: How did Gazette du cinema evolve?
ROHMER: The Gazette had the support of the film club. We had wanted
to change the film club bulletin into a paper, but we never
managed to sell it at kiosks. It was very naive to try to get into
all of that; I had financed a part of it, and some friends had given
money as well. But we were lucky: We had readers from the film club,
and La Gazette's first issues were profitable. But the last issues were
unprofitable, and the Gazette disappeared. We thought of replacing L'Ecran
francais, but no one ever succeeded. There was never another film weekly.
The weekly papers that came later were television weeklies, like Telerama.
NARBONI: Later on, there was Cahiers?
ROHMER: No, Cahiers is something entirely different. La Gazette du cinema
was the work of my film club friends, that is, Rivette, Godard, and me.
Our film club was considered to be very amateurish. The people at Cahiers
came from a different film club made up of professional critics, former
collaborators from La Revue du cinema - whose director, Jean George Auriol,
had just died in an accident - as well as Doniol, Bazin, Kast, Astruc,
Dabat, and so forth. The mentors of the group were Jean Cocteau, Rene Clement,
and Robert Bresson. It had been founded at the end of 1948 and was called
Objectif 49. It was a film club that, unlike ours, had a definite philosophy
and debates that were held by all of these people. I joined them sometimes
myself. Having begun to write for La Revue du cinema, I could speak like
a critic or even, I might say, like a film announcer and not just like a member
of the audience, but I was really just a newcomer. Objectif 49 was led
primarily by Doniol-Valcroze, who had decided after Jean George Auriol's
death - and even when he was alive - to continue the Revue du cinema.
Because he couldn't get Gallimard's name, he took another one, Les Cahiers
du cinema. The first editions of Cahiers were very eclectic, written
by people like Chalais, Mauriac, and so on. Even I was invited to write.
My friends at La Gazette du cinema came into it later. Truffaut, for
example - I'm talking about this as if it were a political plot - had
connections on both sides. He had a place in Objectif 49 because of his
friendship with Bazin, and it was as Bazin's friend that I met him,
rather than from the film club. Rivette, though, was connected only
through La Gazette du cinema. Rivette and Godard came from
the Gazette side, Truffaut from the Bazin side. In the end, we all became
friends; we went to films together and formed a small group, thereby
creating a nucleus at Cahiers du cinema that grew and grew, until the
publication of the famous thirty-first issue which marked the first attack
on "French quality cinema."
NARBONI: Thirty issues, that means the group had been in existence for over
two years. But you and your group had had very definite ideas way before that,
through the Festival du film maudit, the Gazette, your taste for American
films, and so on. Why did this statement appear so late?
ROHMER: You have to separate my situation from my friends': Each one had
his own story. In Truffaut's case it was a bit different; his article had
been written one year earlier. It was put aside because of his attack on
Rene Clement. As for me, Doniol had asked me to write something, and so I did.
But Godard and Rivette waited a year before agreeing to write something.
NARBONI: You say that there were two sides in criticism, an aesthetic
one and a political one, more or less identified with the Communist
party. When I reread the entire batch of articles, I noticed there was
a great deal of criticism that focused on content. You and your New
Wave friends considered yourselves to be advocates of the idea
of mise en scene. But political and even religious and ethical ideas
also seemed to have contributed to your philosophy. In rereading Truffaut's
article "Une certaine tendance du cinema francais," which everyone saw
as the most violent attack on "quality" film, I was struck by the
fact that Truffaut also attacked these films on the grounds that they
were blasphemous, childishly anarchist, and antireligious. You also
wrote political criticism. You didn't like "decadence"...
ROHMER: Yes, that's true. It's difficult to talk about. I could say that
that's the most outdated part of what we wrote. But in fact, I'm not
quite sure. Let's just say that at the present time, I wouldn't get
involved in politics - no one does anymore, not even Cahiers du cinema.
Having said that, there are many ideas today that I consider right
leaning but that the left claims: For example, the idea of specifics
which extends to regionalism and nationalism - was considered extremely
reactionary. Today, that's no longer the case. Criticism of industrial
progress was considered to be a purely rightist idea, but now it's
more or less a leftist theme. While reading these articles you have to
make an allowance for the right wing's provocation, which I was
not necessarily consciously aware of. It came from the polemic
we had with Positif, which was, at the time, very political.
NARBONI: If we take away the part played by circumstances or provocation,
there still remain some fundamental ideas. You were often charged with
being a conservative, but I noticed that your articles continually
advance the idea of modernity - you cited Rimbaud's famous injunction
several times. I'd like you to talk about the relationship between the
modern side, which you have always championed, and your desire to preserve
a classical side. How could you both attack what you called decadence and
refuse to look toward the past?
ROHMER: My idea is very simple, and I still believe it. It's the idea
that in the evolution of art there are cycles, and so it returns to the past.
There was Antiquity and the Middle Ages, then the Renaissance, then once
again we returned to the Mid(Ile Ages with romanticism. It's as simple
as that. When I say, "We live to be absolutely modern," I mean that
to be modern sometimes means being backward looking, although right
now I'm against such "retro" tendencies. I'll use a simple example: In
the past, if an architect had been told that he could design a house
with a roof, he would have fallen into a horrible rage, it was
unthinkable. Now, a modern architect does design houses with roofs. To
lock oneself into a so-called modern form, and to want it to remain
fixed, represents a conservatism worse than saying "Classical values
are permanent." I thought that modern art was somewhat deceptive. It
could be just as tyrannical as classical art, and as tyrannies go, we
may as well have classical tyranny! But I was careful to indicate that
I was speaking in the name of modernity.
NARBONI: Yes, in fact, everyone was surprised when you finished making
your film for educational television, on the changes in industrial
landscapes. Some people were expecting a nostalgic film, but you insisted
on the true beauty of modern architecture.
ROHMER: In an article that is the introduction to an interview that
Michel Mardore and I had with Henri Langlois, I said that the preservation
of the past ensures the possibility of modern art. If museums were
to disappear, we would have to start painting like Raphael again, but as
long as Raphael's paintings still exist, why bother imitating him? We can
do other things. So we should preserve the past. It's the same for film.
Maintaining links with the past, with the works of the past, doesn't
prevent our moving forward - quite the opposite. In other words, in my
opinion - and if I reread this sentence later on I don't think I'll be
ashamed of it - I've always been against destruction. I think that in
order to build, we mustn't destroy. Many people think the opposite, that
destruction is necessary. I don't agree at all: New structures must
take their place next to old ones. There's plenty of room in the universe;
destruction is not a prerequisite for construction. That's why, politically,
I'm a reformist more than a revolutionary. It's true that in the seventies,
the word revolutionary was so revered that to say "I'm a reformist"
seemed incredibly vulgar - but I think that now it's OK to say it.
NARBONI: At the time, there was a certain kind of film content that you
didn't like: It was the opposite of films that glorified ideas of
grandeur and nobility, heroic acts, and equilibrium between man and nature.
ROHMER: In this, I think that Rossellini had a great influence. If you
want to retrace my aesthetic and ideological itinerary, you'd have to
start with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, which made its mark
on me in the beginning. I never talk about Sartre, but he was still my
starting point. The articles that appeared in Situations 1, which discovered
Faulkner, Dos Passos, and even Husserl, contributed a great deal to my
thinking. I went through an existentialist period before I began thinking
about film, but the influence remained, I think, and continued to affect me
in my first films. Rossellini is the one who turned me away from
existentialism. It happened in the middle of Stromboli. During the first
few minutes of the screening, I felt the limits of this Sartrian realism,
to which I thought the film was going to be confined. I hated the way it
invited me to look at the world, until I understood that it was also
inviting me to look beyond that. Right then and there, I converted. That's
what's so great about Stromboli. It was my road to Damascus: In the middle
of the film, I converted, and I changed my perspective.
NARBONI: You went through the same changes as Ingrid Bergman did in the film.
ROHMER: Yes, it's extraordinary! That's what I tried to show in my article for
the Gazette, to show that these values of grandeur, values that were
completely rejected at that time, the resolution to create greatness
using great means was able to exist through film, whereas the ideology at the
time was to create something from nothing.
NARBONI: In talking about Pauline at the Beach (Pauline a la plage), you
once said that you'd always been in favor of the optimistic film, in
the tradition of Renoir - even if it led to sad, cruel films and might
include death - rather than existential films like - as you mentioned -
Wim Wenders's films, for example.
ROHMER: That's right. I'm very sensitive to the existential charm of film,
which we see, for example, in Antonioni or Wim Wenders. That's the way I
feel at the moment. In fact, I recently saw Alice in the Cities again,
and I found it wonderful, yet I'm still as in favor of optimistic films
as I was then.
NARBONI: For you, then, the source of film's greatest current is "the boss,"
Jean Renoir?
ROHMER: Renoir is something else, he represents another current. Renoir is
no longer at all existentialist. But he's modern. More expressionist
than impressionist, closer to Cezanne than to his father. There's a Brechtian
side to him as well, a certain didacticism, but much more deeply buried.
I might have been opposed to Brecht as a film critic, and none of
Brecht's ideas, in fact, has come to the cinema, except perhaps through
Renoir. You mustn't look for Renoir's modernism in the same place you
find it in Antonioni or Wenders: It's completely different, it's unique,
inimitable. Renoir is the least theatrical of all the filmmakers, the
one who goes the furthest in his criticism of the theater and, at the
same time, the one who is closest to the theater. It's a total paradox.
It's the paradox of film, which is an art without being an art, performance
without being performance, theater without being theater, which rejects
theater, in fact. For me, in this sense, Renoir is the greatest of them
all; I can see his films over and over and always find something new, and
just the fact that his importance has not yet been recognized proves
to me that he is in fact the greatest.
NARBONI: Greater than Hawks, for example, who is another of your favorite
filmmakers?
ROHMER: Hawks' importance has not yet been recognized either, it's
the same thing. It is recognized, they say, but in my opinion, Hawks
is way above the place they've assigned him. Hawks is different
from Ford, different from Walsh. I think people who admire Hawks
generally admire him as an American filmmaker. At the moment, I'm rather
anti-American, but that doesn't prevent me from liking Hawks, because
there's a paradox in him, just as there is in Renoir. As far as I'm
concerned, Hawks and Renoir are not so different, but I can't talk about
that here. I can only say again what I said about Hawks in a
little article on his filmography: 'He is not the filmmaker of appearances
but the filmmaker of being.' What does that mean? I can't say. I can't
explain it, but that's what it is: There's no difference in his films between
being and appearing. It's not being and nothingness, either. It's being
opposed to being, I could say.
NARBONI: Rivette ended his article "Genie de Howard Hawks" ("The Genius of
Howard Hawks") with this sentence: "What is, is." '
ROHMER: Yes, in the end what I'm saying isn't original, since Rivette has
already said it, but I agree with him.
NARBONI: Your articles are based on the idea that film isn't an art that
says the same things that the other arts say, but just in a different manner.
Instead, it's an art that says things that are fundamentally different.
ROHMER: Yes, and that's an idea that I still believe in very much.
NARBONI: It was very strange at the time to say things like that.
ROHMER: That's why I was opposed to all the sixties' structuralist and
linguistic ideas. For me, the important thing in film - to repeat
what Bazin said - is ontology and not language. Ontologically, film says
something that the other arts don't say. In the end, its language
resembles the language of the other arts. If one studies the language
of film, one finds the same rhetoric as in other arts, but in a
rougher, less refined, and less complex style, an idea that leads nowhere
except to say that film is able to imitate the other arts, that it does
so with great difficulty, but that it isn't always bad. There's a nice
metaphor for you, it's almost Victor Hugo!
NARBONI: It would mean taking note of the rhetoric and letting the
essential part go unnoticed.
ROHMER: The essential part is not in he realm of language but in
the realm of ontology.
NARBONI: That's the theoretical foundation of your collected articles.
ROHMER: Yes, but all I'm doing is organizing Bazin's ideas. He said
with regard to Monde du silence (The Silent World): "To show the bottom
of the ocean, to show it and not describe it, that's film." Now,
literature describes it; painting paints it; and by freezing it,
by interpreting it, film shows it - for example, Nanook the Eskimo
harpooning the walrus. It's like nothing else, it has no equivalent.
Until film, one had either to paint a painting or describe something.
Being able to photograph, to film, brings us a fundamentally different
knowledge of the world, a knowledge that causes an upheaval of values.
That is what I tried to prove, rather awkwardly, but I can't say it any
better, it's very difficult to explain.
NARBONI: When you say that, one has the impression that the most
important thing is in the realm of becoming, of time - in Nanook of
the North, for example - and yet you wrote an article called "Cinema,
the Art of Space."
ROHMER: There is a cinematic space, different from pictorial space
although some believe it can be reduced to pictorial space - that is
the source of aestheticism. You have to be careful about space. The
cinematic being reveals himself in space as well as in time. To tell
the truth, he reveals himself in space-time, since in film one cannot
dissociate one from the other. All I can say here is that this idea is
very important to me, as you can see from what I've written. Perhaps
today I would express it differently.
NARBONI: I've heard that you claim to write your film critiques
after having seen the film only once. Yet you often write from the
perspective of an enlightened amateur, and concerning some of the
actors' nuances, gestures, and postures, or the lighting, you say that
these things require two or three showings. You wrote, for example,
that the first time one sees Elena et les hommes (Paris Does Strange
Things), one thinks that the actors are marionettes jumping around
but that at a closer glance, the acting and gestures are infinitely varied.
ROHMER: That's true, but I wrote several kinds of articles. There a those
that I wrote for Arts after seeing the film once. For Cahiers,
I often saw the film twice. But I really believe in the first showing. It
often happens that I see films again and don't change my opinion
or even that I see fewer things the second time, but there are
some films that I couldn't appreciate until I had seen them several
times - Jean Renoir's films, for example. In general, my dedication
to a film doesn't come after the second or third showing, but in the
middle of the first, as was the case with Stromboli. At that time, maybe,
I believed less in the subjectivity of judgment; now I believe in
it entirely and consider myself to have been quite obstinate at the
time. Yet I was not alone. It was rare that the point of view I
chose was a purely personal one, opposed to the opinions of my friends
at Cahiers du cinema. Everyone agreed with the opinion we were defending.
We all pretty much liked a film, or we were worked up over a film, but I
don't think it ever happened that someone at Cahiers du cinema would say
good things about a film that everybody else hated. When I say us, I'm
talking about the Hitchcocko-Hawksian wing. On the other hand, there was
a little battle between Pierre Kast, in particular, and us.
NARBONI: The first time I spoke to you about the idea for this book,
you told me: "My most personal articles are not in Cahiers, indeed,
some of my articles in Cahiers were contaminated by the group."
ROHMER: I agree. Having a group is good - you know that yourself
because it tears you away from your subjective judgment and opens
horizons for you. There's no question we enlightened one another. Some
people bring in one kind of writer, some bring in others, but at the
same time there is the danger that the sensitivity of the group will
mask personal sensitivity, and one will feel obliged to defend things
that one doesn't really care about deeply. Some filmmakers didn't
influence me, and I haven't thought about them since; they didn't
affect me in any way. I don't even know, in fact, if I wrote about
them. The mannerists, the stylists, Ophuls, Minnelli, and Preminger,
for other reasons, are people I never was spontaneously attracted
to; I merely went along with other people. In the same way, it seems
to me that Truffaut wasn't very affected by Dreyer. We each had our
own taste, but in the end there was a great harmony of tastes and
ideas among our team, a great sincerity.
NARBONI: In rereading today the list of filmmakers whom you defended
at the time - Renoir, Rossellini, Hawks, Dreyer, Nicholas Ray - not
to mention the older ones, Murnau, Eisenstein. One feels that you were
right. But do you have the feeling that you were unjust toward some
filmmakers whom you, Eric Rohmer, find more interesting today? It
seems to me, for example, that your evaluation of Bunuel has changed.
ROHMER: Yes, I've changed. But even then, I wasn't too hard on Bunuel.
I violently attacked one of his films that I haven't seen since, but I
don't think it was very good: Cela s'appelle l'aurore. I generalized,
perhaps too much. On the other hand, I said good things about Archibaldo
de la Cruz. About Chaplin? It was crazy to say bad things
about Chaplin and then to say good things about Buster Keaton. Chaplin
is extraordinary, that's clear. I saw his last films again on television.
I wonder how I could not have liked A King in New York before. It's very
close to The Testament of Dr. Cordelier (Le testament du Dr. Cordelier)
and to The Elusive Corporal (Le Caporal epingle). The very type of film
I should have defended. But in the fifties, Chaplin was still considered as the one and only genius of cinema. Fortunately, there are others.
NARBONI: You were one of the first to have talked about Chaplin in terms
of his mise en scene at a time when one spoke primarily about the content
of his films, of the comical side, or, as Bazin so magnificently did,
of his mythology.
NARBONI: You were one of the first to talk about Chaplin in terms
of his mise en scene at a time when one spoke primarily about the
content of his films, of the comical side, or, as Bazin so magnificently
did, of his mythology.
ROHMER: That's true. The Cinematheque was the great generator of
values. Murnau had been completely forgotten. I wrote: "Murnau is the
greatest of all filmmakers," and I don't think I was wrong. Pabst was
considered the greatest at that time. I was rather hostile toward Sjostrom,
and I don't know whether I was right or not. I maintained that L'Aurore,
which was shown at the Cinematheque one week after The Wind,
was far superior. Renoir's Grand Illusion (La Grande illusion) and
A Day in the Country (Une Partie de campagne) were admired at the
time, but many people, even then, considered Feyder to be even better.
NARBONI: From time to time we witness attempts to revive filmmakers
who may have been unfairly overlooked because of Renoir's presence.
Duvivier or others. Very quickly, the difference becomes apparent.
But you surprised me before by saying that you like Carne and Clair
a great deal. Your critical works certainly don't reveal this appreciation.
ROHMER: We were very hard on filmmakers like Feyder and Duvivier.
On the other hand, I was influenced by Carne. I had two epiphanies.
One from Stromboli and, ten years earlier, one from Port of Shadows
(Quai des brumes), a surrealist-existentiast tour de force. All
the tendencies of the years immediately preceding the war are seen
in this film. I find that Gabin's metaphysical dimension appears the
most distinctly, especially in the scene at Panama's in which he
doesn't want anyone to speak: There is a fundamental opposition to
language as language. I say Carne, not only Prevert, because Carne
was influenced quite a bit by the German Kammerspiel films. Carne
was a great admirer of Murnau, and he paid homage to, him in a scene
in The Cheaters (Tricheurs), I think, where some young people go
to the Cinematheque to a projection of Tabu. All of Carne's films
are made in the Kammerspiel form; that is, they take place in a
single location. In my Comedies et proverbes (Comedies and Proverbs),
I pay homage to Carne by ending my films in the same way they begin.
Pauline, for example, begins at the gate and ends at the gate. In
Hotel du nord, it's the bridge on the canal; in Port of Shadows, the
road; in Daybreak (Le Jour se leve), the besieged house, and so on. I
saw Carne's films from this period again. I don't want to say anything
about his recent films, which I haven't had a chance to see again -
for better or worse. I'd rather limit myself to the older ones.
The Gates of the Night (Les Portes de la nuit) may be a failure, but
it is one of the most ambitious works in the history of
film. You have to wait until Antonioni and Wenders to find this style
again, for example, when Montand enters and says to Bussieres's wife:
"Your husband is dead," even though he's alive. The whole scene is based
on discontent, an existential discontent, and not on comedy or tragedy,
or a mix of the two. There is great precision in Carne's films, which
unfortunately is coupled with a lack of imagination in the images, and yet
some shots of Jouvet in Hotel du nord do have a Murnauesque side.
NARBONI: You like the German side of Carne?
ROHMER: The German side from the twenties, yes. The rest of French film
from between the wars lacks formal precision. There's no real link
between the mise en scene and the image, as there is in Carne's work, no
spatial precision, even though Carne's space is artificial and stiff
compared with Renoir's. Some remarkable work is being done on the sets
in his films. Few French films are built around the set in the way that
Hotel du nord or Daybreak is. Bazin admired Carne, in fact: He wrote
an interesting article on Daybreak showing that each object had a
particular function in the film.
And then there's Rene Clair. I was touched - later on and less
deeply, but quite touched - by Quatorze juillet. There again, I liked
the extremely solid construction. One finds it in Bunuel sometimes
as well: its "not-a-hair-out-of-place" aspect, often coupled with
a sort of dryness. I'm also crazy about A Nous la liberte, in which
the assembly-line gag appears, a gag that Chaplin repeated in Modern Times.
Clair said that Chaplin had given him so much that he certainly had
the right to steal something! I think that French film has deep roots
in Carne and in Rene Clair, and not just in Renoir. For my part,
I'm indebted to Clair and Carne as well as to Renoir.
NARBONI: All this didn't show up in your writing.
ROHMER: That's true, aside from two allusions made in passing to Port of
Shadows and Quatorze juillet. To tell the truth, my period of
admiration for Clair and Carne came before I began writing.
NARBONI: On the other hand, there is a filmmaker about whom you have written
a great deal - Bergman - whom at first sight one would not expect you
to like. His films are the epitome of existentialist cinema, their modernity
hidden by certain archaisms in the mise en scene.
ROHMER: First of all, you have to consider the period. At the beginning
while we were involved in all the polemics, we defended people who
matched our aesthetic tastes; the acknowledged values didn't interest
us. It was paradoxical to defend Hawks, Hitchcock, or Renoir. Then, when we
finally became the majority at Cahiers du cinema, and when I became the
editor, this changed. It was no longer a question of try to defend
what we liked unconditionally but also of making the public aware of
important filmmakers. It's a completely different task. Maybe we set
aside our individual tastes, and the Bergman phenomenon came about.
We said to ourselves, "Bergman is someone who is very important, we have
to talk about him." It happened that for me, because there were things in
Bergman that I felt an affinity for - there were others things I felt
more distant from - it happened that I started talking about Bergman.
I could have talked about Fellini just as well but for Fellini the job
was left to others.
NARBONI: There were things that touched you in Fellini's work as as
in Bergman's?
ROHMER: Fellini is a great filmmaker, I think, but I'm not quite sure
why, I never knew much about him. If someone were to say to me, "Is
Jean Renoir a greater filmmaker than Duvivier?" I would swear on my life
that he is. But if someone asked, "Bergman or Fellini?" I'd be stumped.
I like Bergman's films, I said good things about them. I liked Fellini's
films less, but in the end, Fellini might be a greater filmmaker. I seem to
be very unkind to Bergman. One thing is certain: I've become somewhat
detached from him - perhaps I'm wrong - after a small run-in. In short,
I don't think that Bergman inspired me more than Fellini did.
NARBONI: In 1963 there was a sort of battle at Cahiers between the
Ancients and the Moderns, in which you appeared to be the defender of
classicism. In an article for Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, you recently
stated that Marguerite Duras was a tremendous filmmaker. How did
this change of heart come about concerning what was considered in
the past to be the height of modernity or the avant-garde?
ROHMER: Well, I've changed, and then again I haven't changed. I article
in Combat I said, "In film, classicism is ahead." In 1949 I wrote that,
classicism was ahead; that is, chronologically it was to come, but in
1983 we can consider that it's behind us; Marguerite Duras was possible
only because the classical age of film had already passed. Before
classicism, what was the avant-garde? It was film that copied other
arts, pseudopictorial film, and so on. Duras was possible
because classicism went through all that, because Rivette - who is perhaps
the most obvious descendant - went through that.
NARBONI: What do you like in her films?
ROHMER: Marguerite Duras is a little like Bergman; her universe doesn't
touch me personally, I'm a stranger to it, it's distant. I've never
written about her, and I'm not here to do so, but I think that she brings
a new element to Bazin's theory, according to which theater and film are
the same. But the theater she films is not the theatre du boulevard. It's
not avant-garde theater either, such as lonesco or Beckett. It's a
post-cinema theater.
NARBONI: Oddly enough, you also wrote about the lettrist movement and
Isidore Isou, and you wanted very much for us to republish this piece.
ROHMER: At the start of it all, there was a provocation. I wanted to show
the people at Cahiers du cinema that my point of view was very modern, that
we were not only the pillars of the Cinematheque, reactionaries admiring
Hollywood, refusing the great topics, social questions, Bunuel, and so
forth. Modernism for me wasn't surrealism, it was lettrism, which
corresponded completely to my idea at the time that the arts were
on the road to destruction. Lettrism is the absolute end of
literature, since the word disappears and is replaced by the letter
and non-codified sound.
NARBONI: Yet you weren't an iconoclast. You never were.
ROHMER: I wasn't iconoclastic. Besides, I didn't agree with lettrism
at all. I didn't think that film's destiny was the destiny suggested by
Isou, I said only that he should be taken into consideration. He was,
in a certain sense, the precursor of the "happening." Whatever happened
on the screen was destined only to stimulate the spectator's
participation. He also said that Godard hadn't invented anything. There
were in fact some of Godard's ideas in what he said - if only the idea of
mistreating the film, dirtying it, stomping on it, or even just neglecting
the links in editing.
NARBONI: Many of the New Wave filmmakers have used film as a point of
reflection in their films, sometimes addressing it directly: Truffaut
in La Nuit americaine (Day for Night), Godard in Contempt (Le Mepris),
and so forth. You seem very far away from this. You are more wary of
cinematic cliches in film than of theatrical or pictorial cliches.
ROHMER: Yes, and this is truer and truer. I believe more and more what
I wrote in my last article, that is, that cinema has more to fear from
its own cliches than from those of the other arts. Right now, I
despise, I hate, cinephile madness, cinephile culture. In "Le Celluloid
et le marbre" I said that it was very good to be a pure cinephile, to
have no culture, to be cultivated only by the cinema. Unfortunately, it
has happened: There now are people whose culture is limited to the world
of film, who think only through film, and when they make films, their
films contain beings who exist only through film, whether the reminiscence
of old films or the people in the profession. The number of short films
by novices who in one way or another show only filmmakers is terrifying!
I think that there are other things in the world besides film and,
conversely, that film feeds on things that exist outside it. I would
even say that film is the art that can feed on itself the least. It
is certainly less dangerous for the other arts.
NARBONI: Does that make you want to eliminate the explicit presence
of the cinema in your films, or in addition, does that make you want to look
elsewhere, to the theater or painting or to conversation?
ROHMER: You mean in their contemporary form? Painting and the plastic arts
mostly. The theater for Perceval. Music very indirectly. As for current
literature, I'm not very familiar with it.
NARBONI: Do you feel there is continuity between your activities as
a critic and your activities as a filmmaker?
ROHMER: I don't know. Even in the past, it was wrong to think that
my criticism paved the way for my films, since I began to shoot -
in 16mm - before I began to write.
NARBONI: The wariness in regard to cinematic cliches and the
importance of conversation are so great in your films that often one
hears the question "Where is the cinema in all this?"
ROHMER: Currently, I want to make a film with few words. In fact, I
made one: Le Signe du lion (Sign of the Lion). That being said, I most
often have been inspired by people who talk for a very simple reason:
The situations I know best in life are those in which people talk.
Situations in which no one talks are the exception. It has nothing to
do with literature but, rather, with reality.
NARBONI: There's an article that I absolutely wanted to include, the
one on The Quiet American, which in my opinion contains many things that
later appeared in your films. You never defended psychology in
Cahiers, and you even defended Renoir's opposition to it, yet you write
that this is a great psychological film. Moreover, there are people,
often specialists, who talk about themselves, who talk intelligently
about why they are as they are. There is, then, this professional
quality such as one finds in your films. Not to mention the taste for
plots, machinations, and playing with language. In the end, it's a film
that you say conjures the muffled silence of libraries more than the
ambience of a movie theater.
R0HMER: The taste for plots is part of my Balzacian side. I've been
compared with many moralists, people whom I'm not particularly interested
in, Laclos, Marivaux, Jacques Chardonne, and so on. All I have to say is, No,
that's not it, my authors are Balzac and Victor Hugo. Balzacian, yes. That
is, anti-existentialist, against the new novel, against people like
Moravia, Sartre, and Beckett. In Balzac's novels one finds content in
conversations. But in twentieth-century novels, there are conversations
but no content. Their sense exists between the lines; the characters'
sentences are flat. Second, in twentieth-century novels things occur, one
is subjected to them, but there's no plot. The plot is something which is
completely outdated. There's no psychology either. I personally have
always been in favor of psychology. In his last films, which never cease
to amaze me, Renoir claims not to have used psychology, but he shouldn't
be taken literally. They're nothing like the films of Antonioni, Wenders,
or Bunuel. Against psychological convention, OK. But against the psychological
consistency of characters, no. I love to portray thinking people, people
gifted with a psyche. I still believe that film founded on intrigue and
characters is always modern - if not more modern than apsychological,
dedramatized film. It's the latter, which in the eighties seems to be on
its last legs.
(Interview conducted in November 1983)
"The Taste for Beauty," by Eric Rohmer, translated by Carol Volk.
septimus
said feel like they might be even more pertinent now than it was in
1983.
I made small excerpts below:
ROHMER: My idea is very simple, and I still believe it. It's the idea
that in the evolution of art there are cycles, and so it returns to the
past.
There was Antiquity and the Middle Ages, then the Renaissance, then once
again we returned to the Mid(Ile Ages with romanticism. It's as simple
as that. When I say, "We live to be absolutely modern," I mean that
to be modern sometimes means being backward looking, although right
now I'm against such "retro" tendencies. I'll use a simple example: In
the past, if an architect had been told that he could design a house
with a roof, he would have fallen into a horrible rage, it was
unthinkable. Now, a modern architect does design houses with roofs. To
lock oneself into a so-called modern form, and to want it to remain
fixed, represents a conservatism worse than saying "Classical values
are permanent." I thought that modern art was somewhat deceptive. It
could be just as tyrannical as classical art, and as tyrannies go, we
may as well have classical tyranny! But I was careful to indicate that
I was speaking in the name of modernity.
ROHMER: In this, I think that Rossellini had a great influence. If you
ROHMER: That's right. I'm very sensitive to the existential charm of
film,
which we see, for example, in Antonioni or Wim Wenders. That's the way I
feel at the moment. In fact, I recently saw Alice in the Cities again,
and I found it wonderful, yet I'm still as in favor of optimistic films
as I was then.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rohmer and company have been around for so long that the "Sartre Years"
in the post-war era must have had an impact on all of them, although it
still comes as a surprise to me because I seldom read their writing
about
this.
Given the first paragraph of Rohmers quoted above I wonder if he still
agrees with Sartre, who claimed that the latter's artistic output was
for the (then) modern times only and it would have no value for
posterity.
Rohmer's idea of cyclic nature of art appreciation is impressive in
perspective,
although I may not agree with him. His humility in the face of
the passage of time is particularly touching.
But I wouldn't agree that Sartrean (or French existential) thoughts
had no "grandeur," that "the ideology at the time was (solely) to create
something from nothing. Why does he think Ingrid Bergman's housewife
has more grandeur than Camus' Sisyphus or Nietzsche's Last Man?
Sartrean
ideas were routinely described as heroic; his "freedom" to whom we
are supposedly condemned is not a right to nihilism, it is a call to
arms.
I always find Antonioni (esp. his late films) too programmatic and
laborious and
perhaps not sufficiently human, and hence I generally don't think
of him as a great existential artist. Beckett and Sartre's novels
are often howlingly funny; Wender's _Alice in the Cities_ probably
has more of a humor than most Antonioni films combined.
Paul Gallagher
>But I wouldn't agree that Sartrean (or French existential) thoughts
>had no "grandeur," that "the ideology at the time was (solely) to create
>something from nothing. Why does he think Ingrid Bergman's housewife
>has more grandeur than Camus' Sisyphus or Nietzsche's Last Man?
>Sartrean ideas were routinely described as heroic; his "freedom" to whom we
>are supposedly condemned is not a right to nihilism, it is a call to
>arms.
Rohmer uses 'existentialism' very broadly, almost using the term as
a synonym of 'pessimism' or even 'nihilism.' As you wrote, that isn't
accurate regarding Sartre. It's probably unfair to Antonioni and Bergman
as well.
By the way Gilberto Perez interprets one of Rohmer's favorites - Murnau's
_ Nosferatu _ - in terms of Heidegger's existentialism. Nosferatu personifies
death - at first, fear of the idea of death; then, in the plague scenes,
"the indefinite certainty of death"; and finally, "a figure of the
individual's death." The woman, Ellen, personifies the existentially
authentic human being. Perez sees in the final scene, in which she
chooses to sacrifice herself to destroy the vampire and end the plague,
"a metaphor for the self embracing, anxiously yet freely, the condition of
'being-toward-death.'" Perez writes, "Hers is not an atoning sacrifice...
but a bravely human taking upon herself of the death that awaits her."
He notes that, unlike Bram Stoker's novel and most vampire tales, there
is almost no religious aspect to _Nosferatu_. As with Heidegger, religion
is absent in _Nosferatu_ and science is shown to be of little use
confronting the anxiety of being.
Perez also describes how the plague scenes are naturalistic, but "vertiginously
subjective": "the distant camera disperses attention over a whole that
yet lies outside our grasp... there being no object that stands out and
holds the consciousness... we are tremblingly thrown back on our own
subjectivity and our own fear of death. Death seen to dwell in the heart
of the everyday, when the false reassurance of the familiar falls apart
from our eyes, brings on the anxiety that for Heidegger inheres in our
being-in-the-world."
Perez comments on Antonioni: "even more than Murnau, Antonioni leaves the
spaces between wide open to our apprehensive projections, but his
spaces between are those of the estranged self in society, not the
self before ominous nature. Antonioni is rather like a materialist
Murnau, a Murnau concerned not so much with the primordial as with an
anxiety arising out of the concrete relations and circumstances of
human society."
It's interesting that even though Godard's _Breathless_ is often
thought of as an existentialist film (and Sartre called it a masterpiece),
Perez sees it as a critique of existentialism, because it shows
"the fiction of authenticity." Belmondo's "self-definition is the midst
of existence" is based on "make-believe," on the image of Humphrey
Bogart. "Through its clash between documentary and fiction Breathless
makes us see the fiction of authenticity, the fiction one acts out
when defining oneself in action, as well as the authenticity of fiction,
the way a fiction one acts out may all the same be what one authentically
is." (This reminds me of Jean Rouch's mixtures of fiction and documentary,
in which acting is often the truest way to be one's self.)
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>ROHMER: Currently, I want to make a film with few words. In fact, I
>made one: Le Signe du lion (Sign of the Lion). That being said, I most
>often have been inspired by people who talk for a very simple reason:
>The situations I know best in life are those in which people talk.
>Situations in which no one talks are the exception. It has nothing to
>do with literature but, rather, with reality.
>R0HMER:
>Second, in twentieth-century novels things occur, one
>is subjected to them, but there's no plot. The plot is something which is
>completely outdated. There's no psychology either. I personally have
>always been in favor of psychology. In his last films, which never cease
>to amaze me, Renoir claims not to have used psychology, but he shouldn't
>be taken literally. They're nothing like the films of Antonioni, Wenders,
>or Bunuel. Against psychological convention, OK. But against the psychological
>consistency of characters, no. I love to portray thinking people, people
>gifted with a psyche. I still believe that film founded on intrigue and
>characters is always modern - if not more modern than apsychological,
>dedramatized film. It's the latter, which in the eighties seems to be on
>its last legs.
While I'm quoting critics, I thought I'd mention some remarks by
Deleuze, who describes modern cinema as "'the to-ing and fro-ing between
speech and image,' which has to invent their new relationship."
Deleuze claims Rohmer for the modern cinema on the basis that
in Rohmer's films, unlike in the classical film, speech is often
separate from the visual image and from the character's actions and
reactions and interactions. Speech in Rohmer's films is "a realizing
fabrication": it creates events. The characters speak as if describing
themselves in the third person. "Rohmer's puppet characters ... are
defined in terms of speech or information, not of energy or motivity."
Deleuze writes:
Rohmer has often said, when explaining his practice, that the 'Contes
moraux' were mise-en-scenes of texts first written in the indirect
style, then changed to the condition of dialogues: the voice-off is
obliterated, even the narrator enters into a direct relation with
another (for instance the woman writer in _Claire's Knee_), but in
such condition that the direct style [in which speech interacts
with the visual image, while still being part of the this image] keeps the
marks of an indirect origin and does not allow itself to be fixed with
the first person... the two great films, _The Marquise of O_ and _Perceval
le Gallois_, successfully give cinema the power of the free indirect [
a mixture of the direct and indirect styles], as it appears in Kleist's
writings, or in the medieval romance, where the characters can speak of
themselves in the third person ('She is crying,' sings Blanchefleur.)
It is as if Rohmer had taken the opposite path to Bresson... For, in
Bresson, it is not indirect discourse which is treated as direct, it
was the opposite; it was the direct, the dialogue, which was treated
as if it were reported by someone else; hence, the famous 'Bressonian'
voice, the voice of the 'model'... where the characters speaks as if
he were listening to his own words reported by someone else...
cutting [the voice] off from any direct resonance...
I think Deleuze has a point. Rohmer's characters often speak, not as in
real life -- which is what Rohmer seems to be claiming in the interview --
but as if they were describing themselves to the audience. Speech plays
a role beyond its role in the action and interactions of the film: instead
of expressing the character's psyche, it describes it. So in a sense
Rohmer's films, in their use of speech, differ from traditional
film just as much as Bresson's films do, but it's not so obvious.
Paul
Paul Gallagher
>While I'm quoting critics, I thought I'd mention some remarks by
>Deleuze, who describes modern cinema as "'the to-ing and fro-ing between
>speech and image,' which has to invent their new relationship."
That should be "the to-ing and from-ing."
I'm having second thoughts about Deleuze's statements. In any case this
might be an example of what Rohmer described as being modern
by turning to the past, since I imagine dialogue that doesn't serve
the plot and that is self-descriptive is common in the literature of
the past, even if it is unusual in films.
Paul
septimus
>
> By the way Gilberto Perez interprets one of Rohmer's favorites - Murnau's
> _ Nosferatu _ - in terms of Heidegger's existentialism.
> As with Heidegger, religion
> is absent in _Nosferatu_ and science is shown to be of little use
> confronting the anxiety of being.
>
> holds the consciousness... we are tremblingly thrown back on our own
> subjectivity and our own fear of death. Death seen to dwell in the heart
> of the everyday, when the false reassurance of the familiar falls apart
> from our eyes, brings on the anxiety that for Heidegger inheres in our
> being-in-the-world."
Very interesting description.
>
> Perez comments on Antonioni: "even more than Murnau, Antonioni leaves the
> spaces between wide open to our apprehensive projections,
> but his
> spaces between are those of the estranged self in society, not the
> self before ominous nature. Antonioni is rather like a materialist
> Murnau, a Murnau concerned not so much with the primordial as with an
> anxiety arising out of the concrete relations and circumstances of
> human society."
>
To me, terms like existentialism or alienation are something very
personal and very human. You have to feel it in your bones; you
can't just pluck down some philosophy text and impose it externally
in your film or novel or whatever. (At least I think you can't.)
I find Wenders' films intensely personal and idiosyncratic; long
before I read anything about Wenders, I feel like I know very well
from his films. Terrence Malick, who once translated Heidegger,
strikes me that way too. Antonioni just strikes me as abstract.
(It really doesn't help that his first film I saw was _The Eclipse_.)
I don't know what is so personal about _The Eclipse_ or perhaps
to a smaller extent _Red Desert_, why he felt compelled to make
those films. Maybe for some reason I'm just not on to his personal
wavelength. Perhaps Monica Vitti qualifies as his idiosyncracy ... I
probably like _La Notte_ best -- I feel real horror (instead of
just boredom) associated with existence there.
septimus
>
> Antonioni just strikes me as abstract.
> (It really doesn't help that his first film I saw was _The Eclipse_.)
> I don't know what is so personal about _The Eclipse_ or perhaps
> to a smaller extent _Red Desert_, why he felt compelled to make
> those films. Maybe for some reason I'm just not on to his personal
> wavelength.
Although for some reason I like Bergman's _The Silence_ and _Persona_
more than his more personal films. Why? Maybe I find them to be
richer experiences than _The Eclipse_. There is just so much you
can convey if all the scenes are 10-minutes long takes. I do find
_The Silence_ and _Persona_ are more intellectually satisfying
perhaps because there is so much more of them.
Paul Gallagher
>Antonioni just strikes me as abstract.
Antonioni's films can be appreciated as abstractions, as a ballet
composed of the actors' movements in relation to their surroundings
(including empty spaces) and to the moving camera, apart from their
thematic or dramatic content.
>(It really doesn't help that his first film I saw was _The Eclipse_.)
>I don't know what is so personal about _The Eclipse_ or perhaps
>to a smaller extent _Red Desert_, why he felt compelled to make
>those films. Maybe for some reason I'm just not on to his personal
> wavelength. Perhaps Monica Vitti qualifies as his idiosyncracy ... I
>probably like _La Notte_ best -- I feel real horror (instead of
>just boredom) associated with existence there.
Well, I do like Monica Vitti, and I suppose I'm close to Antonioni's
personal wavelength. His depiction of landscapes reminds me of my own
experience on occasion: the way everyday things seem to coalesce into
abstract patterns, or empty spaces can seem full of portent, or the way
the world sometimes seems to evanesce in the midst of fog or rain --
if nothing else, we both are fond of rainy days.
So I suppose I value Antonioni's films mostly for what they show,
for their peculiar relationship to reality, and not so much for
the particular ideas they express.
Paul
septimus
>
> In <3D2A68A1...@millenicom.com> septimus <sept...@millenicom.com> writes:
>
> >Antonioni just strikes me as abstract.
>
> Antonioni's films can be appreciated as abstractions, as a ballet
> composed of the actors' movements in relation to their surroundings
> (including empty spaces) and to the moving camera, apart from their
> thematic or dramatic content.
I agree and you've mentioned this before. I was just saying this
in connection with "existentialism." Or maybe that's not even
the right word -- maybe I should use "French existentialism." That's
probably worse terminology, because Camus never liked the label
and Camus is one of the people I have in mind. Most of the artistic
"existentialist" novels seem to have strongly subjective voices.
(_The Plague_ is probably something of an exception.) Sartre's _Being
and Nothing_ more or less took as (one) starting point the Cartesian
"I think, therefore I am." I don't see an "I" in Antonioni's work,
whether it is "I" as the identifying point of view or "I" as
Antonioni. (But then I don't know him well. Maybe I should try his
earliest work.) But most of all, from the novels, I get a sense of a
person on the edge of an abyss, where everything is at stake.
Or, in _The Moviegoer_, and Malick's first two films, everything *is*
at stake and there is this paradoxical nonchalant narration which
further heightens the tension and the sense of foreboding.
I stressed "novels" because the plays tend to be more didactic,
especially Camus'.
To me, the best of Antonioni has this feel to it, but not always.
Instead, and I may be the only one who feel this, there is an almost
high-concept touch to them. Alienation in the U.S. Alienation in
Swinging London. Alienation in an industrial wasteland. Alienation
in a middle-class woman's daily life. Substitute "Die Hard" for
the A-word and you see what I mean. There are some of his films
that impress me greatly, there are others that don't at all, but taking
those I've seen on a whole there doesn't seem to be an organic
feel, something deeply personal and committed to this theme. Again,
I may easily be wrong about this. But that's why I keep complaining
that Rosenbaum (my favorite dead horse critic of the moment? sorry!)
praises Antonioni for broaching "existential" themes and don't
seem to mention that in connection with Malick (or Wenders?).
(Again, maybe Antonioni's vision is closer to Heidegger's, for all
I know. I've read very little of Heidegger.)
>
> Well, I do like Monica Vitti, and I suppose I'm close to Antonioni's
> personal wavelength. His depiction of landscapes reminds me of my own
> experience on occasion: the way everyday things seem to coalesce into
> abstract patterns, or empty spaces can seem full of portent, or the way
> the world sometimes seems to evanesce in the midst of fog or rain --
> if nothing else, we both are fond of rainy days.
>
> So I suppose I value Antonioni's films mostly for what they show,
> for their peculiar relationship to reality, and not so much for
> the particular ideas they express.
>
Again, no intention to criticize Antonioni outside the context of
what I said before.
Paul Gallagher
>To me, the best of Antonioni has this feel to it, but not always.
>Instead, and I may be the only one who feel this, there is an almost
>high-concept touch to them. Alienation in the U.S. Alienation in
>Swinging London. Alienation in an industrial wasteland. Alienation
>in a middle-class woman's daily life. Substitute "Die Hard" for
>the A-word and you see what I mean. There are some of his films
>that impress me greatly, there are others that don't at all, but taking
>those I've seen on a whole there doesn't seem to be an organic
>feel, something deeply personal and committed to this theme. Again,
>I may easily be wrong about this. But that's why I keep complaining
>that Rosenbaum (my favorite dead horse critic of the moment? sorry!)
>praises Antonioni for broaching "existential" themes and don't
>seem to mention that in connection with Malick (or Wenders?).
I agree that Antonioni's films don't seem to be Existentialist. I
would like to find out why Rosenbaum or others think that the
films present Existentialist ideas, but I haven't seen that myself.
The films address some of the same emotions and states -- anxiety,
dislocation, separation, alienation -- as Existentialist
literature, but I don't see that they have the same inspiration or purpose.
I haven't read Peter Brunette's book on Antonioni, but it is said
to address the limitations of interpreting Antonioni's films as Existentialist:
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol3-1999/n50martin-jones
As to subjectivity: at least some of Antonioni's films -- from
_ Il Grido _ to _ Blowup _, for example -- examine subjective experience
very closely, but the characters' perceptions are of more
interest than their moral action. I may be missing something in
Antonioni's films, and I'm not particularly familiar with Existentialism,
but I don't see much similarity. Perhaps there's more affinity
between Antonioni's films and phenomenology -- again I'm not particularly
familiar with phenomenology, but the emphasis on bracketing off the
external world to better understand pure consciousness -- is reminiscent
of Antonioni's films. So Antonioni's films may share some of the same
philosophical roots as Existentialism, but I don't see the emphasis
on the key ideas of the Existentialists, such as freedom, authenticity,
and ethical action.
As for Antonioni's motivations, he seems fascinated by appearances
and ways of seeing. There is the theme of alienation, but there
are different explanations for alienation: alienation might
be the natural state of human beings, or it might be the result of bad faith,
or it might arise from particular social conditions, or it might
be the result of differences in perception. There's an interesting article
here about _ The Passenger _:
http://www.othervoices.org/1.3/jturner/passenger.html
I suppose similar ideas could be found in other Antonioni films: the
Imaginary and the Symbolic range over Reality in their rival attempts
to control it, with the women usually linked to the Imaginary -- to
narcissistic self-absorption -- and the men to the Symbolic -- the
inhuman rules of society.
I'm not clear what the films are "thinking." It may be that Antonioni
doesn't have anything especially profound to say. Noel Burch, for
example, described _ Cronaca di un amore _ as Antonioni's masterpiece
and thought his later films weighed down by extraneous literary themes.
But I don't think Antonioni's films are especially Existentialist.
Paul