Atget, Comic Books, and Film Noir: A Possible Connection Explored
Bill Palmer
with films and comic books as well as with Atget's photography.
But since I have attempted to make an important connection
(about both "popular" and "commercial" art becoming recognized
as "fine") I thought some of you here in rec.arts.fine
might enjoy reading this. In fact, you may want to comment
as to whether I am on the right track with my suggestions about
a relatonship between Atget's photography, film, and comic art.
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In article <9qsc3to97nn7garpa...@4ax.com>,
Alan Hope <ah...@skynet.be> wrote:
>May God punish me with an eternity in alt.writing if Bill Palmer
>didn't just come right out and say:
>
>>But the reason I respond here is that your
>>remarks put me in mind of what I have recently been musing about
>>regarding the film noir peroductions of the 1940's and 1950's.
>>Those were the low budget films of their day. Often they had no
>>special effects at all (although there were stunning exceptions
>>like the look into Marlow's mind after he was drugged against
>>his will in Murder My Sweet). But for the most part, it was acting,
>>directing and writing which made the film noir movies so enduring.
>>Lots of the expensive mainstream Hollywood productions of those
>>two decades strike the modern viewer as being fully as vapid and
>>boring as Titanic strikes you (and me), while movies like Dark
>>Passage, This Gun for Hire, Phantom Lady, Ministry of Fear (low
>>budget B movies of their day) and many others still move along
>>at a near breathless pace for a growing number of today's viewers.
>>Anyone care to explain this mystery?
>
>Those films were never meant to be enduring. The acting, direction and
>writing were supposed to be as routine as their B-grade required them
>to be. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see
>qualities in them which they coincidentally possess.
That is not really unusual in art. Look at the French photographer
Atget. Essentially, he did commercial photography, while most of
his contempories who--contrary to Atget had artistic pretensions--
did the sort of "fine art" photography that imitated popular
oil-painting motifs. Most of those "fine art photography" results
strike viewers today as incredibly boring--while Atget's "commercial
art" is hailed all over the world and new books about him come out
regularly.
Atget had to work for living, it should be added. Most of the
now forgotten "fine art photographers" had inherited money
to pay for their equipment and fancy studios. (Perhaps there
is something to be said for not being born with a silver
spoon on one's mouth.) For years, Atget was up before dawn,
lugging his unwieldy equipment around Paris by streetcar in
order to take his pictures of buildings before the streets
filled with "picture blurring" people who would stroll between
him and his store-front subjects...
Or (though some will think this is going from the sublime
to the ludicrous) look at comic art. Dr. Frederic Wertham
help up a Jack Cole-illustrated comic book story, "Murder,
Morphine, and Me" as an egregious example of the "rubbish"
found in comic books (of the early 1950's). Many people
of the day shuddered at the syringe needle on the verge
of penetrating Mary Kennedy's eyeball, as the vindictive
dope smuggler pulled her eyelids apart. "Yes, MARY
KENNEDY, you try to square things with the BIG boss!"
"PUT THAT NEEDLE DOWN! NO!" (the "NO" is four times
larger than the other letter's in Mary Kennedy's word
balloon, which has jarringly jagged edges in Cole's
"nightmare sequence").
Anyway, Dr. Wertham's example of comic book "rubbish"
is today considered a masterpiece of comic art. If
you had the complete orginal art work in that story by
Cole, you could likely sell it for as much or more
than a Lichtenstein original. Now, did Jack Cole
(who shot himself in the 1960's, if I remember
correctly from last year's excellent NEW YORKER piece
by Art Spiegleman) suspect that he was producing great
illustrative art? Or was he just making a buck?
I have no idea. My suspicion is that highly
talented people often produce art without consciously
setting out to do that.
[In fact, if you look at some of the leadng art publications
today, such as the respected AMERICAN ART REVIEW, you find
pulp magazine illustrations, comic book panels, and pin
up calendar paintings are now being auctioned by some
of the leading art houses.]
>
>That hindsight was largely provided by a group of French critics,
>including Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, who reacted against
>the moribund state of their own country's film industry in the late
>1950s by looking across the Atlantic for inspiration in what was
>regarded as a raw genre, unsullied by intellectual pretension.
I think you attach too much importance on that. Those films
were great enough so that SOMEONE was bound to "rediscover"
them anyway. Someone rediscovered Atget--and "Plastic Man"'s
Jack Cole, too--but the fine work was there for the "rediscover-
ing" in the first place.
They
>found it in the films of Howard Hawks, William Wyler and Alfred
>Hitchcock (the book of Truffaut's interviews of Hitchcock may well be
>the greatest book on the cinema ever published), and they brought the
>inspiration home in such films as A bout de souffle, which remains the
>epitome of what a European version of an American film looks like.
>
>In order for B-movies to achieve a recognition they never sought, they
>first had to be exported to Europe, and then re-imported back to
>Hollywood. The same kind of thing happened with other genres, as when
>the Western was revived by Sergio Leone.
Of course, "B-movies" simply refer to cost, not to inherent
quality. And while, yes, the film noirs are B movies, there
are many movies which could be called film noirs that fail
miserably as drama. What amazes me is that SO MANY of them
hold up so much better than the A's, the expensive Hollywood
mainstream stuff of the day. So, Alan, despite who discovered
or rediscovered them (not to suggest Truffaut and Goddard and
the other French critics do not deserve praise for their
prescience) the film noirs hold up so well today from the
combined result of the acting, directorial, and writing
talent that went into them. (Anyone seen "Dark Passage"?
Talk about "pacing"...never a dull moment!)
>
>The French wine-growing industry has in recent years been radically
>overhauled by the growth of British supermarket sales. It's a
>phenomenon that's not restricted to the cinema.
alt.genius.bill-palmer
>
>--
>AH