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Wednesday, November 28
OTTO PREMINGER
by
Lloydville
on Wed 28 Nov 2007 04:14 PM PST
In 1963 Jean-Luc Godard published in Cahiers du Cinéma his list of the top ten American sound films of all time.
It featured many of the usual suspects -- Vertigo, The Searchers -- and one film you'd never expect, at least not these days . . . Angel Face (above), a classic film noir directed by Otto Preminger.
Among the French New Wave directors, Preminger was considered one of the
masters of cinema, who could be spoken of in the same breath with
Welles or Ford. Today he holds a place somewhere between Cecil B.
DeMille and Fred Zinneman -- considered a first-rate showman, as an
incarnation of the directorial persona, but otherwise a merely
competent craftsman of studio product.
I really can't explain what happened to his reputation as an
artist. Perhaps the theatricality and commercial calculation of
his directorial persona cheapened him, made him seem less than serious,
as it did for DeMille and even Hitchcock for many years. Truffaut
made Hitchcock respectable again, and DeMille seems to be undergoing
reevaluation these days. Preminger is admired, if he's thought of at all, for his early noirs, and for the noirish Laura. The major works of his later years are appreciated somewhat less enthusiastically.
These later films, like In Harm's Way,
for example, have the feel of standard studio prestige pictures of
their time -- but in truth they're far more interesting than that,
certainly on a visual, cinematic level. They are
filled with movies within movies -- elaborately choreographed scenes
that often play out in one or two shots with a highly mobile
camera. These passages are breathtaking -- they impart a sense of
being someplace rather than of watching something.
They are, as the New Wave critics might have put it, passages of pure
cinema -- examples of the discursive style largely lost to mainstream
movies since the coming of sound. Ford, also working in the
mainstream, got away with this sort of thing mostly because he worked
in genre -- in Westerns we were supposed to sit back and enjoy watching
men ride horses through spectacular spaces. But the long tracking
shot that contains almost the whole first scene of In Harm's Way,
set at a naval officers' party in Hawaii on the eve of Pearl Harbor, is
very unusual in a big-budget studio melodrama. It's exceptionally
effective -- drawing us into the time and place on a subliminal level,
making us feel vulnerable to the Japanese attack that's unleashed the
next morning.
Almost all of Preminger's films have passages like this and they linger
in the mind, even if the film as a whole is disappointing. Bonjour Tristesse
is one of the most disappointing of Preminger's films, but its mood and
sense of place were the things Godard riffed on to produce Contempt
-- which is almost a formal variation on the visual and dramatic themes of the
earlier work. (And of course it was Jean Seberg's odd but
compelling performance in Bonjour Tristesse that inspired Godard to cast her in Breathless.)
Preminger is due, overdue, for a comprehensive critical reevaluation.
Wednesday, November 21
A JOHN HUSTON QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 21 Nov 2007 02:50 AM PST
We can make good movies or we can make bad movies. The bad movies
cost a bit more, but if they give us enough money, we can make them
just as bad as they want them to be.
Wednesday, November 14
WINSOR MCCAY AND THE CINEMA
by
Lloydville
on Wed 14 Nov 2007 11:05 AM PST
The
influence that went on, back and forth, between the cinema and other
visual arts has often been noticed but rarely studied in detail.
Writers on cinema have produced tome after tome about the influence of the
stage and literature on movies, but the visual side of things has
rarely been subjected to rigorous investigation.
Partly this is because the two principal visual influences on movies,
comic strips and Victorian academic painting, have had little prestige
in the scholarly culture, and partly it's because these two forms have
been hard to study themselves. First-rate reproductions of even
the most important comic strips have been difficult to come by, and
Victorian academic painting tends to languish in storage in museums, to
make room in the galleries for the junk creations of "modern art".
With respect to comic strips, things are changing. Splendid reproductions of seminal strips like Popeye, Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates
are becoming available in ongoing series, and Winsor McCay is getting
spectacular treatment in large over-sized volumes which do full justice
to his amazing visions. (See here and here.)
New revelations about the connection between comic strips and movies should
follow. Here's a brief slideshow (via Boing Boing) created by a critic at the Boston Globe
which surveys some of the most obvious ways Winsor McCay's work has
influenced the iconography of movies. It's based on observations in a new collection of McCay's strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend. More complex issues of
narrative technique and composition will surely come to the fore in the
future. [McCay created some of the earliest animated cartoons, so
his influence on film animation has long been appreciated, but his
influence on movies in general was far more comprehensive, as the
slideshow suggests.]
If you want to contemplate the connection between cinema and Victorian
academic painting you will just have to settle at present for my
passing observations in the essays collected here.
Saturday, November 10
THE WAR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 10 Nov 2007 06:27 AM PST
Reading Hitler's War,
David Irving's massive, exhaustive study of WWII as seen from Hitler's
perspective, is riveting but spiritually exhausting. We will
never have a more sympathetic portrayal of Hitler and his motives, at
least not one consistent with the purely factual record, but what vapid
company the Führer turns out to be. Even the glamor of evil can't
redeem him and his henchmen from their utter banality, from the sheer
colossal mind-numbing stupidity of their fear of and paranoia about "world
Jewry". As they grow in power their puny souls seem smaller and
smaller -- consistent with the bunch of clever, fanatical, provincial
hacks they were. It will be to Germany's eternal shame that it
consented to be led in momentous times by such mediocre shadows of men.
A useful specific for the soul-sickness induced by Irving's book is Ken Burn's 15-hour documentary The War.
It's not without its passages of moral self-congratulation, but its
greatest value lies in its willingness to confront the darkness that
the war summoned up in the victors, especially in the young men who had
to fight it on the front lines. In the filmed interviews, the American combat
survivors -- old men looking back on the war after more than half a
century -- still tremble when they recall what they had to do, still seem
mystified that they could do it.
Like the Germans and the Japanese, the good guys in this war learned to
kill without mercy -- even to kill defenseless civilians and unarmed
prisoners. And sometimes they experienced an exhilaration in
killing. The experience shook their souls and by the evidence
they never really got over it. The fact that they won a "good
war", or a "necessary war" as one of them prefers to call it, didn't
heal the wounds within.
Hitler, and the Japanese warlords, sought to glorify the merciless
killing of war -- sought to embrace it as a given of nature. The
soldiers of the great democracies may have recognized it as a given of
nature, but their refusal to glorify it, to accept it willingly as a part of who
they were, even in a just cause, makes for a startling contrast to
the supposed "realism" of a man like Hitler. It gives the heart a
little breathing space in a heartless world.
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