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Sunday, February 24
HOLLYWOOD: ART VERSUS COMMERCE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 24 Feb 2008 02:24 AM PST
One
of the enduring myths of Hollywood is that the town is an eternal
battleground between art and commerce -- between studio executives who
only care about money and filmmakers who only care about art.
The truth is that movies have been, almost since the moment they were
invented, a popular art form. They attracted, for the most part,
popular artists -- which is to say, artists who wanted to reach large
audiences. Long before there was an established studio system run
by corporate functionaries, filmmakers courted a mass audience and
reached it. The financial returns that followed created the industry that corporations at once set about dominating and controlling.
The art of cinema was created by the same people who created the mass
market for films -- Griffith, Chaplin, Pickford, Keaton, Lloyd.
Because they were popular artists, commerce was an intimate aspect of
their endeavor. The corporate executives who took over the
industry these artists created were by no means more
interested in the box office than the artists had been -- they were
interested in power and turning the art form into a more predictable
revenue source . . . interests which often conflicted with maximum
box-office potential.
When executives and filmmakers clashed over the content of films, it
was not a battle between art and commerce -- it was a battle between
popular artists who actually knew how to make popular films and
bean-counters who thought they knew better. Since the
bean-counters quickly gained a virtual monopoly over the distribution
of films, they had the last word, and also the ability to insure that
this word could never be challenged, since the overruled filmmakers had
no practical way of getting films before the public without the
bean-counters' consent.
John Ford fought constantly with studio executives and, by his account,
never won a single battle with them -- but does anyone seriously
believe that Ford, one of the most consistently successful popular
artists since Dickens, was fighting for some private, noncommercial artistic vision? Ford did make a few films, like The Fugitive,
which he may have known in advance would not be wildly commercial, but
for the most part he wanted to address a mass audience as effectively
as possible. For a genuine popular artist like Ford -- or Dickens, or Shakespeare, for that matter -- there is no
conflict between art and commerce.
Ford was fighting against executives who could not have created a
popular work of art if their lives depended on it, executives who only
managed and bullied and second-guessed those who could create such
works. The real issue was not art or commerce -- it was
power. Without their corporate control of the means of film
distribution, these executives would have remained in the realm of
exhibition, from which most of them emerged and where they belonged.
Hollywood in truth has been a battleground between monopoly and a free
market, between corporate standardization and homogenization and
entrepreneurial innovation. The conflict between art and commerce
has been nothing more than a smokescreen.
Tuesday, February 19
CHEYENNE AUTUMN
by
Lloydville
on Tue 19 Feb 2008 12:26 AM PST
This
was the next to last feature film John Ford completed, in 1964, when he
was 69 years-old. It doesn't work as a drama, much less a
melodrama, or as a character study or as an historical epic . . . but
it's one of the most sublime visual poems in the history of movies and
a very great work of art.
It tells the once little-known story of a band of Cheyenne who, in
1879, broke out of confinement on a reservation in Indian territory,
present-day Oklahoma, and made a 1500-mile trek back to their homeland
in Montana. Pursued and harried by a succession of cavalry
expeditions, starved and near death, the band made it to its old home where
it was allowed to remain.
In his excellent commentary on the wonderful new DVD edition of the film, Ford
biographer Joseph McBride says that Ford originally intended to make Cheyenne Autumn
as a small, black-and-white film, an intimate study of the Cheyenne
pilgrims, but that he was persuaded by the studio to expand it into a
big wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza. It was, says McBride, a
"Faustian bargain" which led to a film that was neither fish nor fowl,
since Ford lost sight of the Cheyenne characters yet failed to create a
genuine epic.
This may indeed reflect the development of the project but I think it
misses the essence of the film that Ford finally made. All
of the characters in the film, both Cheyenne and white, recede into the
images, become secondary to the images. Ford doesn't lose sight
of them as dramatic personae because he has no real interest in them as
dramatic personae. They're just narrative markers that guide us
through the landscape of the film.
Landscape was always a character in
Ford's Westerns, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the relative
smallness of human intention and desire. It stood in, one might
even say, for the regard of Eternity, in which human endeavor held an
insignificant place. It transformed the melodrama of his stories
into tragic
absurdity.
In Cheyenne Autumn, as in
Shakespeare's late romances, the author lost interest in the mechanics
of plot altogether, in the centrality of individual character, and became enchanted by the
mystery of his medium -- the magical poetry of words, in Shakespeare's
case, and of images in Ford's. The
progress of the Cheyenne through the magnificence of the landscape, the
evolutions of mounted cavalry on the march or at the charge, fill
Ford's imagination fully -- the characters dissolve into the beauty of
movement itself. They are elevated into a transcendent glory not
by the specificity of self but by their possession of space. They
are dancers, sculptures in motion.
This is not an abstract vision, however, a celebration of
technique. In his old age, disillusioned with the legends of the
West he did so much to reinforce, Ford lost his faith in man's
essential goodness, or at least in that part of it related to his
will. Primal values, transcending individual human character,
were all he could believe in -- the dumb urge to go home, to preserve
community, to do one's duty.
At the center of the film Ford inserted, unaccountably to many critics,
a 21-minute sequence set in Dodge City which mercilessly satirizes the
myth of the Western hero, of the frontier town. Jimmy Stewart
appears as a corrupt and cynical Wyatt Earp leading the hysterical townspeople on an
absurd pursuit of the phantom Cheyenne, who in truth are nowhere near
Dodge. The familiar narrative of the old West is deconstructed, revealed as
a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
After this strange interlude, the film switches back to the story of
the Cheyenne, doing what they have to do, and the horse soldiers, doing
what they have to do. When the Cheyenne are restored to their
ancestral Eden, Ford shows us how much they have lost recovering it,
just as
he shows us how much honor the soldiers have lost in fulfilling a duty
that's been applied to a meaningless and inhuman mission.
The triumph on both sides was only in the journey, the movement, the dream -- all of
which vanish in the end, as the eternal landscape looks on impassively.
The
film has a nominal "upbeat" resolution in its penultimate episode in
which
Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, wonderfully played by Edward G.
Robinson, goes to visit the escaped Cheyenne in Montana and promises to
help them stay there. This scene, oddly, is shot against
cheesy-looking back-projections -- such a radical violation of the look
of the rest of the film that it almost seems deliberately surreal . . .
as though Ford was asking us not to take this superficial "climax" too
seriously. Perhaps it can be compared to the improbable events
that "resolve" the narrative of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale,
in which the playwright seems to be asking us to laugh with him at the
conventions of the stage -- to remind us that the true heart of his
work lies elsewhere.
Saturday, February 16
DUDLEY NICHOLS AND JOHN FORD
by
Lloydville
on Sat 16 Feb 2008 11:45 PM PST
With the notable exception of Stagecoach,
I'm not a big fan of the movies John Ford made with screenwriter Dudley
Nichols, even though these include some of Ford's most celebrated and
entertaining films.
Nichols was an extremely skillful writer, with a sound sense of story structure and a good ear (usually) for
colorful dialogue. But he also had a self-conscious, "literary"
style -- he tended to see situations and characters in emblematic,
metaphorical terms. This aspect of Nichols' work encouraged Ford
to indulge his gorgeous visual expressionism at the expense of what he
did best -- create cinematic spaces and places of mesmerizing
specificity. The images of The Lost Patrol and The Informer
are supremely beautiful but they grow claustrophobic after a
while. The desert and the fog-bound city are too obviously
surrogates for existential states, symbolic and airless.
In his best work Ford found ways of imbuing interiors and landscapes
with an uninsistent symbolic quality -- we read them as real spaces and
feel their emotional resonances on a subliminal level. We have a
sense of discovering and exploring these spaces on our own, no matter
how many times we come back to them. The shadowy streets of Gypo
Nolan's Dublin in The Informer, the merciless desert that swallows up The Lost Patrol, are places we visit with a guide, always reminding us what these environments "mean".
The streets of Tombstone in My Darling Clementine,
the unfinished church on the edge of town, the maze of the O. K.
Corral, are every bit as charged with meaning and significance, but
Ford lets us tease them out for ourselves -- he lets us inhabit them at
our ease, until the places seem to speak to us in their own voices.
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