Written for the Pesaro International Film Festival (July 2016). Most of this piece is made up of earlier articles on the same general subject, so the reader should bear in mind that some of my positions and opinions (such as my estimation of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma) have changed over the years. — J.R.
Criticism on Film
From Sight and Sound (Winter 1990/91):
It’s no secret that serious film criticism in print has become an increasingly scarce commodity, while ‘entertainment news’, bite-size reviewing and other forms of promotion in the media have been steadily expanding. (I’m not including academic film criticism, a burgeoning if relatively sealed-off field which has developed a rhetoric and tradition of its own — the principal focus of David Bordwell’s fascinating book Making Meaning). But the existence of serious film commentary on film, while seldom discussed as an autonomous entity, has been steadily growing, and in some cases supplanting the sort of work which used to appear only in print.
I am not thinking of the countless talking-head ‘documentaries’ about current features — actually extended promos financed by the studios or production companies — which include even such a relatively distinguished example as Chris Marker’s AK (1985), about the making of Kurosawa’s Ran. The problem with these efforts is that they further blur the distinction between advertising and criticism, and thus make it even harder for ordinary viewers to determine whether they are being informed about something or simply being sold a bill of goods. What I have in mind are films about films and film-makers which seriously analyze or document their subjects. Many of these films surface at festivals, turn up on TV, and are used in academic courses, but very few ever wind up in commercial theatres, and so are rarely reviewed outside the trade journals. I can’t claim to be comprehensive in this survey, so what follows is merely meant to be suggestive, and mainly weighted towards what I’ve seen recently.
A few words about the conventions of this sub-genre. Most films about the work of a film-maker have a standard itinerary: a show-and-tell format, consisting of interviews (with the film-maker and friends, associates, biographers, critics), clips, and, if the subject is still alive, footage documenting work on a recent feature. The best examples from the past include Peter Bogdanovich’s Directed by John Ford (1971), Philo Bregstein’s Whoever Tells the Truth Shall Die (on Pasolini, 1980), Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s Unknown Chaplin (1983) and Michael Ventura’s ‘I’m Almost Not Crazy’: John Cassavetes, The Man and His Work (1984), Patrick Montgomery’s The Man You Loved to Hate (1979), scripted by Richard Koszarski and intended as a companion to his Stroheim biography, illustrates the advantages and drawbacks of this approach. Clips from a good many rare films in which Stroheim acted are invaluable, and interviews with many people who knew Stroheim well give us a vivid sense of his personality; but the amount of concrete information imparted is minuscule compared with Koszarski’s book. Production histories of each film whiz by so rapidly that we are ultimately left with much more about Stroheim’s public profile than his directorial style. The commentary is certainly enlightened, but if we want any sense of how Stroheim’s style evolved, we have to look elsewhere.
Much the same can be said of Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer (1990), with the difference that here there is no satisfactory biography to fall back on — unless one counts the recently published Preston Sturges, skilfully edited and adapted by Sandy Sturges from her husband’s unfinished autobiography, letters and diaries. We do, however, have Manny Farber and W. S. Poster’s essay ‘Preston Sturges: Success in the Movies’ and Penelope Houston’s Sturges entry in Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, both of which contain critical insights which the film makes no attempt to approximate. Directed by Kenneth Bowser and written by the former Variety critic and reporter Todd McCarthy, the documentary competently lays out the basic facts and contradictions of Sturges’ life and meteoric career; and it’s notable for the variety of archive material it draws on, from radio interviews, through Sturges’ cameo appearance in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), to photographs and verbal accounts of the gabmaster at work. Its overall approach is biographical rather than critical, but it does a brisk, professional job of squeezing in a lot of data without seeming ponderous; the choice of clips and the lean, functional narration usually come together with maximal efficiency.
Two facets of Sturges’ career are, however, regrettably glossed over: his extraordinary stock company of character actors and his last film. Andrew Sarris perceptively describes how these actors function in a typical Sturges scene, and the narration goes on to cite half-a-dozen names while subliminally quick close-ups from a group photograph flash by: William Demarest, Jimmy Conlin, Robert Warwick, Jack Norton, Robert Greig, Frank Moran. But given the Bruegelian richness of this aspect of Sturges’ art, the list should have been much longer — at least a dozen major names are omitted, from Edgar Kennedy and Raymond Walburn to Lionel Stander and Akim Tamiroff — and a clip illustrating the choral function of these characters would not have been amiss.
Made in France in 1956 in separate French and English versions, Les Carnets du Major Thompson and The French They Are a Funny Race/The Diary of Major Thompson — Sturges’ rare swan song is the only film he directed not to be accorded a clip. Apart from Pauline Kael’s judicious short notice in 5001 Nights at the Movies, almost every critical reference to the film in print writes it off as dreadful, and this documentary clearly concurs by so hastily gliding past it. Having seen the English version, however, I beg to differ. While it is far from a masterpiece, the film has sweetness, gallantry, wit and an uncharacteristic leisurely pace that is elegiac rather than inert. (If there is a dreadful film in the Sturges canon — and I am afraid there is — it’s The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend.)
These cavils aside, the picture is a good example of what the conventional show-and-tell format can accomplish. The same is true of Paul Joyce’s Motion and Emotion: The Films of Wim Wenders (1989), though here the film’s principal value is as a work of criticism. This is a rare virtue in American show-and- tell documentaries, which usually try to hide their critical biases — as the Sturges documentary does with its disdain for the director’s last film. Motion and Emotion, on the other hand, conveys a sense of what is both questionable and praiseworthy about Wenders’ work. Without being malicious or polemical, it also offers the best ideological critique of Wenders I have encountered: much of this comes from the critic Kraft Wetzel who remarks, during a fascinating discussion touching on the director’s use of women and children, that Wenders will be remembered as the Christian Democrat of the New German Cinema. As a detailed investigation of a major contemporary film-maker, this documentary strikes me as a more valuable overall appraisal than any book or article I have read on the director, even providing the basis for a critique-in-advance, as it were, of Wenders’ Notebook on Cities and Clothes.
Christian Blackwood’s Signed: Lino Brocka focuses more on its subject’s life than on his films; considering Brocka’s career, however, this approach seems sensible. (It worked less well when applied to Raul Ruiz in Jill Evans’ Exiles series on Channel 4; there the emphasis on how nice a fellow Ruiz was didn’t leave much space for dealing with the more subversive aspects of his work.) The film opens with shots of Manila, while we hear Brocka speaking on the phone in English to someone in France. He tells Blackwood he is responding to a French survey about why he makes films; then he reads his reply, a lengthy statement which concludes, ‘Film for me recaptures the spontaneous, pure, no-nonsensical relationship I had with the world as a child. This is why later, when I learned what was happening to my countrymen, I decided I also wanted to be part of those who tell the truth — I wanted to cry and I wanted to disturb. . .signed, Lino Brocka.’
Cut to a shot of Brocka directing. The movie-in-progress, we learn, is being made as a favour to a producer who paid Brocka’s bail bond when he was arrested for acting as a negotiator in a 1985 jitney transit strike. Brocka goes on to describe his difficult childhood, his varied background (including work as a monk in a Hawaiian leper colony), his developing relationship to his homosexuality, the local film industry, his hatred for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, and his growing activism. What impresses one most through this extended illustrated conversation with Blackwood is the courage and intelligence of Brocka’s candour.
When clips from his films are shown — shot directly from a screen or movieola — Brocka translates the dialogue, explains the plots and offers some self-critical asides to Blackwood. The documentary assumes, as well as demonstrates, a continuity between Brocka’s passion as a director and his passion as a human being, and while Brocka speaking cannot wholly take the place of seeing a Brocka film, it provides an absorbing introduction.
The French emphasis on style and form has on occasion breathed new life into the standard show-and-tell format, notably in André Labarthe and Janine Bazin’s TV series Cinéastes de notre temps, which has been appearing since the 60s and which often imitates the shooting and editing styles of the directors interviewed. Thus, Josef von Sternberg was accorded Sternbergian lighting while he spoke about The Saga of Anatahan; Samuel Fuller’s anecdotes and two-fisted aphorisms were punctuated with staccato editing; and Cassavetes was filmed around the time of Faces (by Labarthe and Hubert Knapp) with a hand-held camera in his own home and environs. One sometimes regrets the absence of any impulse to contextualise the directors’ remarks in a more critical light. Like most of Sternberg’s critics, Labarthe seems to accept at face value the director’s insistence that apart from the sea everything in Anatahan is artificial and created for the camera. But what of the key archive sequence of Japanese soldiers returning after the war? Without the dialectical power of this documentary intrusion — particularly in relation to the abstract homecoming sequence — the greatness of Anatahan would be substantially diminished. More recently, in Cinéma de notre temps, a successor to Cinéastes…, David Lynch is filmed by Guy Girard at his home, dictating a script to a secretary while the camera drifts dreamily into the next room to pick up a slanted view of Eraserhead on a TV set before gliding back to Lynch again. Thanks partly to the questions offered, this is a sharper portrait of Lynch than the usual promos, but it is still some distance from a genuine critical overview.
Labarthe has recently applied similar tactics to a semi-fictional feature in English about the last days of Orson Welles — called The Big O in English, and L’Homme qui a vu I’homme qui a vu I’ours in French — and in several ways this uneven work summarises the achievements and pitfalls in the sort of mimetic journalism which has engaged Labarthe over several decades. Described as a ‘fictional essay,’ The Big O resurrects the fictional Laszlo Kovacs — an alias of Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Breathless, reprised by Belmondo in modified form in Chabrol’s A Double Tour – played here by New Wave bit actor (and post-New Wave director) Laszlo Szabo, serving as Labarthe’s virtual stand-in. Trying to launch a feature of his own in Los Angeles, Kovacs becomes obsessed with investigating what Welles was up to before he died. With the aid of friends, he improbably arranges a series of interviews with former associates and acquaintances of Welles, most of them conducted in Szabo’s heavily accented English (although John Houseman, filmed shortly before his own death, speaks in French). Eventually, Kovacs moves to New York and Paris for further revelations and metaphysical speculations.
Although the film improves as it proceeds, it is limited by a perverse capriciousness in terms of style and scholarship: a plethora of tilted angles, dominating the first half, conveys only a superficial notion of Welles’ mutable style (although later the film becomes more subtle when it imitates the lighting scheme of the Orly sequence of F for Fake); and the treatment of Welles as a mythic father figure, the subject of an Oedipal search, oscillates uneasily between genuine investigation and a refusal to sort out truth and legend. Houseman’s frequent claim that Welles never wrote a word of Citizen Kane has been definitively disproved, but you would never guess it here, where Houseman’s repetition of this lie — refuted even in his own correspondence with Welles while Kane was in production — is permitted to go unchallenged.
By contrast, Henry Jaglom’s assertion that he openly taped many of his conversations with Welles at the latter’s own request is refuted in detail by Welles’ long-time associate Alessandro Tasca di Cuto, reportedly the last person to have seen Welles alive, who states that the taping, belatedly discovered by Welles, was done without his prior knowledge or consent. Labarthe is somewhat cavalier about distinguishing between authorities and braggarts; many of the participants, moreover, were interviewed without knowing that they were appearing in a semi-fictional work, so levels of deception come into play on both sides. What this adds up to may not be entirely satisfactory as either research or criticism, although as a tortured. reflection on the lures and snares of French cinephilia, it is often a pungent document.
Some of the most interesting documentaries adopt some or all of the show-and-tell format only to subvert it, and in ways that are more fruitful than Labarthe’s. Orson Welles’ Filming Othello (1978), a prime instance of this skullduggery, features clips from Welles’ 1952 Othello, yet all but the first of these are substantially re-edited by Welles and shown silent while he offers commentary over them. While Welles never alludes to this procedure – except perhaps in an aside on ‘quoting or misquoting’ critical comments by Jack Jorgens and André Bazin — it has the provocative and unsettling effect of continually transforming the supposedly fixed object under examination. We are hearing about a film made in 1952, but what we are seeing is the scrambled shards of a dream of Othello, oddly akin to the dreamlike prologue of Citizen Kane, rather than the film itself.
Three academic studies of early cinema deserve attention. While some of the historical assertions in Noël Burch’s Correction, Please, or How We Got Into Pictures (1979) and What Do Those Old Films Mean? (1985) are open to debate, the use of fiction in the former film to illustrate theories about the evolution of film form between 1900 and 1906 is imaginative and inventive, and both works offer sustained looks at rare archive footage in near optimum conditions.
Thom Andersen’s Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974), by contrast, seems unimpeachable both as history and film-making. Beginning with a quote from Mao and ending with allusions to Zeno and Da Vinci, it is remarkable for the amount of information it imparts in an hour, and for the economy with which it suggests the philosophical, sociological, scientific, aesthetic, optical, technical and theoretical implications of Muybridge’s motion studies without belaboring any of them. Using split-screen effects to juxtapose simultaneously two or more angles and/or speeds in these studies, and even simulating one Muybridge study in color, the film superimposes its own analytical grids over Muybridge’s, and thus yields a complex historical meditation.
A more recent theoretical study is Godard’s TV series Histoire(s) de cinéma (1988) -– an extremely hermetic (if fascinating) work using dozens of clips, stills, printed titles and fragments of soundtracks, many of them simultaneously or in rapid alternation, along with his own fragmented commentary, to tease out various apparent relationships between film and history. Godard concocted this delirious exercise in associative collage at precisely the point where the cinephilia that launched his own generation is nearing extinction, which means that most of his linkages are bound to be semi-comprehensible at best, even to specialists.
The printed title ‘le cinema substitue’ ushers in alternating snatches of Murnau’s Faust (Faust and Mephistopheles at the crossroads) and Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire dancing in a bar), accompanied by a few lines of dialogue (the narrator seducing the heroine) from Last Year in Marienbad. That the dance occurs inside a stage musical based on Faust may be apparent to some spectators, although not many of them are likely to recognize the Murnau clip or the Marienbad dialogue, much less make the Faustian connections. Even if they do, what are they (or we) then to make of the apparently unrelated, subliminal glimpses of films by Renoir and Mizoguchi which follow?
Local clusters are often witty, or at least until further clusters come along to interrupt on dissipate them: Howard Hughes is identified by the title Only Angels Have Wings, followed by shots of an airplane, Charles Foster Kane,the RKO logo, and then, through a kind of delirium of association, the arrival of the aviator in Paris at the beginning of La Règle du jeu. The old woman being burned as a witch in Dreyer’s Day of Wrath is accompanied by Rita Hayworth singing ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ from Gilda. But when the latter linkage is then followed by old Borgen calling for his son Johannes in Ordet, thereby establishing a link with Dreyer which seems to cancel out the feminist wisecrack, one feels cast adrift in a private reverie. ‘Let’s say, for example, that the history of cinema is the history of all the films that have never been made,’ Godard suggests, and promptly illustrates with evocations of Welles’ Don Quixote, Othello, Kane, Journey into Fear, It’s All True and F for Fake – only two of which qualify as unfinished, much less unmade.
Given the perpetual drift in and out of meaning, this on-going series might be regarded as Godard’s Finnegans Wake. But half a century of scholarship has decoded or at least illuminated the meaning-clusters of Joyce, while it is difficult, alas, to foresee comparable efforts being made on behalf of Godard. There’s something quixotic about this last-ditch effort to process the history of cinema through his fanciful and cryptic pronouncements -– a kind of shorthand synthesis of (or desperate aide memoire for) what we’ve already forgotten, or at best, like Godard himself, only half-remembered. In so far as all the films about films discussed here are efforts to retrieve or resurrect continuities of film history that the marketplace continues to rend asunder, Godard’s desperate magpie assemblage – dedicated to Mary Meerson of the Cinémathèque Française — at least has the virtue of suggesting the range of what is being lost and squandered.
Criticism on Film: The Sequel (Spring 2016)
Invited by Adriano Aprà to update this article fifteen years later, I find that I have to move at once in opposite directions — that is, both backwards, to take in some of the earliest examples of DVD “extras” as well as a subsequent review of mine of some of the BFI national film “histories” on film, and forward, to sketch in the dimensions of a field that has grown so large over the past few years that no single individual can pretend to offer a comprehensive survey of it all. Indeed, the most that I can hope to accomplish in this task is to cite a few exemplary works, individuals, and approaches, with the understanding that others can and should add to this list.
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I. The “mosaic” approach (1)
“Having provided over 30 audio commentaries for DVD releases,” Australian film critic Adrian Martin wrote five years ago in his column for the Dutch film magazine Filmkrant, “I feel I have earned the right to criticize the format. These voice-over commentaries provided by filmmakers, critics and historians are decidedly a mixed blessing. I sometimes wonder whether anybody, except the most dedicated and/or masochistic researcher, ever listens to them all the way through. No one can doubt that these voice-tracks sometimes give us splendid insight or information that we cannot obtain elsewhere in print. But are they really the best we can do in the quest to marry film criticism with the film-object itself?”
Martin is hardly alone in articulating this position. Many of my friends who collect DVDs, maybe even most of them, avow that they tend to skip audio commentaries entirely, and it’s difficult not to share their bias. In most of these run-on spiels, the remarks rarely coincide with what one is seeing (or hearing), and one often feels that the commentator, whether it’s a critic or a participant in the filmmaking, is simply taking the easy way out — doing a free-form improvisation rather than bothering to write a carefully considered text. For my own part, with the exception of a single solo audio commentary for Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, I’ve so far agreed to furnish audio commentaries only when I’m having a dialogue with someone else — James Naremore (about Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil), Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (about Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up and The Wind Will Carry Us), or David Kalat (about the recently discovered longer cut of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis). The prospect of doing a single-voice commentary has always struck me as intrusive, at least if one agrees with my premise that a film critic’s job is basically to facilitate (rather than monopolize) the discussion that takes place around a film.
Perhaps an even bigger problem is the compulsive linearity and artificial continuity of the form itself — the necessity of having something cohesive to impart for the entire length of a feature. This suggests, like much else in contemporary film culture, that we’re hampered by clinging to outdated discursive habits that no longer apply with the same validity. Compared with theatrical viewings of films, DVD watching tends to be a more fragmented experience, which suggests that a more fragmented form of film commentary might also be appropriate, whether this is in a spoken or printed form — and not in order to be lazy in a different fashion but in order to organize the material differently. Even though one could also argue that declining literacy and shortened attention spans have made extended analyses and arguments less desirable, it might make more sense to concede that there are also certain advantages and even gains in aiming for a mosaic approach.
These thoughts were provoked in part by the DVD releases of five Russian classics — two by Lev Kuleshov, Engineer Prite’s Project (1918) and The Great Consoler (1933); two by Sergei Eisenstein, Strike (1925) and October (1927); and Alexander Medvedkin’s Happiness (1934) — on a label called Academia being distributed by Ruscico (short for Russian Cinema Council). Each release is a two-disc PAL set priced at $40, and I’ve so far been able to spend time with three of them: October, Engineer Prite’s Project, and The Great Consoler. [2016 postscript: more titles in this series, including Boris Barnet’s sublime 1935 By the Bluest of Seas, are now available from http://www.ruscico.com/catalog/dvdsearch/.)
None of these, I hasten to add, has an audio commentary. But all three, in an innovative manner that is dubbed “Hyperkino,” provide printed onscreen commentaries with various illustrations (stills, photographs, clippings, and/or film clips), and all these commentaries are on disparate topics — “matters arising,” as the late Raymond Durgnat liked to put it. This means, of course, that one can interactively decide which topics to access and in what order. Each of the Kuleshov films is given 30 separate topics, while October is accorded no less than 44.
It might be argued that one reason why Kuleshov and Eisenstein are the first Russian filmmakers to receive this sort of treatment is that their importance as film theorists may actually exceed their achievements as filmmakers — a distinction that to my mind is far more supportable in Kuleshov’s case. (Indeed, one might argue that Kuleshov remained, for better and for worse, an inspired amateur throughout his career.) Whether or not one accepts this premise, the need for historical annotation to properly understand their films and their theories is hard to deny, and the fact that theory and practice need to be treated separately as well as in relation to one another already suggests that more than one route into their lives and careers is clearly desirable. Even if it can’t account for everything — there are peculiarities in The Great Consoler that are unexplained in Kuleshov’s theorizing, such as his decision to keep the heroine’s best friend perpetually offscreen while laughing abrasively — a multifaceted approach winds up clarifying a great deal.
The reason why each Hyperkino set contains two discs is to give the viewer a choice — part of the interactive idea. Each disc has the same film, but on the disc with all the commentaries, numbers flash in the upper right corner of the frame corresponding to the relevant commentary that can be accessed with one’s remote control. On the second disc, where the film is unencumbered by flashing numbers, there are many more different kinds of optional subtitles available — not just English and Russian, which are already available on the first disc, but also French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
It’s commendable that Academia is committed to making these DVDs multilingual, yet ironic (and, alas, characteristic of Russian insularity) that this only becomes apparent once one accesses their menus. The language used on the boxes of all three releases that I have is exclusively Russian. (This is also true of another outstanding Ruscico release, Kira Muratova’s madly inspired Chekhovian Motifs, which is accompanied by a fascinating documentary about Muratova and sells for only $26.) And some might also fault both Ruscico’s website and its “annotated” Academia editions for not being more user-friendly; both demand a certain amount of patience in figuring out how they can best be navigated. Nevertheless, I think they’re onto something potentially groundbreaking and fruitful — and not just for film courses but also, more generally, for educating the general public.
The nonlinear methology employed here isn’t entirely unprecedented. For me, the major pioneering work in this vein appeared almost a decade ago, in 2001, by Joan Neuberger and Yuri Tsivian, in their separate “multimedia” essays about Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible on the Criterion DVDs devoted to that film’s two parts: “The History of Ivan” by Neuberger on the first disc, with Part I, and “Eisenstein’s Visual Vocabulary” by Tsivian on the second, with Part II. Significantly, both scholars published short books about Ivan the Terrible a little later — Tsivian in the BFI Film Classics in 2002, Neuberger in the KinoFile Film Companion series in 2003 — but as excellent as these two studies are, and despite the fact that as short books they can include more material than DVD extras, their audiovisual essays are far more impressive to me as criticism, largely because they can demonstrate most of their points immediately and succinctly via sound and image. Together they’ve transformed my understanding and appreciation of Eisenstein’s masterpiece profoundly, far more than anything I’ve read about it before or since. Among other things, they show conclusively that the two parts of Ivan the Terrible, far from representing any cowardly retreat on Eisenstein’s part (as some early critics maintained), are among the most politically courageous films ever made by anyone.
So it’s important to point out that the 44 printed commentaries offered on the Hyperkino October are also by Tsivian, and they provide more of a critical model for how a nonlinear criticism might be developed than those on the two recent Kuleshov releases. It’s also pertinent that the Kuleshov commentaries are mostly historical, whereas Tsivian’s commentaries about October more often combine historical information with critical insights. To cite just the first half-dozen of the topics broached, these are “The Dismantlement of the Monument,” “Right and Left Change Places,” “Raised Scythes,” “Denarrativization of the Event,” “Edouard Tissé as an Actor,” and “Visual and Kinesthetic Rhyme.”
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Sadly, only three of the five reels of Engineer Prite’s Project (called simply Engineer Prite on Ruscico’s website) have survived, and all of the original intertitles are lost as well, so what remains, even as a half-hour “reconstruction,” is necessarily a much more specialized item than either October or The Great Consoler. But its historical importance is enormous, and not only because it was the first Russian film to employ montage as a concept. It was made when Kuleshov was only 18 (and it starred his brother Boris, eight years older, in the title role) — the same year he experienced the Russian Revolution, after having spent much of the previous year directing newsreels and working for the great pre-revolution Russian director Yevgeni Bauer (mainly as a production designer, but also as an actor). The authors of the commentary here, Nikolai Izvolov and Natascha Drubek, have in fact included the surviving fragments of Engineer Prite — running only 15 minutes, without music or intertitles — on the second disc, along with an excellent 1969 documentary, S. Raitburt’s The Kuleshov Effect, made about a year before Kuleshov died, and interviewing him at length, both about his filmmaking and his far lengthier career as a teacher (including some fascinating remarks about Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo). Also interviewed is the father of Russian Formalism, Viktor Shklovsky, who worked with Kuleshov as a screenwriter on a Jack London adaptation, By the Law, in 1926.
Kuleshov’s students included Barnet, Eisenstein, and Pudovkin; they often had to work without any film stock at all, which may help to explain how and why their teacher became the most formative of all Russian film theorists, the man who invented montage as a concept. Kuleshov himself credited D.W. Griffith as the inventor of montage as a practice, and one of the more fascinating aspects of his films is the degree to which they use the United States, a country he never visited, as a privileged setting — not only in Engineer Prite’s Project and The Great Consoler, but also in By the Law and Horizon (1932), his first sound film, while his best-known comedy, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), featured an American title hero. Plainly, America was important not only for the speed and freshness of its silent cinema; it seems that setting so many of his films there also allowed him to speak about Russia without having to worry about censorship. And when it came to The Great Consoler — which film historian Jay Leyda once called “the only impressive Soviet film that has ever been set in the United States” — this allowed Kuleshov to create a complex meditation on the social impact of art as filtered through both the life and storytelling of William Sydney Porter, best known by his pen name, O. Henry.
The helpful commentary is provided by Yekaterina Khokhlova — the granddaughter of the great, mannerist White Russian actress Aleksandra Khokhlova, whom Kuleshov met in 1920 and married, and who quickly became his major collaborator, lead actress, and muse. To give some idea of what’s annotated, let me briefly outline the ninth, 10th, and 11th commentaries: “Weyland Rodd’s film debut” actually has less to say about the black American expatriate who plays one of O. Henry’s fellow convicts, sings a song, and speaks fluent Russian (and who would go on to play in several other Soviet films, including an adaptation of Tom Sawyer) than it does about the treatment of interracial themes in ’30s Soviet cinema, a fascinating subject in its own right. But Khokhlova has plenty to say about “the principal actor,” Konstantin Khokhlov, in her 10th commentary — a well-known stage professional who played O. Henry, and was widely criticized for the theatricality of his performance, which Kuleshov maintained was deliberate and central to his own design. And “the borderline between reality and invention” (No. 11) discusses how Kuleshov filmed O. Henry’s story “The Metamorphosis of James Valentine” in the style of silent cinema, complete with intertitles, music, and one brief animated sequence, in contrast to the “talkie” style of the rest of the film, which deals with both O. Henry’s imprisonment, where he wrote the story about safecracker Valentine, and the subsequent impact of this story on a shopgirl (played by Khokhlova).
The fact that these commentaries belong to a hybrid form — existing somewhere between reading and watching, like various computer-related activities — is part of what seems forward-looking about them. Developments in fragmented, mosaic forms of print criticism can be spotted elsewhere — e.g., Chris Fujiwara‘s 800-page anthology Defining Moments in Movies (Cassell, 2007), to which I and Dennis Lim, the editor of Moving Image Source, both contributed — and perhaps belong in a similar category. One might also mention some of the experiments in illustration and layout employed by the online film journal Rouge. What all these forms of criticism suggest is not merely a less linear way of approaching film experience but also a more interactive methodology. The fact that movies are being seen more and more often away from public theaters shouldn’t necessarily mean that the way we all experience them and share our experiences is any less social. Perhaps it’s more pertinent to note that the very forms of our social interactions in relation to films are changing as well.
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II. Audiovisual Critical Essays
- An exemplary negative example: Room 237 (2)
Like so much (too much) of contemporary cinema, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 (2014) is at once entertaining and reprehensible. Alternating between the extravagant commentaries of five analysts of Kubrick’s The Shining (Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Julie Kearns, John Fell Ryan, Jay Weidner), it refuses to make any distinctions between interpretations that are semi-plausible or psychotic, conceivable or ridiculous, implying that they’re all just “film criticism” and because everyone is a film critic nowadays, they all deserve to be treated with equal amounts of respect and/or mockery (assuming that one can distinguish between the two) -– that is, uncritically and derisively, with irony as the perpetual escape hatch. Thus we’re told, in swift succession that The Shining is basically about the genocide of Native Americans, the Holocaust, Kubrick’s apology for having allegedly faked all the Apollo moon-landing footage, the Outlook Hotel’s “impossible” architecture, and/or Kubrick’s contemplation of his own boredom and/or genius. Images from the movie and/or digital alterations of same are made to verify or ridicule these various premises, or maybe both, and past a certain point it no longer matters which of these possibilities are more operative. Unlike his five experts, Ascher won’t take the risk of being wrong himself by behaving like a critic and making comparative judgments about any of the arguments or positions shown, so he inevitably winds up undermining criticism itself by making it all seem like a disreputable, absurd activity. We can’t even tell if he’s representing his commentators fairly; he seems so invested in giving them all equal credibility that he can only make them all into cranks.
Over the course of Ascher’s 104 minutes, I kept thinking that American education and its mistrust of art have a lot to answer for. The puzzle aspects of Last Year at Marienbad and Certified Copy may finally be the least interesting thing about them, but it’s probably the most interesting and important thing about a cynical piece of non-art like Memento, which is possibly what makes that film such a cherished cult item and fetish object in certain Anglo-American circles. One way of removing the threat and challenge of art is reducing it to a form of problem-solving that believes in single, Eureka-style solutions. If works of art are perceived as safes to be cracked or as locks that open only to skeleton keys, their expressive powers are virtually limited to banal pronouncements of overt or covert meanings -– the notion that art is supposed to say something as opposed to do something.
I can only guess at Ascher’s justification for his reductive approach — which doesn’t even bother to include Diane Johnson, Kubrick’s fascinating and talented screenwriter, as part of the discussion. But the safest guess is that he’s pretending to honor some bogus notion of “impartial” journalism and letting “the facts” (presumed to be discovered rather than created or selected) “speak for themselves”. Yet one could argue that one reason why we no longer have much journalism worthy of the name is the catastrophic fantasy that impartiality is either possible or desirable. Which is another way of saying that we need criticism in order to have journalism, and the reductive treatment of all critical voices as equal is the surest way of nullifying all criticism and therefore all journalism as well.
- A Few Mixed Models and Examples
International Harvest [Films about Films] (3)
To celebrate the “100th anniversary of cinema,” the British Film Institute has commissioned a series of documentaries about national cinemas. Some of them are still being made, but the first 13 are showing at the Film Center as part of a series that started early this month with the three-part A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (excellent) and has continued with documentaries by Sam Neill on New Zealand cinema (witty), by Nelson Pereira dos Santos on Latin American cinema (ambitious but unsuccessful), by Edgar Reitz on German cinema (embarrassing), and by Pawel Lozinski on Polish cinema, realizing an outline by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (I haven’t seen it). The Neill and Pereira dos Santos entries, showing again on November 30, are in 35-millimeter, and all the others are being screened in projected video; most of them run a little under an hour. (Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot, an essayistic fiction feature devoted to African cinema that premiered at festivals earlier this year, refused to play by most of the rules established for the series and was dropped from the cycle, though I don’t understand why Pereira dos Santos’s almost equally eccentric Latin America: Cinema of Tears was retained.)
Eight more documentaries in “The Century of Cinema” are still to come at the Film Center, beginning with a pairing of Stephen Frears (British cinema) and Jean-Luc Godard (French) this Friday, followed by Stig Bjorkman (Scandinavian) and Donald Taylor Black (Irish) on November 29, Nagisa Oshima (Japanese) and Jang Sun-woo (Korean) on December 6, and Nikita Mikhalkov and others (Russian) and Stanley Kwan (Chinese language) on December 13.
Judging from the nine entries I’ve seen, this is a highly uneven series. For starters it’s built on the debatable premise that the best way to recount the history of movies is by starting with national cinemas, an approach that fosters insularity, mishandles many major figures who are transnational or multinational (including Akerman, Antonioni, Chaplin, Davies, Dreyer, Godard, Hitchcock, Lang, Murnau, Ruiz, Snow, and Stroheim), and often honors sociology over aesthetics and the typical over the exceptional. Of course most film professors love this approach, because -– to paraphrase critic Bill Krohn writing in another context — it allows one institution (academia) to pay homage to another (national bureaucracy) over the body of an artist. So it’s no surprise that an academic and BFI bureaucrat, Colin McCabe, is the principal architect of this package.
Significantly, the late Henri Langlois — the Turkish-born founder of the French Cinematheque who was arguably the key guru of the French New Wave — spent his life railing against state bureaucracies, and his passion fomented a cinephilia that trampled national boundaries with giddy abandon in the 60s and 70s, much as another brand of cinephilia had in the 20s and 30s. But in more conservative eras such as the present foreign filmmakers have to be exhibited like zoo animals in their native habitats to be delivered to an international audience. This is part of the bias that underlies the BFI’s present agenda, which also often hands over the responsibilities of film history to filmmakers rather than to scholars who’ve had more opportunities to educate themselves on the subject. A similar bias can be found in the retooling of the BFI’s principal magazine, Sight and Sound, over the past five years, away from criticism and scholarship and toward the kind of marketplace currency jive that already informs Premiere and Movieline –- not to mention a massive downsizing of the institute that generally favors bureaucrats over cinephiles. (As a onetime BFI and Sight and Sound employee — albeit one who left voluntarily 20 years ago — I suppose I could be accused of sour grapes; but my main concern is that serious, knowledgeable film scholars have been replaced by slick, less knowledgeable entrepreneurs — a trend that’s also occurring in film institutions in many other countries, including this one.)
The casualties of this approach include the BFI production that tries to cope with its own national turf — a survey that begins with a provocative allusion to a French New Wave figure. Over the opening titles Stephen Frears proclaims, “The great French film director Francois Truffaut once famously said that there was a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain.’ [Pause.] Well [pause] bollocks to Truffaut.” To Frears’s credit, he wears his upper-class background on his sleeve in the autobiography that follows, and the sheer disdain conveyed in his pauses expresses almost as much as his words do. But most of what follows constitutes a weary confirmation of Truffaut’s bias; Frears is so plainly bored by his subject that he can conclude 50-odd minutes later, “The only truth I have learned is that people when they go to the movies like to see American films.” He can’t even imagine why they shouldn’t — or why this bias may say more about the power of Yankee advertising dollars than about Hollywood aesthetics.
Given such a crass sociological survey of English movies, where the bottom line generally seems like the only game in town, it’s hardly surprising to see Frears reject the whole silent era as inconsequential. He patronizes Michael Powell and Humphrey Jennings (accorded one measly clip each); fails to mention Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, or Richard Lester (presumably regarding all three as American interlopers); reduces Ken Russell and Mike Leigh to the worst single clips imaginable (and has nothing to say about the TV work of either); limits John Boorman, Bill Douglas, Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway, Isaac Julien, and Sally Potter to one fleeting movie poster apiece; and omits virtually the entire English documentary movement (though he includes a disparaging nod to Night Mail), along with the cycle of Hammer horror movies — while paying abject obeisance to the Academy Awards and every crumb they’ve offered British cinema (special points to Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, and Four Weddings and a Funeral). It’s frustrating to imagine what a real critic of English cinema like Raymond Durgnat might have done with what Frears chooses to discuss — not to mention what he leaves out. What we get instead is alienated twaddle about what Frears imagines other people might be interested in — the Janet Maslin school of film commentary.
It may be unfair to saddle Frears with all the inadequacies of this Cook’s tour — even though it’s subtitled “A Personal History of British Cinema,” records some of his memories of movies and of being caned at boarding school, features his gabfests with Hollywood colleagues (critic-screenwriter Gavin Lambert, the late director Alexander Mackendrick, and directors Michael Apted and Alan Parker), and shows him briefly at work on Mary Reilly. Though the press book tries to get one to ignore this, it pairs Frears with a codirector, Mike Dibb, and a cowriter, critic Charles Barr, both of whom are credited first; so maybe Frears — a good director of actors who’s never shown much aptitude for or interest in film aesthetics — was too busy with Mary Reilly to do much more on this than chew the fat with four colleagues and add a few pithy voice-overs. Still, I think I’m fully entitled to conclude, bollocks to Frears.
Jean-Luc Godard also begins contentiously in 2 X 50 Years of French Cinema, and also is billed second to director and writer Anne-Marie Miéville, his frequent collaborator. But there the resemblance to Typically British ends. Far from being another potted survey, this is a multifaceted polemic that questions most of the central premises of the “Century of Cinema” series — though not, interestingly enough, the nationalistic orientation (despite the fact that the final image in the video is a photograph of Henri Langlois). Paradoxically it also fulfills the BFI’s commission (Miéville and Godard’s contract pointedly appears under the BFI logo) by offering a comprehensive look at French cinema — though it’s broken up into haunted, lyrical, and mainly obscure fragments; mostly unattributed clips, stills, photographs, and names; and patches of music and dialogue that point to a cinema and a history that are basically forgotten. Just how comprehensive this portrait is may not be apparent on a first viewing; it was only during my third time through the video that I began to see the organizing logic and respond fully to the musical flow and visual poetry. In the French magazine Trafic Jean-Claude Biette aptly employed Manny Farber’s critical categories by calling Godard’s recent film JLG/JLG “white elephant art” (i.e., grandiloquent and self-important) and 2 × 50 Years “termite art” (unpretentious and concerned only with its own boundaries). It’s worth adding that here the obscurity of many of the reference points — which, along with the unpretentiousness, tends to be more evident in the Godard works cosigned by Miéville — is pivotal to the work’s meaning. (A typical obscure reference is to Lucien Coedel, a bit player of the 40s whose daughter makes a guest appearance in one scene.)
In an unidentified European lakeside hotel, actor Michel Piccoli — recently appointed president of France’s First Century of the Cinema Association, based in Lyons at the site of the Lumiere factory — arrives to greet Godard shortly after the Lumiere Institute’s own “century of cinema” celebration in 1995. (This event launched a French centennial-film spin-off, Lumiere & Co., which will play at the Film Center on December 5 and 6 — a fascinating if uneven collection of very short films made by famous filmmakers all over the world, from Peter Greenaway to Abbas Kiarostami to David Lynch to Jacques Rivette to Wim Wenders, all of whom were lent a Lumiere camera to shoot their segments.)
Godard’s skeptical remarks to Piccoli about this celebration circle around three basic points: (1) “Why celebrate cinema? Isn’t it famous enough already?” (2) What’s being celebrated is the commercial exhibition of cinema — the first program of Lumiere films for paying customers was held in 1895 — rather than its invention or production, which is why projectors are highlighted in the publicity rather than cameras. (3) How can we celebrate a history that isn’t even remembered? Godard also observes, “The French cinema is the only one that had critics. In the other countries it became a business right away.” These are the themes that the remainder of the video develops.
At Godard’s invitation, Piccoli spends the night at the hotel — periodically quizzing the staff to see what they know or remember about French cinema, periodically phoning Lyons and reading from books Godard has given him — then leaves the next morning. Through all this, we get not only a panoply of names and film titles, but unidentified and unattributed fragments, many of them certain to be unfamiliar or barely recognized by the audience.
The fragmented style and narrative method of 2 X 50 Years is markedly different from that of his eight-part magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (the first half of which has played at the Film Center; the premiere of the complete work is scheduled for Cannes next May), but the philosophical underpinnings are very much the same. Cultural amnesia has been a central theme in his work since the 80s — especially evident in King Lear, but also present in, Passion, Nouvelle vague, and Histoire(s) du cinéma –- and here too it’s central to his poetic form as well as his subject.
Clearly Godard, a filmmaker who started out as a film critic, regards video as a medium for criticism. 2 X 50 Years ends with a moving tribute to French film criticism — using that term broadly enough to include precursors as well as poets, art critics, and filmmaker-theorists — by furnishing us with a honor roll of 15 individuals, from Denis Diderot to Serge Daney, each of whom is accorded a portrait, a page of text, and an offscreen recitation of a brief passage read by Miéville or Godard. A 16th member of this honor roll, Charles Baudelaire, is cited during Piccoli’s haunted vigil in his hotel room, and a 17th, Roger Leenhardt, is heard at some length and briefly seen in what is probably the longest clip in the video. Leenhardt was a film critic and filmmaker of real distinction, though he’s as forgotten today in France as he is unknown in the states; the clip, unidentified like all the others, comes from Godard’s 1965 feature A Married Woman. Leenhardt talks about intelligence and some of its social functions, making observations that apply to all of the writers cited in the closing sequence, including Elie Faure, Andre Malraux, Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette, and Marguerite Duras.
Stig Bjorkman’s I Am Curious, Film, titled after Vilgot Sjoman’s I Am Curious, Yellow and I Am Curious, Blue, features the lead actress of both, Lena Nyman, as hostess and interlocutor as she moves from Sweden to Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Finland to speak to a few filmmakers, cinematographers, and actors. (The Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes can understand each other’s languages, so they speak in their native tongues, but Icelandic director Fridrik Tor Fridriksson and Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki both speak in English. Kaurismaki also inserts a typically wry minifilm of his own, Beer & Cigarettes, presumably modeled after Jim Jarmusch’s series of short films, Coffee and Cigarettes.)
Apart from Godard’s film, this is the only documentary reviewed here that was made by a film critic, which gives it an attentiveness to film history and form not found in most of the other works. Beginning (after the opening sequence from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona) and ending with a consideration of the close-up, this survey can be recommended most of all for its ravishing clips, especially from black-and-white films, and for its willingness to move beyond Scandinavian reference points to make critical points (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Flaherty, Samuel Fuller, Sergio Leone, and Andrei Tarkovsky are all cited).
Because Carl Dreyer is my favorite filmmaker, I was especially interested in seeing how Bjorkman would deal with him. Not surprisingly, he hands over most of this task to Lars von Trier, Dreyer’s most famous self-appointed disciple, and though von Trier’s comments are annoyingly brief and far from adequate, some beautiful clips from Dreyer’s Vampyr and Gertrud are included. Bergman is treated in depth, though he was apparently unwilling or unable to be interviewed; his cinematographer Sven Nykvist and two of his actors, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, are introduced to take up the slack. Other prominent participants include pioneers Astrid Henning-Jensen and Stefan Jarl.
Apart from Akira Kurosawa, Nagisa Oshima is plainly the greatest living Japanese filmmaker, but given that he despises the work of virtually all other Japanese directors, he seems quite unsuited to recount the history of his country’s cinema. In 100 Years of Japanese Cinema he basically turns himself into an academician, and not a very good one at that, giving us a pocket social history of 20th-century Japan in relation to film, in which aesthetic issues play almost no role at all. (At the end he speculates that over the next hundred years Japanese cinema will cease to be Japanese and “will blossom as pure cinema” — something he clearly would like to see happen.)
Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kurosawa are accorded only one clip apiece; even more scandalous, Oshima accords himself no less than four clips (from Cruel Story of Youth, The Ceremony, In the Realm of the Senses, and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) and manages to discuss or mention most of his other features as well. He even foregrounds his self-interest by shifting from third person to first person in his commentary on the 50s through the 80s — an honest approach, but one that tends to play havoc with almost all the other filmmakers; and he’s scarcely convincing when he claims that his third-person commentary is “objective.” The real problem here is that the story of Japanese cinema can hardly be recounted by a single voice, though apart from a quotation or two that’s all Oshima seems willing to offer; for all his intelligence, he takes a backseat to even a drudge like Frears when it comes to conveying a feeling for art.
It’s possible that Oshima’s treatment of contemporary Japanese history is audacious and radical in relation to Japanese norms (he’s withering about state militarism and attentive toward Korean residents in Japan), but how much does it say to the rest of us? The stodgy sociopolitical slant and aesthetic indifference wind up crowding out so much of value in Japanese movies — from Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Page of Madness (accorded only a brief still) to Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (ignored) to animation and documentaries (crammed into a few fleeting stills), all of which Oshima seems as bored with as Frears is with English cinema — that what remains is hardly sufficient to keep anyone interested.
I don’t mean to suggest that taking a sociopolitical approach to film history is wrong, for it isn’t if it’s done with critical savvy and aesthetic sensitivity. The most slanted “Century of Cinema” documentary in this regard is Stanley Kwan’s 80-minute Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, an examination of films from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China strictly from the point of view of gender and explicitly from the highly personal and autobiographical vantage point of an openly gay director. It’s worth emphasizing that Kwan neglects many major areas of his subject even within the restricted terrain he’s chosen–most flagrantly woman directors such as mainlander Li Shaohong and Hong Kong filmmaker Clara Law (though he does give extended space to Hong Kong actress Brigitte Lin and Taiwanese critic Peggy Chiao, and he examines at length his own focus as a director of films about women), not to mention figures as important as Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Yimou, Yim Ho, and Wayne Wang. (The fact that he omits the silent Chinese cinema is surely more defensible, if only because his masterpiece Actress, coscripted by Chiao, has already dealt beautifully and brilliantly with that subject.)
But this is still the most exciting and comprehensive survey of Chinese cinema that I know of. Dividing his survey into half a dozen chapters dealing with such topics as “Absence of the Father,” “Feminine and Masculine, Face and Body,” father figures, elder-brother figures who become father surrogates, and transvestites and transsexuals, Kwan may give short shrift to mother figures–apart from his own mother, whose very moving comments conclude the film. But he nevertheless succeeds at describing the contours of a wide-ranging film history and the changes in culture that inform that history (a task Oshima only halfheartedly makes a few stabs at).
Along the way Kwan introduces a fascinating array of relatively unknown figures (I’m especially intrigued by Maxu Weibang, a “uniquely perverse” horror specialist who worked in the Shanghai studios in the 30s) and also provides absorbing commentary by and about, among others, Hong Kong action director Chang Cheh and his disciple John Woo; Hong Kong directors Wong Kar-wai and Allen Fong; Taiwanese directors Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang (most of them speaking about their fathers or children and how these relationships inflect their films); older mainland directors such as Xie Jin; and actor Leslie Cheung (critiquing some of his own pictures). Kwan interviews heterosexual directors Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark, and Zhang Yuan (a maverick mainland independent) about their sexual attitudes — and charges Chen’s Farewell My Concubine with homophobia, particularly in relation to the Lilian Lee novel it’s based on — and in the process bears intelligent witness not only to the changes in sexual sensibility and family values taking place across the Chinese-speaking world, but also to the range and vitality of the recent filmmaking that reflects these changes. In short, Yang + Yin is far from complete in recounting the history of Chinese film, but it will do just fine until a more comprehensive survey comes along.
C. Three Positive Models: Mark Rappaport, Thom Andersen, Kevin B. Lee
Although Mark Rappaport’s pioneering critical audiovisual essays can’t and shouldn’t be limited to those devoted to the careers of certain film actors, it could nevertheless be argued that these critical career surveys — a corpus that includes Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992), From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), John Garfield (2002), Becoming Anita Ekberg (2014), I, Dalio, or The Rules of the Game (2015), and Debra Paget, For Example (2016) — represent, in most cases, his finest work in that sphere. In each case, the critical work involves the teasing out of traits that would be less apparent without this sort of analysis, and the criticism involves ideological as well as aesthetic issues that are much broader than those that can be traced to the creative work of the actors involved. In Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, the principal concern is with Hudson’s hidden or obfuscated gay identity outside his film performances that none the less produce distorted traces of that identity within the films themselves; in From the Journals of Jean Seberg, the focus takes in much more than Seberg’s biography to consider the implications of her ambiguous “blank” expressions and the careers of some of her leftist contemporaries, such as Jane Fonda. More recently, in I, Dalio, Rappaport produces a fascinating comparative study of the type-casting of Marcel Dalio in French cinema (both prewar and postwar) and in Hollywood studio productions, showing how Dalio’s Jewish background leads to various forms of anti-Semitic stereotypes in French films that are bypassed in Hollywood, to be replaced by American stereotypes of French behavior. And in Debra Paget, For Example, he uses the actress’s screen career to reflect on several subjects, such as variable (and almost interchangeable) ethnic stereotypes, Cinemascope, and kitsch. In each of these works, Rappaport employs fictional as well as non-fictional methods of exposition—most notably, by employing actors to portray Hudson, Seberg, Dalio, and Paget; in the latter case, he complicates this methodology by using both an actress playing Paget and his own voice to express different arguments.
I’ve already discussed Thom Andersen’s Eadward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1972), an early essay that predates Rock Hudson’s Home Movies by sixteen years, but his subsequent and no less ambitious Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, 170 minutes), Red Hollywood (made in collaboration with the aforementioned Noël Burch, 1996, 118 minutes), and The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015, 108 minutes) deserve consideration here for the original ways in which they stake out vast areas of film for critical scrutiny. The first of these, an examination of how Los Angeles has been depicted in films, takes in such ancillary topics as car culture and architecture (to cite two particular interests of Andersen that have been addressed in other works of his, ranging from his unpublished book Cinema and its Discontents, a parallel history of cinema and the automobile, to his recent [2012] Portuguese documentary Reconversion), although this hardly does justice to the overall historical, sociological, and political scope of his analytical survey. The second develops a 1985 essay of the same title by Andersen (subsequently updated) that examines the political and social content of blacklisted Hollywood artists, and the third offers a very personal survey of film history keyed to a taxonomy offered by two complementary books by Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: L’Image-Mouvement and Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps (1983).
By his own estimate, Kevin B. Lee has made or coauthored approximately 300 audiovisual works of film criticism over the past seven or so years, all of them relatively short, most of which have been posted online — often at Fandor, where he also commissions critical videos by others, but also at such online venues as Indiewire, Sight and Sound, and his own channels on Vimeo (111 videos) and YouTube (142 videos). In the interests of transparency, I should add that I’ve collaborated with Lee on five of his videos, on Out 1, Satantango, a comparison between The Sun Shines Bright and Gertrud (in two parts), and Orson Welles; among his many other critical collaborators are Mike d’Angelo, David Bordwell, Nicole Brenez, Richard Brody, Chris Fujiwara, Molly Haskell, Adrian Martin, Dan Sallitt, Andrew Sarris, Matt Zoller Seitz, Kristin Thompson, and Paolo Cherchi Usai.
Lee’s work, which is far more characteristic of most recent works than those of Rappaport or Andersen, is none the less far too varied to allow for comparable capsule summaries, especially because I have seen at most only a fraction of them. Instead of attempting such a summary, let me conclude this survey by reproducing a list of works by Lee and a few others that he and Alejandro Bachmann have selected to be shown at Austrian Filmmuseum in three separate programs in April 2016, around the same time that this essay is being completed — works whose titles (and, in some cases, authors) can be said to represent some of the kinds of analysis that are currently being done:
Ästhetik der Analyse / The Aesthetics of Analysis
Kevin B. Lee – in person
Program 1: Autoren & Analyse / Auteurs & Analysis
18. April, 19:00 Uhr
The Spielberg Face (Kevin B. Lee, 2011, 10’)
Who Should Win the 2014 Oscar for Best Lead Actress (Kevin B. Lee, 2014, 7’)
Double Insomnia (Kevin B. Lee, 2015, 6’ )
Deceptive Surfaces: The Films of Christian Petzold (Kevin B. Lee, 2015, 6’ )
Lynchian Ambience (Jacob Swinney, Fandor, 2015, 1’ )
The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson in Five Shots (Live Version) (Kevin B. Lee, 2012, 10’)
Viewing Between the Lines: Hong Sang Soo’s The Day He Arrives (Kevin B. Lee, 2012, 12’)
Jacques Rivette: Out 1 (Solitaire) (Kevin B. Lee & Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2014, 8’)
Dissolves of Passion (Catherine Grant, 2015, 8’)
Tarkovsky’s Candles (Kevin B. Lee, 2015, 10’)
Program 2: Technology & Politics / Technologie & Politik
18. April, 21 Uhr
Why Framing Matters in Movies (Chloé Galibert-Lâiné, 2015, 7’)
Interface 2.0 (Harun Farocki) (Kevin B. Lee, 2012, 8’)
The CGI Menagerie of Rhythm & Hues (Kevin B. Lee, 2013, 8’)
Is This Cinerama (Kevin B. Lee, 2013, 5’)
What Makes a Video Essay Great? (Live Version) (Kevin B. Lee, 2014, 7’)
Vancouver Never Plays Itself (Tony Zhou, 2015, 9’)
Transformers: The Premake (Kevin B. Lee, 2014, 25’)
Program 3: Cinema & Society / Kino & Gesellschaft
20. April, 21 Uhr
The Hour of the Star (Kevin B. Lee, 2008, 8’)
What * was * Documentary? (Kevin B. Lee, 2014, 8’)
The Essay Film: Some Thoughts on Discontent (Kevin B. Lee, 2013, 7’)
The Tarantino Death Toll (Live Version) (Kevin B. Lee, 2015, 10’
When Soldiers Come Home in the Movies (Bill Kinder, 2015, 7’)
Learning to Look: Eye Contact in Satyajit Ray’s The Big City (Joel Bocko, 2015, 7’)
Fembot in a Red Dress (Allison de Fren, 2016, 13’)
Talking with Siri About Spike Jonze’s Her (Kevin B. Lee, 2014, 10’)
End Notes
- Adapted from an article posted at Moving Image Source on August 18, 2010 (http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-mosaic-approach-20100818).
- Derived from a blog post: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2012/09/room-237-and-a-few-other-encounters-at-the-toronto-international-film-festival-2012/
- Reprinted from the Chicago Reader (November 22, 1996).