Tag: movies (page 1 of 2)

The Richard Brody review of Perfect Days is a tone-deaf review by the most reliably tone-deaf reviewer out there. Every reviewer has limits to his or her catholicity of taste, because every human being is thus limited, but Brody’s cinematic sweet spot seems to be tiny, and when he doesn’t like a movie he simply doesn’t pay attention to it. I just don’t think Brody likes movies enough to review them for a living. 

Brody wants everything in Perfect Days to be revealed, including (especially?) our protagonist’s politics. I mean, sure, how can we know what we’re supposed to think about another human being unless we know what their politics are? The idea that Hirayama might be utterly apolitical is one that seems not to have crossed Brody’s mind. Nor has he considered the artistic and moral possibilities of narrative reticence.

What’s wonderful about the movie is that it reveals just enough about Hirayama for us to understand that his simplified and repetitive life is both a comfort — a stabilizing power for a person who (for reasons only imperfectly glimpsed by us) desperately needs it — and also a kind of impoverishment. He is a lonely man who has many loose ties, which are unquestionably good things in his life, but no really strong ones, and we get a sense of what that lack of strong ties protects him from and what it deprives him of.

“Mama,” the woman who runs the little izakaya where Hirayama is a regular, wonders why everything can’t remain the same. Well, it can’t; but stability happens too. What we see at the end of Perfect Days is a kind of re-establishment of the rhythm of Hirayama’s life, but not without change, and not without the possibility of betterment. His new work partner seems to be a significant upgrade from the old one; his kindness to his niece Niko just might reconnect him to her and to his sister; and who knows, maybe he and “Mama” will forge the kind of relationship that he tells her ex-husband he doesn’t currently have with her. Change isn’t always bad. But a structured rhythm of life, a settled disinclination to chase novelty, an appreciation for what we can count on, including our friends the trees — that’s a very good thing indeed. 

Last night Teri and I watched Swing Time, and afterwards played a little game: We went back to the dance scenes and tried to pause at instants when Astaire and Rogers didn’t look elegant. Couldn’t do it. At every moment they are balanced and poised, they’re perfect images of grace.

My recent posts on how I choose what fiction to read and what’s going on with the publishing industry share a theme: perverse incentives. (Indeed, it seems that a lot of my writing is about perverse incentives, but more about that another time.) The intellectual/political monoculture of the modern university leads to an intellectual/political monoculture in the major media companies, and when you combine that with the many ways the internet has disrupted the economic models of all the arts, you get a general environment in which interesting, imaginative work is not just resisted, it’s virtually prohibited. All the incentives of everyone involved are aligned against it.

Thus the thesis of this essay by James Poniewozik: “We have entered the golden age of Mid TV”: 

Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to. 

Or you could listen to a Sally Rooney novel on Audible while chopping the veggies. Same, basically. This is what I think about almost everything from current big-studio Hollywood movies to new literary fiction to music by Taylor Swift or Beyoncé: it’s … okay. It doesn’t offend.

But wouldn’t it be nice to have something better? Wouldn’t it be cool to be surprised? Crevecoeur famously described early America as a land characterized by “a pleasing uniformity of decent competence.” But after a while the competence isn’t all that pleasing. As Wittgenstein famously wrote in the Philosophical Investigations: “We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” I wrote an essay about this.

Of course I think about this stuff all the time. 

The good news is that these production-line periods tend to produce a reaction: Romantic poetry was one such; punk rock another; the Nouvelle Vague in French movies yet another. Indeed, so was Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But the bad news is that today our manorial technocracy makes the project of finding cracks in the walls more difficult than it has ever been. So I’ll be watching the rough ground to see who turns up there, but in the meantime, here’s how I make my decisions about watching movies: 

• If someone I love wants me to go to a movie with them, I do. 
• Otherwise, I don’t watch movies produced and/or distributed by the big studios. (I had been leaning in this direction for a while, but I didn’t make it a guideline until three or four years ago.) I just don’t, for the same reason that I don’t read novels by people who live in Brooklyn: it’s not a good bet. The chance of encountering something excellent, or even interestingly flawed, is too remote. Not impossible — I really enjoyed Dune, for instance, and Oppenheimer, both of which I watched with my son — but remote. 
• I don’t subscribe to Netflix, or HBO, or Amazon Prime. (I do have Apple TV as part of my Apple subscription, but I primarily use it to rent movies. I did try watching For All Mankind and Masters of the Air, but both of them were too … Mid for me.) The only service I subscribe to is the Criterion Channel, because it allows me to watch (a) classic movies, (b) independent movies, and (c) foreign movies. All of which are much better bets than anything the current big studios make. 
• I never hesitate to watch a favorite movie again when that’s where my whim takes me. In fact, I watch movies from my Blu-Ray/DVD collection more often than I stream anything. 

The Vikings was the first movie I ever saw — not in a standard movie theater, but some years after its release, at a drive-in. I remember being at once bemused and excited by the rituals of finding a parking place, hanging the speaker over the car door .. and the movie itself? I adored it. What four-year-old wouldn’t? 

I also remember quite clearly the first movie I saw in a proper movie theater, not too long after I saw The Vikings. It was this: 

So what I’m saying is that I had a good start on my movie-watching career. 

Things got even better a few years later when my ne’er-do-well uncle — a ladies’ man, a snappy dresser, a driver (and occasional seller) of exotic automobiles —  decided to take his 12-year-old nephew to the movies, in fact to a double feature. And what were those movies? Why, Dirty Harry and The Wild Bunch, of course. Food for the spirit of a growing boy. 

Some years ago I read an article about sociopathy – I don’t remember the author or where it appeared, but I do recall the description of a boy who began to show signs of sociopathy from an early age. Once, as he and his parents gathering with family and friends at a house that had a swimming pool, a younger cousin, a toddler or barely older, fell into the pool at a moment when no one was paying attention – just this boy. As the toddler flailed helplessly in the water, the boy watched. He didn’t try to help, or even call for help; he just watched. Eventually an adult noticed, and rescued the small one. When the boy was asked why he didn’t do anything but watch a child drowning, he replied that he had wanted to see what happened.

I think about that boy when I watch the films of Bernardo Bertolucci. Maybe that’s not fair; it’s hard to say. Dramatic films are just that, dramatic – their makers do not provide authorial commentary on the action. They portray, we judge. So I am not saying that Bertolucci was a sociopath; I am instead saying that his movies feel to me that he’s asking me not to empathize, but to watch. And because his images are so compelling, it’s hard not to watch.

Like Antonioni, Bertolucci tends to make movies about lost souls. But when I’m watching L’Avventura or La Notte, I feel that the director has compassion for these souls in their lostness, and is inviting, even encouraging, me to have compassion for them also. By contrast, Bertolucci seems to be setting up his camera at the end of the pool and simply pointing it at the drowning child. 

Francois Truffaut’s The Wild Child is a truly remarkable movie that has never gotten the attention it deserves. And so I’m going to begin this post by saying that (a) it deserves a place in the Criterion Collection and (b) I hereby volunteer to write an essay introducing it. (Actually, my suspicion is that Criterion would’ve created such an edition a long time ago if they had been able to get the rights.)

The movie’s story is based on a historical event, the discovery of the so-called Wild Boy of Aveyron and the attempts of a physician named Jean Marc Itard — played in the movie by Truffaut himself — to educate him. One tiny, easily-missed element of Truffaut’s version of the story provides what I believe is the key that unlocks the whole narrative. 

Occasionally Dr. Itard takes Victor (as he names the child) to visit some friends of his who live on a farm. We’re never told why, but the obvious suggestion would be that their rural life is for Victor a return to something like the open, free, “natural” life that he lived before he was discovered. Dr. Itard and his friend sit inside and play backgammon while — we see this sometimes through an open door — the friend’s child pushes Victor in a wheelbarrow. 

But the key point is that Itard consistently refers to his friend as Citoyen — which reminds us, and is very much meant to remind us, that these events are unfolding in the aftermath of the French Revolution. That is to say, the Wild Boy was discovered within the country that had gone further than any other in ordering itself by the inexorable strictures of Reason. This, I think, is the primary source of Truffaut’s interest in the story. He is fascinated by the contrast between two models of ideal humanity: on the one hand, the Natural Man uncorrupted by society; and on the other hand, the Citoyen governed by pure Raison — reason understood as requiring the elimination of the church, the proposed redrawing of the departments of France into geometric forms, the renaming of the months and regularizing of the calendar, and so on. As Simon Schama has convincingly argued, “If one had to look for one indisputable story of transformation in the French Revolution, it would be the creation of the juridical entity of the citizen.” 

(Not germane to this particular post, but it’s perhaps worth saying that the combination of this emphasis on the universal equality of citizens with the determination to overcome Nature with Reason helps explain the profound ambivalence of the Revolutionaries towards Rousseau: in many ways he lays the groundwork for the Revolutionaries’ political project while utterly repudiating their understanding of human nature.) 

These two images are placed side by side, in fierce opposition to each other. And thus the most interesting character in the movie is not Victor — though he is fascinating, as played by the young Romani boy Jean-Pierre Cargol, who is compelling throughout — but rather Dr. Itard himself. Throughout the story the good physician is quietly torn between his desire to “transform” Victor into a rational man, a potential Citoyen, and his natural compassion. At times he treats Victor with a harshness that he hates to perform, but he does so anyway, because he believes that he is acting in accordance with the demands of reason. After all, the stakes for Victor are so very high. Schama again: 

Suddenly, subjects were told they had become Citizens; an aggregate of subjects held in place by injustice and intimidation had become a Nation. From this new thing, this nation of citizens, justice, freedom and plenty could be not only expected but required. By the same token, should it not materialize, only those who had spurned their citizenship, or who were by their birth or unrepentant beliefs in capable of exercising, yet, could be held responsible. Before the promise of 1789 could be realized, then, it was necessary to root out Uncitizens.

Dr. Itard could not allow Victor to become, or rather to remain, an Uncitizen. 

All his life Truffaut was fascinated by wayward children and outraged by the social structures devised to control them. He himself had always struggled in school and spent much of his adolescence bouncing between school and institutions for “troubled youth.” He dramatized his experiences in his first feature, The 400 Blows, and returned to such themes often in his later films. (In this post I mention Truffaut’s interest in a man named Fernand Deligny, who devised imaginative ways of aiding neurodivergent children. Truffaut had consulted with Deligny in making The 400 Blows and consulted him again when making The Wild Child.)

As Truffaut sees it, French society’s standard way of dealing with difficult children can be summed up in two words: Discipline and Punish. The whole strategy is one of negative reinforcement, and the most touching thing about Dr. Itard is that he is an immensely kind man who, thanks to his intellectual formation, has only those tools at his disposal. His own character — his own nature, we might say — is at odds with his professional commitments. As a physician he is a Skinnerian avant le lettre, believing that Victor can be turned into a rational man and potential Citoyen simply through operant conditioning. He doesn’t seem to realize that what Victor craves is affection. He loves to touch and to be touched. And while Dr. Itard does not by any means withhold such touch from him — he often holds his shoulders or embraces him — he does not realize how essential such physical affection is to Victor’s upbringing and improvement. 

What is essential, for Dr. Itard, is to constrain Victor’s nature — to bring it, as it were, within a frame, and here we should notice how many scenes in the movie are framed by windows and doors. Sometimes we are on the outside looking in, and sometimes on the inside looking out. Sometimes the frames are multiple, especially when we consider that the cinematic image constitutes its own frame. There’s an extraordinary moment early on when the still-wild boy climbs a tree to escape some pursuers, and the camera, positioned at the height of the forest canopy, pulls back to show the boy in this vast unbounded wilderness. But when he is brought to Paris, and then to Dr. Itard’s house on the outskirts of Paris, he is surrounded by right angles that enclose small spaces.

(This distinction is powerfully dramatized through the magnificent photography of the great Nestor Almendros, who in the wilderness scenes gives us a world of light and shade captured fleetingly by a moving camera, while in Dr. Itard’s house all is still and lit with a Vermeer-like gentleness and evenness. This movie should be on anyone’s short list of masterworks of black-and-white cinematography.) 

Near the end of the movie, Victor, frustrated by Dr. Itard’s rigid and incessant lessons in the rational order of language, runs away, and finds himself once more in a State of Nature. But, after a brief period of delighting in his freedom, he discovers, or rediscovers, that human life in the State of Nature is pretty much what Hobbes said it was: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Victor struggles to find food: because he is now in a place that is at least sparsely populated, and perhaps because he has forgotten some of the skills that he had developed when living alone in the wild, he finds his primary option is theft — and theft is both difficult and dangerous. So eventually he returns to Dr. Itard.

Dr. Itard is thrilled to have him back and sees this return as a sign that his program is working, that Victor is becoming more rational. And so as Madame Guérin — the kindly housekeeper, who had already warned the doctor about his overly harsh methods — leads Victor up the stairs to get him a bath and a change of clothes, Dr. Itard cheerfully calls out to Victor, “We will resume our lessons tomorrow!” And in the very last shot of the movie, Victor looks back at his benefactor — or his jailer — with an utterly inscrutable expression on his face. You might perceive it as obedient, or sullen, or resentful, or even hateful. It’s impossible to say. Victor still cannot speak. But he surely knows he has given up his freedom, his wildness, for a civilized life. In a civilized world, he has safety, and cleanliness, and food, and even companionship and affection. These are all wonderful things, great achievements of the kind of social order that ultimately produces Citoyens. But he can’t seem ever to forget the very different world that he has left behind; nor can we. This finely-poised ambivalence is the essential achievement of a very great film. 

Whenever people speak in L’Avventura I find their talk intrusive. I imagine a Phantom Edit of the movie that removes all the scenes in which people speak, and in which all sounds are replaced by one of Eno’s ambient compositions, so I could then contemplate the evocative images without distraction. 

Above you’ll find a justly famous scene from one of the greatest of all films, The Earrings of Madame de… — and it’s also a perfect illustration of how deeply Max Ophuls loved dancing, how for him dancing is the ideal kinetic embodiment of love, the very image of intimacy. Circular movement was endlessly fascinating to him — see his film La Ronde for the obsession at its most obsessive — and he returns to it repeatedly, and what I love most is what the theme does for his camera work. Surely no one before the advent of the Steadicam has made a camera flow the way Ophuls did; and it would be difficult to find a Steadicam scene that excels Ophuls’ camera in elegant economy of motion.  

(Also: note, late in the scene above, how the camera follows the musicians and attendants, so that we see the dancers primarily in mirrors. Ophuls was fascinated by mirrors also, especially in that movie, which begins by denying us a clear view of its protagonist except, fleetingly and partially, in a mirror.) 

The Earrings of Madame de… appeared in 1953, when Ophuls had returned to Europe after a somewhat frustrating decade in Hollywood. His penultimate film in the U.S. was a noir-ish movie called Caught, which Ophuls seems to have conceived of as a way to say what he really thought about Howard Hughes. (Spoiler: nothing good.) But James Mason is fabulous as an idealistic doctor who works among the poor of Manhattan, and this scene in which he and Barbara Bel Geddes dance … well, IMHO it’s the best dance scene ever filmed by the all-time master of dance scenes. Just pay attention to the movement of that camera. 

Here’s something people often don’t notice about Sunset Boulevard: Norma Desmond isn’t old. Several elements in the film are designed to make us think she’s elderly: the decrepit old mansion she lives in, her old butler, the comments people make on the Paramount set she visits — “Is she still alive?” But then the screenplay (a work of genius, primarily by Charles Brackett and the film’s director, Billy Wilder) starts to undermine the impression it has taken pains to produce. On that movie set, Cecil B. DeMille, playing himself, reminds people that he’s old enough to be her father. Joe Gillis (William Holden) comments that she’s “middle-aged,” and then, in their climactic confrontation, reminds her that she’s fifty years old. 

And Gloria Swanson was indeed fifty when the movie came out — 49 when it was made. DeMille was 69 and Erich von Stroheim 65, but one of the other superannuated silent-movie stars we meet in the course of the picture, Buster Keaton, was just 55. The point here is a powerful one: that the coming of sound to motion pictures utterly transformed the industry, and did so overnight, so that one year’s matinée idols were the next years’ forgotten ancestors. 

This could of course also be a comment on a Hollywood youth culture — never cast anyone over thirty — but I don’t think that’s the case here. Swanson was just five years older than Cary Grant, seven years older than Katherine Hepburn, both of whom would continue to be superstars for years and years. Her misfortune was that she became big too soon — just before the Great Divide introduced by sound. (“I am big — it’s the pictures that got small.”) 

Let’s compare that situation to our own moment. Swanson was born in 1899; her career as a star was essentially over before she turned 30, so let’s say by 1929; this movie was released in 1950. Imagine a version of Sunset Boulevard coming out today, featuring an actress whose career had followed a similar trajectory to Norma Desmond’s. Let’s see, we’d need an actress born around 1972, so: Jennifer Garner. Gwyneth Paltrow. Thandiwe Newton. Any of those strike you as plausible candidates for Norma Desmond? (“Gwyneth Paltrow — is she still alive?”) Sandra Bullock of course would be too old for the part, as would Marisa Tomei and Jennifer Aniston. One might also take a look at the widely varying ages of the actresses who have played Norma Desmond in the musical version of the story. 

Now, how about the even more archaic 55-year-old Buster Keaton? That would call for … let’s see … Will Smith, Hugh Jackman, or Daniel Craig. Tom Cruise? Way too elderly. But maybe he could play the Erich von Stroheim role. (Incidentally: early in his career Jackman played Joe Gillis in a Melbourne staging of the musical.)  

All of this we can explain with reference to general improvements in health care, exercise regimes, and cosmetic medicine. But there’s another element that’s more curious.

So let’s make a different comparison. One of Swanson’s most successful films was Sadie Thompson (1928) — a movie released 22 years before Sunset Boulevard. To the moviegoers of 1950 that was effectively the Jurassic era. But let’s think about films made in 2001: Monsters Inc. A Beautiful Mind. Shrek. The Royal Tenenbaums. Mulholland Drive — and The Fellowship of the Ring. All movies that are, to one degree or another, a part of the contemporary conversation. Not Jurassic; not even Neolithic. 

What does this difference tell us? Certainly that the silent-to-sound transition was devastating to the cultural currency of everything made in the silent era. But it also suggests that we of 2023 aren’t necessarily the most present-minded Americans ever. We might have a longer cultural memory, at least in some media and in some genres, than we give ourselves credit for. And surely there’s a big technological reason for that: the availability of movies, almost any movies we might want, in our homes — something that I’m especially thankful for right about now, since it enabled me to watch Sunset Boulevard last night, on the whim of the moment. 

Here is the great Takashi Shimura as Kambei Shimada, the leader of The Seven Samurai (1954):

A man to be reckoned with. A calm but unyielding and fearless leader of warriors. And here’s Shimura two years earlier, as the dying bureaucrat Mr. Watanabe in Ikiru — a timid man, a man so lifeless and dull that one of his co-workers nicknames him “the Mummy”:

He was also the kindly peasant woodcutter in Rashomon and the professor in the original Godzilla! Which is a pretty remarkable string of major roles, comparable perhaps to Harrison Ford’s run in the early 80s as Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and Rick Deckard. But Shimura’s sheer range is unmatched, I think. Even now, forty years after his death, we ought to be talking about what an astonishingly versatile actor Shimura was, compelling in every role.

But that’s just by-the-way. What I really want to talk about here is the filmmaker most closely associated with Shimura, the director of Rashomon and The Seven Samurai and Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa. (No, Kurosawa didn’t direct Godzilla, but if he had….) The argument I want to make here is that Kurosawa has experienced a fate that no one would have predicted of him fifty years ago: as a director, he is significantly underrated.

For many years, starting with the overwhelmingly delighted response to Rashomon at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, Kurosawa was the Japanese film director — he eclipsed all others, at least in the eyes of Western audiences. (Indeed, you could make the case that The Seven Samurai is the most influential film ever made — even if you think only of how many movies have stolen its most obvious plot device, the let’s-assemble-the-gang first act. But the way Kurosawa films his action scenes, copied by filmmakers ever since, has been equally influential.) But this celebration of Kurosawa did nothing to elevate the status of other Japanese filmmakers, including the two who have a strong claim to be his superiors: Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. They only gradually made their way into the public consciousness.

One of the best film critics alive — one of the best ever —, David Thomson, has written that he has often been rather hard on Kurosawa precisely because he is annoyed that Kurosawa’s reputation has displaced Ozu and Mizoguchi, whom he thinks obviously the greater artists. But that was a mistake, for two reasons: first, because you cannot elevate the reputation of some by attacking the reputation of others — it just doesn’t work that way; and second, because it is not at all obvious (to me, anyway) that Kurosawa is a lesser filmmaker than Ozu and Mizoguchi.

I don’t say this carelessly. If I had to pick a Greatest Director, it would probably be either Ozu or Jean Renoir. But lately I have been thinking about this: Kurosawa is best known for his historical films, especially the ones focused on samurai culture, and yet Ikiru — a film set in 1950s Japan, in an urban setting, focusing on family and the workplace — in short, a film very like Ozu’s most famous ones, a perfect example of the shomin-geki — may well be Kurosawa’s masterpiece. And it is in every way worthy to be compared with Ozu’s transcendentally great Tokyo Story and Late Spring.

That still could easily have been from Ikiru, though in fact it’s from Late Spring. The two films occupy much the same world.

To be sure, anyone who knows Ozu’s cinematic grammar would never for a moment think that Ikiru was one of his films. The camera is too mobile; the height of the shots too variable; the transitions too different. (Kurosawa frequently employs horizontal wipes to change scenes, something Ozu probably never did in any of his forty or more films.) Still, Ikiru and Ozu’s masterpieces of the same era are spiritually kin — closely kin; they tug at my heartstrings in very similar ways, with very similar effects. And if Kurosawa could make an Ozu-like film, Ozu could never in a million years have made The Seven Samurai.

So I’m on something of a Kurosawa kick right now, and re-evaluating his body of work. He’s much less subtle than Ozu and Mizoguchi … but subtlety isn’t everything. Sometimes the direct approach is the best. And rarely did any director make the direct approach more skillfully and compellingly than Kurosawa does.

That’s my copy of Pauline Kael’s For Keeps, the enormous collection of the essays on and reviews of movies that she most wanted to preserve. It’s pretty marked up, because Kael, more than any other film critic, helps me to understand what I think about movies. Re: my three categories of thinker, Kael is neither a good Explainer nor a reliable Illuminator — nothing in Renata Adler’s notorious takedown of Kael is wrong, exactly, even if it relies far too heavily on strategic omission — but she’s one hell of a Provoker. 

You’ll notice how much how many more markers there are in the early pages then there are in the later ones. This has something to do with my own interests, but I think it has a lot more to do with how Kael’s relationship to the movies changed over the decades. This first occurred to me as I was reading her review of Blade Runner, which is a largely hostile one … but the hostility really wasn’t, for me, the problem (especially since that initial theatrical release of the movie was indeed badly flawed). Rather, while reading I just felt that Pauline Kael was not made to be reviewing movies like Blade Runner, that by this point the movies had a traveled down a path that was simply alien to her sensibility.

She was still capable of having intense responses to movies, positive ones as well as negative. For instance, there’s a scene in My Left Foot that — in one of her last reviews — she says might be the most emotionally wrenching she had ever seen in movies. (Any of you who have seen My Left Foot will know precisely the scene that she’s talking about.) So it’s not as though she had come to hate new movies; she thought that some were good and most were not so good, and that was no different in the Eighties than it had been in earlier decades. But it is pretty obvious that her intellectual and aesthetic formation is not really suited to the direction that movies take from the Eighties onward. 

She retired in 1991, largely because of the onset of Parkinson’s disease, which some people think may have affected her mind. I don’t know about that, but certainly many of the reviews that she wrote in the Eighties were indistinguishable from the work of other critics. That was never true of her earlier work, which was sometimes right and sometimes wrong, sometimes exhilarating and sometimes exasperating, but it was all very obviously written by Pauline Kael and could not have been written by anyone else. 

I think maybe she might’ve retired a decade too late; but she certainly should have gotten started a decade earlier. She only began publishing regularly in her forties, and didn’t commence her regular column for the New Yorker until she was fifty. If her talents had been recognized earlier she could have taken over for James Agee, who was only a decade older than her, as the most important American writer about film. It would’ve been wonderful to get Kael’s real-time takes on the films that emerged from the late Forties to the late Fifties. 

In 1969 Kael wrote a long essay for Harper’s called “Trash, Art, and the Movies” that I’m going to return to in another post — it helps me think about what I was talking about in yesterday’s post — but I’ll leave you with a passage from it that’s classic Kael, and that shows you what we’ve been missing in writing about movies since she left the scene:  

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies. 

 “Oh, it’s so hard to be good under the capitalistic system.” — Genevieve Larkin (Glenda Farrell) in Gold Diggers of 1937 

The 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll of the greatest films of all time featured a surprising Number One: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. I had never watched it, and it’s on the Criterion Channel, which I subscribe to, so I had to watch, didn’t I? I did, and here are my thoughts: 

It’s a tract. It’s a powerful tract, but it is purely polemical. It has one message and one mood. The one mood is used to drive home the one message with relentless force; there is no possibility of dissent or even ambivalence. It is not a melodrama, but it is like melodrama in the sense that it allows but a single emotional response. I think that the film is a powerful statement, but is not a great work of art; maybe not a work of art at all. 

Now, being a great work of art is not the only thing that a movie, or even a novel or a poem, might aspire to. There are many other worthwhile goals to pursue. But I think that one of the vital contributions that truly major works of art make to our common life is their depiction of situations to which equally intelligent and equally reasonable people might have different responses. In our moment — in which social media have conspired to promote and celebrate the unambiguous taking of sides about everything, this contribution is not recognized as having any value. So of course our critics have chosen as their top film one that disdains such complexity. (Also: Vertigo almost repeating its 2012 top finish? Sigh.) 

When Jean Renoir’s film The Rules of the Game appeared in 1939, the opening audience hated it. Renoir was shocked and troubled by this response, and took the movie back to the editing room, where he cut out 23 minutes. As Christopher Faulkner explains in a short video on the Criterion Channel, one of the chief effects of the cuts was to make the character he himself played, Octave, a much less complex one – far more straightforwardly craven and selfish than he is in the original film. Renoir inexplicably axed a key scene in which Octave’s struggle between self-gratification and generosity is resolved in favor of generosity.  

But when the film was restored to its original length — or possibly something a little longer — in 1959, the complexities of Octave were restored. And that is when The Rules of the Game became a truly great movie. Its greatness lies in the richness of its portrayal of this morally compromised world of the French aristocracy. Morally compromised, yes, but not completely without self-knowledge, not completely without standards. (Most of the “rules of the game” are meant to enable hypocrisy … but not all of them.) When you watch the film in its full version, you have a conflicted response to Octave, in very much the same way that you have conflicted responses to many people you know. For one thing, it is Octave’s generosity that results in the death of his friend — had he given in to his selfish impulses he himself would have died. The ironies are multiple and profound. But in the shorter version, we see merely the corruption of the aristocracy — we receive a single message and a single permissible viewpoint. And that is why the shorter version is a dramatically inferior film to the longer one.

In his book about Shakespearean comedy — still, I think, the best thing yet written about those plays — Northrop Frye talks about Shakespeare’s habit of creating characters who are excluded, or perhaps exclude themselves, from the festive reconciliation which the other characters at the end of the play enjoy.

The sense of festivity, which corresponds to pity in tragedy, is always present at the end of a romantic comedy. This takes the part of a party, usually a wedding, in which we feel, to some degree, participants. We are invited to the festivity and we put the best face we can on whatever feelings we may still have about the recent behavior of some of the characters, often including the bridegroom. In Shakespeare the new society is remarkably catholic in its tolerance; but there is always a part of us that remains a spectator, detached and observant, aware of other nuances and values. This sense of alienation, which in tragedy is terror, is almost bound to be represented by somebody or something in the play, and even if, like Shylock, he disappears in the fourth act, we never quite forget him. We seldom consciously feel identified with him, for he himself wants no such identification: we may even hate or despise him, but he is there, the eternal questioning Satan who is still not quite silenced by the vindication of Job….

Think for instance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, who is exposed as a strutting, delusionally self-satisfied fool … and yet even the characters who so expose him can seem uncomfortable with what they have done; and we the spectators can’t help but be aware, if only subliminally, that some of those included in that festive circle at the end are not necessarily any better than Malvolio the mocked. 

I think this kind of character is absolutely essential to the greatness of Shakespearean comedy, in much the same way that in his best tragedies we see comical characters who are detached from the terrible events that we see unfolding. Think for instance of the gravedigger in Hamlet, who goes about his business regardless of what happens to the prince and the other members of the royal family of Denmark. He is a living embodiment of the point Auden makes in “Musée des Beaux Arts.” 

In my view, this complication of our responses, this questioning of our priorities, this reminder that we could see the world in rather different colors than those perceived by the most important characters in the story, is one of the essential gifts great art offers to us. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for the tract, the polemic — the story that gives us a single unambiguous message. It just means that excellence in polemic is different than greatness in art. 

Whenever anyone says what I’ve just said, what comes back is a mocking Yes, but is it art? — with the assumption that trying to distinguish between what is and what isn’t is a mug’s game. And maybe it is. But it seems to be one that we mugs can’t stop playing: som elf us have a sense that the term art is not a useless one. 

I’m going to pause here, with a note for future reference that the question of what makes a movie great is a more difficult one than I have acknowledged here: see, for instance, this post by Adam Roberts on the unrelenting seriousness of the critics’ choices in the S&S poll. More on all these matters soon. Or eventually.  

Of all the great movie critics, present and past, I suppose the one whose judgments about particular films I am least likely to endorse is Pauline Kael. But I would rather read her than anyone this side of James Agee, and that’s because of the sensibility she brings to her movie reviews. She’s so openly personal and invested — and this lasts for about twenty years, from her early work for literary quarterlies and radio stations to somewhere around the middle of her New Yorker career. As the eighties progressed she became more full of herself, more dictatorial, more insistent that her view was the only view. And of course at times she was dishonest. But before the rot set in she was consistently brilliant.

Just one example: here she is in 1968 writing about The Lion in Winter, which means writing about Katherine Hepburn, which means writing about so much more:  

Seven years ago, in Pocketful of Miracles, when Bette Davis became lovable and said “God bless” to Glenn Ford with heartfelt emotion in her voice, I muttered an obscenity as I slumped down in my seat. I slumped again during Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, because Katharine Hepburn had become sweet and lovable, too. The two great heroines of American talkies, the two who dared to play smart women (who had to), the two most specifically modern of women stars — the tough, embattled Davis and the headstrong, noble Hepburn — have both gone soft on us, have become everything we admired them for not being. They had been independent enough to fight the studios, but they have given in to themselves. The public has got them at last as it always wanted them. They have become old dears — a little crotchety, maybe, but that only makes them more harmlessly lovable. And though, of course, we can’t help prizing them still — because what they once meant to us is too important a part of our lives to be relinquished — there’s a feeling of dismay, and even of betrayal, when we watch them now. They make us fearful that they will humiliate us by turning piteous, and they mustn’t; we’ve got to have a few people who know how to age gracefully in public, who don’t go flabby with the joy of being loved every time there’s a fan or a reporter around. 

Everything about this is wonderful, but the key clause, the most completely Kaelian clause, is this one: because what they once meant to us is too important a part of our lives to be relinquished. 

I recently re-read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and experienced an epiphany: the perfect Aunt Emily — and Aunt Emily is the most important character in the book to cast properly — would be Joanne Woodward, from her Mr. And Mrs. Bridge era. Absolutely perfect. I am now filled with regret that Terrence Malick never managed to make that movie that he so longed to make. 

We just watched To Be or Not To Be for the first time in a while. What an extraordinary movie; I don’t know of a film more tonally complex. 

Jack Benny is Jack Benny — which is a high compliment — but Carole Lombard is utterly marvelous in what would prove to be her final film; she died in a plane crash just a few weeks after completing the filming — they had wrapped principal photography on Christmas Eve 1941. It’s one of her finest performances: the moment when she swooningly murmurs “Heil Hitler” is transcendently great, though you have to see it in context to know what I mean. (FWIW, I think her pinnacle for a complete film is My Man Godfrey.) This loss to acting hurts more than most because Lombard was so gifted that she would have continued to be a star, in varying roles and styles, for decades to come. She was only thirty-three when she died. A one of one.  

In 1963 Pauline Kael — a freelance essayist, five years before her gig at the New Yorker — published an essay in the Massachusetts Review about some then-recent and then-widely-discussed European films. It’s a very interesting and (I think) convincing essay, animated by the strong views about what movies ought to be that would later make Kael notorious, but without the laying-down-the-law tone that makes so much of her later writing frustrating to read. She wasn’t yet “Pauline Kael of the New Yorker,” she was just another writer in a relatively obscure literary quarterly. Here’s how it starts: 

La Notte and Marienbad are moving in a new filmic direction: they are so introverted, so interior that I think the question must be asked, is there something new and deep in them, or are they simply empty? When they are called abstract, is that just a fancy term for empty? La Notte is supposed to be a study in the failure of communication, but what new perceptions of this problem do we get by watching people on the screen who can’t communicate if we are never given any insight into what they would have to say if they could talk to each other? 

I think she is asking precisely the right questions here and leading her reader towards the right answers. The problem is not so much that these films are pretentious — though Lord knows they are — but that they are empty. They are empereurs sans vêtements. 

Later: 

In La Notte we are people for whom life has lost all meaning, but we are given no insight into why. They’re so damned inert about their situation that I wind up wanting to throw stones at people who live in glass houses. At a performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, only a boob asks, “Well, why don’t they go to Moscow?” We can see why they don’t. Chekhov showed us why these particular women didn’t do what they said they longed to do. But in movies like La Notte or Marienbad, or, to some degree, La Dolce Vita the men and women are not illuminated or ridiculed — they are set in an atmosphere from which the possibilities of joy, satisfaction, and even simple pleasures are eliminated. The mood of the protagonists, if we can call them that, is lassitude; there is almost no conflict, only a bit of struggling — perhaps squirming is more accurate — amid the unvoiced acceptance of defeat. They are the post-analytic set — they have done everything, they have been to Moscow and everywhere else, and it’s all dust and ashes: they are beyond hope or conviction or dedication. It’s easy enough to say “They are alienated; therefore, they exist,” but unless we know what they are alienated from, their alienation is meaningless — an empty pose. And that is just what alienation is in these films — an empty pose; the figures are cardboard intellectuals — the middle-class view of sterile artists. Steiner’s party from La Dolce Vita is still going on in La Notte, just as the gathering of bored aristocrats in La Dolce Vita is still going on in Marienbad. 

Of the three films, Last Year at Marienbad is the most visually interesting, and visual interest is the only kind there can be in movies of this sort. But the interest doesn’t last long. This three-minute video essay about the film tells you all you need to know about it, I think. 

Karl could have ended up in a kind of intellectual dead-end: she despised the emptiness of so much New European Cinema, and loved the rough vigor of Old Hollywood … but the world of movies is always mainly about the new, and Old Hollywood was clearly dying. (The amount of absolute trash that the studios cranked out through most of the Sixties is astonishing.) As Mark Harris shows in his brilliant book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, in 1967 — the year of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate — the great pivot happened. And it was her essay in praise of Bonnie and Clyde that landed Kael her job at the New Yorker. 

Diane Johnson, novelist and co-author with Stanley Kubrick of the screenplay of The Shining, writing just after the director’s death:

Kubrick had a strong, offended sense of the ridiculousness of the human being, and the futility of human endeavor. He returned to these points again and again — with the recruit in Full Metal Jacket, everyone in Dr. Strangelove (the characters associated with Terry Southern), the victims in A Clockwork Orange. He assailed married life and artistic pretension in The Shining, which was also to have assailed racism (the Overlook Hotel had been built on an Indian burial ground), a theme that fell by the way. The new film may assail psychiatry, another subject he was skeptical of. 

His pessimism seems to have arisen from his idealism, an outraged yearning for a better order, a wish to impose perfection on the chaotic materials of reality. This impulse is behind much art, after all, and Kubrick was above all an artist. His art was an expression of his view of things through the complicated medium of film. Like any artist, he felt an interest in controlling as many aspects of his medium as he could — set, music, costume, take — an attitude that unfairly earned him the reputation of monomaniacal difficulty.

But he thought of art as fun. Art in his view was also moral. People have tried to enlist him in the cause of hip nihilism, but this is to mistake his orthodox Sixties but rather conservative views. What was A Clockwork Orange — which he withdrew in England after some copycat killings — but a diatribe against violence? What were Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket but antiwar films? 

It is very strange to me to hear the co-author of the the movie’s screenplay say that The Shining “assails” “married life” — a thought that has never occurred to me and still, despite her statement, refuses to occur to me. But in other respects I find this meditation interesting, because I have at least some sympathy for David Thomson’s view of Kubrick — in writing about The Shining, he says, “A masterpiece. How wonderful that this straining, chilly, pretentious, antihuman director should have stumbled into it.” 

Thomson utterly despised 2001: writing in 2008 or thereabouts, he stated, as if giving testimony in court, “I believe now, as I did in 1968, that 2001 was a lavish travesty and an elaborate defense of vacancy or the reluctance to use real imagination. Of course, space can still work on film — we have had Alien, E.T., and others — but the lack of humanity is a dead end.” I think the “lack of humanity” is one of the chief points of that movie, and therefore it needed to be directed by someone whose style could fairly be described as “straining, chilly, pretentious, antihuman”; but Diane Johnson’s comments — along with those of people who knew Kubrick well — suggest that the apparent antihumanity is a mask for something deeper and more tender.

But it’s telling that if Kubrick did indeed have that more richly humanistic side — and I believe he did — he was never able to find a way to express it directly in his films. It’s something evoked by its absence, as when Shakespeare writes of “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” 

I’m trying to decide how much I agree with this, from the film scholar David Thomson, in the Mizoguchi entry in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film: 

Despite all its advantages for research and preservation, video is unkind to any movie and cruel to any great movie. Mizoguchi worked with scale, space, and movement, and movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water. 

Let’s suppose you have a big modern flatscreen TV, a good sound system, a high-quality Blu-ray Disc and player, and a dark room in which to watch … is that environment dramatically different from watching a movie in a theater? 

Ever since I learned from Michael Benson‘s excellent book on the making of 2001 that Stanley Kubrick‘s list of actors to play Moonwatcher — the early hominid who first discovers the use of weapons — included Jean Paul Belmondo, all I can think about is Belmondo sitting in full makeup under a rock outcrop on the African savanna smoking a cigarette and longing for the boulevards of Paris.

There’s a lot going on in Edward Yang’s masterful Yi Yi (2000), but I just want to focus on one theme here: how an eight-year-old boy named Yang-Yang is confronted by an epistemological conundrum. He realizes, first, that he can’t be sure that other people see what he sees; and second, that he can only know half of the truth about the world, because he can only see what’s in front of him — what’s behind him remains always invisible. 

Yang-Yang responds to this difficulty by getting a camera. It takes him a while to learn how to use it properly: at school a teacher confiscates a stack of blurry, uncomposed photos and mocks them as “avant-garde art.” But gradually he gets the hang of his new device, and finds his true subject: the backs of heads — as many of them as he can photograph. Late in the movie he hands his uncle a photo. The uncle is confused at first, but then realizes that it’s the back of his own head. “You can’t see it so I help you,” Yang-Yang says, to which his father replies, “So that’s what this is all about.” (It may not be irrelevant that the uncle is notable for his complete lack of self-knowledge.) 

Yang-Yang’s father, NJ, has troubles of his own, including conflict with his co-workers; a wife, Min-Min, who has fallen into deep depression when her stroke-afflicted mother becomes comatose; and the sudden reappearance in his life of his first love, a woman named Sherry. When NJ and Sherry talk we typically see him from behind — we see only the back of his head. What message his face carries is not for us to know. 

There is one exception to this rule, though. When Min-Min’s mother is brought home in a coma, the doctors tell the family to speak to her every day. Tell her what they’ve been doing, whatever, but speak to her because maybe — the doctors don’t have much hope of this, but still — maybe that will help bring her back. When they do this we see their faces; the blanket-covered lower body of the unconscious old lady is visible just at the edge of the frame. At one point NJ visits, in the midst of his struggle with what to do about Sherry’s reappearance, and says, in highly general terms, that he’s having a tough time. We see his full face throughout this scene. Also: he comments, “This is like praying, you don’t know whether the person you’re talking to hears you.” But we know she doesn’t see him. 

Late in the movie, when Min-Min returns from an extended period of retreat in a Buddhist monastery, she tries to tell NJ what she has learned — and what she has not learned. She sits, distressed, at the foot of their bed, while he sits near the head of it — behind her. He sees only the back of her head; she doesn’t see him at all. Yet they speak words of remarkable honesty to one another; perhaps some things are easier to say when you’re not looking into someone’s eyes. Perhaps also that’s why it can be easier to talk to a comatose person who probably can’t hear you than to talk to an angry or unhappy member of your family. 

It’s noteworthy, perhaps, that Yang-Yang shares part of a name with the film’s director, because Edward Yang repeatedly films his characters through glass, in such a way that we see those characters but also reflections in the glass — reflections that show us what is behind the camera. Maybe, then, this is one of the roles of movies: to show us that half of the truth that we don’t ordinarily see, that we’re debarred from seeing. (One teenage character: “My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies…. It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.” I’d like to know his uncle’s name.) 

One more note: In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes: “For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex — to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head…. A true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling.”