Where the Stress Falls

Critical Thinking

It's been nearly two months since I last posted here, and in that time I've felt an increasing need to catch up, not only with films and my own writing, but with those of you who read this blog regularly. I have some things on the horizon and hope sincerely that I can get to them soon: about mainstream studio films, about Arnaud Desplechin, about jazz and Miles and tradition and tributes. Just this week, though, I've discovered several items that I'd like to relay and respond to immediately. The first, via Girish, is an incisive take-down of Richard Brody's recent biography of Jean-Luc Godard, Everything Is Cinema (Metropolitan Books, 2008). I've read the book in parts, have considered it instructive in some ways and bizarre in others, and recently alluded to its rather untenable interpretation of Vivre Sa Vie. As Adrian Martin points out in his review, "Brody is a film critic for The New Yorker -- and Everything Is Cinema is definitely a New Yorker's view of Godard ... the book springs from a peculiarly American projection of French society and culture." In addition:

Godard is no longer a citizen of the world, no longer someone who interacted with fellow filmmakers such as Poland’s Jerzy Skolimowski, Italy’s Bernardo Bertolucci, Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Georgia’s Sergei Paradjanov. He mainly seems, in Brody’s account, to be on planes between France and the US – at least until he relocated to Switzerland, where he is based today. But the Switzerland of this book is just a picture postcard of lakes and restaurants, not a living, breathing, troubling society which Godard depicts in films including the magisterial Nouvelle Vague of 1990.

Yet the issue extends beyond critical interpretation of a filmmaker, his films, or the milieu in which he works. Brody, as Martin explains, makes dubious, unsubstantiaed claims for Godard's alleged anti-Semitism and seems fixated on the director's supposed perverse sexual interest in very young actresses. All in all, Martin's review is instructive not only for those interested in Godard but for anyone interested in the methods of film criticism, even those of biography. As a professionally trained historian, I've learned much about how vital evidence, verification, and methodology are, and how important balance and reasoning become in the writing of any account or life. I believe Martin's review is an important reminder of all that.

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Speaking of the practice of criticism, Walter at Quiet Bubble put up a nice piece on film critic Stanley Kauffmann, who has been writing for The New Republic since 1958. Walter is right; few cinephiles and critics seem to mention Kauffmann, much less read him, and I'm as guilty as anyone. Kauffmann's collection of reviews, Regarding Film, was one of the first books on film I purchased when I first began taking cinema seriously about six or seven years ago. In the long run, Kauffmann never figured as an extensive influence on my own writing; Susan Sontag would reign supreme in this regard, and in the years since my initial introduction to Kauffmann, I've shelved his book to look at those of others. Walter's post, though, reminds me that Kauffmann is a refreshing response to the prevailing emphasis on auterist criticism, which (incidentally) I happen to find valuable and which I engage in, but which, as Kauffmann suggests, is not the only way to think about movies. My own affinity with Kauffmann, however, lies in a different, albeit related, arena. I've not talked much on this blog about my own critical agenda, but I have one. In addition to the formalism and the auterism that I've adopted and which have aided me in understanding both the mechanics and meanings of films, I try to practice what might be called a humanist-centerd criticism; film, as the writer Wallace Stegner once said about fiction, "is people", is about experience, and I prefer criticism that is attuned to this. Or as Kauffmann himself wrote in a prefatory note in Regarding Film:

Graham Greene, who was a film critic from 1935 to 1941, wrote during his tenure, "Life as it is and life as it should be: let us take that as the only true subject for a film, and consider to what extent the cinema is fulfilling its proper funtion." This principle, wildly inappropriate though it may seem in numerous instances, is nonetheless insistent. Let's add only that "life as it should be" is less defined by the critic than it is envisioned by the artist. That vision, in whatever species of film, breezy or grave, is the critic's basic concern.

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Chris and Paul Weitz's About a Boy (2002), which I've revisited recently, has more than a hint of obviousness to it: as characters and voice-over narration observe repeatedly, no man is, or should be, an island; everybody needs community, friendship, "back-up", as the young Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) says; Will, the man-child played by Hugh Grant, will slowly learn the importance and value of responsibility and purpose. But the film is charming and has its moments and, like Stephen Frears' High Fidelity (also based on a Nick Hornby novel), makes telling suggestions about men who know much about inanimate things, such as the best records to buy, but not much about life. While watching the film this week, I noticed a shot I hadn't really noticed before. On a Christmas Eve, Will has gone shopping to purchase a copy of James Whale's Frankenstein on DVD, which he will watch, all alone, at home. On his way out of the store, Will rides up the escalator by himself, while the down escalator is crowded with shoppers. The shot is essentially a diptych that underscores Will's habitual detachment from people and illustrates the film's general visual coherence. I certainly wish the Weitz brothers would have expressed their ideas and the story's themes more through these visual means and less through dialogue and voice-over, but I thought this was a nice touch nonetheless.

I hope to return soon.

Another Thought

Following up on my previous post about evaluating films:

For me, the ultimate value of a film lies in its ability to transform; in other words, the experience of viewing it is transformative in some particular way, allowing me to understand more, feel more, or see more. I often find that formally inventive films tend to be the most effective; form can accelerate and enhance a film's aesthetic or psychological or emotional impact. But films needn't always be inventive in this regard, and for every rule, there's usually an exception (compared to say, Claire Denis or Alain Resnais, William Wyler's best films aren't experimental, but they're still transformative). Films I've seen relatively recently and that I've found to be truly transformative include: both of Lucrecia Martel's feature films (The Holy Girl and La Cienaga), all of Ozu's late films, Stefan Krohmer's Summer 04, Olivier Assayas' Clean, Tsai Ming-liang's What Times Is It There?, Krzystztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, Denis' L'Intrus, Danis Tanovic's L'Enfer, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flowers of Shanghai, and Jia Zhang-ke' Still Life (which I saw at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, and which is now making its way to various theaters and film centers -- Dan Sallitt has a nice write-up about it).

More to come.

Evaluation

A few weeks ago, Girish wrote a thought-provoking post about the shifting value of films, and in particular how any given film "is a complex, mutating entity" and not a stable thing that "stands apart from the flow of discourse but instead something that becomes enmeshed in this discourse, fused with it." I've been thinking about this issue off and on since then, and here are some of my own conclusions, which might shift in time themselves:

*As Girish suggests, the difference between the immediately apparent value of a film and its long-term value can sometimes be significant, and I often find that the kinds of discourse he mentions influence my sense of a film's worth: conversations with others, existing criticism of the work in question, the changing evaluations of a film by other filmmakers. My own estimation of individual films or the careers of particular directors rise and fall because of this discourse, which I'd say is an inextricable, necessary part of film viewing. This isn't to discount the power of the moment; I've certainly had moments when a film's value appears and hits me immediately. I was so impressed by Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There?, Jonathan Glazer's Birth, and Terence Malick's The New World that I followed my initial viewing of each one with at least one repeated viewing the very next day, which is not something I often do. My estimation of these films has more or less remained steadfast, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it eventually changed.

*More often than not, though, evaluation takes time. Forming an opinion of a film's value can require repeat viewings (even across years), continual reconsideration, and an ongoing, willing engagement with all the varied discourse about a film. This reminds me of something Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote about Pauline Kael and similar critics who reflexively denounced some of Antonioni's work: "any of these people were already starting to adopt a critical attitude that assumed it was possible to know immediately and without a doubt what was good and bad in a movie the precise moment it appeared ... intricate, melancholic mood pieces like Antonioni's, which invite and reward -- and occasionally even require -- weeks of mulling over, could find no place at all within this approach, so fewer and fewer critics wound up dealing with them, seriously or otherwise." (Rosenbaum, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, University of California Press, 1995, p. 309.) I recall being initially lukewarm to Antonioni's L'Eclisse, even though I greatly admired L'Avventura and La notte, the triumphs that preceded it, but upon subsequent consideration my feelings of its value rose so high that I now consider it a crowning achievement of modernist cinema and a personal favorite.

*I believe that as viewers and critics we should distinguish between different kinds of value. Some films have significant cinematic or artistic worth because they challenge and expand film-making in formal, visual, or other aesthetic terms, while other films might lack these qualities but still have important historical or cultural value (particularly when it comes to national cinemas, though this is not the only case). In addition, certain films carry with them significant emotional or personal value for individual viewers, and even though film criticism historically has centered on discussions of a film's artistic merits, I don't believe that this aspect of the film experience should be discounted or overlooked. I was moved, for example, by Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, and yet I have to muster strength to be similarly affected by some of Ingmar Bergman's work, even though I admire much of it on a formal level. My hope for film criticism is that it will move towards a more experiential approach to cinema (Sontag's influence looms large here, I admit), and I suppose if I have any particular agenda in my own writing, I'd modestly say that this is it.

*In thinking about film evaluation, the one overbearing, recurring thought I have is how my view of a film's value is deeply affected by other films, by watching more, by expanding my own experience of cinema. When I became serious about watching films roughly five years ago and introduced myself to the work of Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and some of their contemporaries, I initially thought that I had reached, to borrow very loosely from Weekend, the "end of cinema." Later viewing of films by Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Claire Denis, Yasujiro Ozu, Wong Kar-wai, Krzystztof Kieslowski, and Lucrecia Martel revealed how wrong I was, how much more I had to learn. In the process, at least two things occurred to me: for one, I've become more adept at determining a film's value; and two -- and perhaps most important -- my estimation of Antonioni, Godard, and Resnais did not diminish after discovering other accomplished filmmakers. Instead, it escalated to an entirely new level of appreciation, in large part because the distinctive qualities of their cinema, like the distinctive qualities of my later discoveries, became all the more pronounced.

Perspectives

During the past few weeks, despite the end-of-the-year and end-of-the-quarter tidal wave of work that I call the deluge, I've managed to sneak in a few films: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates, several Hollywood dramas and escapist action movies, Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Criterion's new digital transfer of Godard's Breathless. Each film is an experience in and of itself; each is also an opportunity to understand further the practice of cinema. I suppose that in the latter sense each film is inherently an object of study, something to analyze and write about, or in the least to weigh as a self-contained piece of art (or trash, or something in between) and as a part of film history and an ongoing conversation about filmmaking. In watching these movies, I couldn't help but think about this, and in the process about how my own ideas of film aren't just influenced by film criticism, but by criticism in general. For all that I've learned, and continue to learn, about cinema from film critics, I've found that writers in other disciplines, especially those in other narrative arts, equally inform how I think about film. The literary criticism by novelists John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, and, especially, William Gass has supplied me with other, varied perspectives and has improved my understanding not only of the written word but the moving image.

Recently, novelist Sarah Hall wrote an appreciation of the post-apocalyptic children's book, Z for Zachariah. In my own brief mention of Hall's new novel, The Carhullan Army, I recognized her penchant for regional-based fiction, and her introductory comments in her article bring to mind just how important setting can be for narrative art in general:

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments. Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city. I was brought up in a remote, rural place, among formidably pragmatic and enduring women and I began writing my novel The Carhullan Army - the tale of one woman's escape from a repressive English police state to join a group of upland rebels - after the Cumbrian floods in January 2005. This was one of the worst episodes in my county's history, a history that includes many violent sackings, and the implications of an altered climate became no longer merely imaginable, but visible.

Sometimes in the midst of discussing the mechanics of a work, I overlook elements as simple and as time-worn and as significant as place; in this sense, Hall's words here serve as an important critical reminder, as does her own fiction. Hall's first novel, Haweswater, focuses on a tenant farming community in the small village of Mardale, in northwest England. Her second, The Electric Michelangelo, splits its narrative between the English seaside resort of Morecombe and New York's Coney Island. Each environment indelibly informs the experiences and behavior of the book's characters (as does, say, the modern, urban, commercialized Paris of Godard's Two or Three Things).

In considering Z for Zachariah, Hall alludes to another type of place, that of the book's status in a culture (an issue I've increasingly become interested in, both for books and films):

I was also unaware of the turbulence Z had caused since publication. Its themes are, to this day, widely considered too adult for children, its realism too shocking and upsetting: the end of the world; the end of childhood; despotism; violence against women. At what age is this material suitable? Should schools stock it, parents endorse it?

Most of all, Hall discusses the book's relevance to her own life and to the art she practices:

Foremost in my mind, though, was the prospect that Ann [the book's protagonist] might not live up to my expectations. Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy. I had left Ann heading out into the wilderness. She'd been heroic, dynamic, a role model of female self-sufficiency, choice and triumph. Turning to the text again, I expected to find the prose, both in tone and content, over simplistic perhaps, designed for a juvenile audience. But, written in the form of Ann's diary entries, the novel is beautifully spare; neither childish nor adult in style, but pragmatic and direct, like the personality of its narrator. It is a tense, intimate portrayal of a girl in desperate circumstances, a bright farmer's daughter, of whom maturity is suddenly required. Though not yet mature, Ann is not wholly innocent. Once her fear of invasion abates, she admits to excitement over the arrival of a man. She worries about her appearance, ponders whether to put on a dress before revealing herself to the stranger, who looks "poetic" and who she hopes will be "companionable". Her chief worry is not that she won't like him, but that he won't like her.

This, like the entire article itself, is a different kind of criticism. Hall remains intent throughout not so much on the functional qualities of her subject, nor on its mechanics, but on its meaning and her own ways of coming to terms with it. I've never read Z for Zachariah; I didn't even know it existed before reading Hall's essay. Yet Hall has opened it up to me, has allowed me to understand it from a certain perspective, and in the process has set an example, particularly by examining the book through the vital and incandescent filter or her own experience.

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Sarah Hall, "Survivor's Tale," The Guardian (December 1, 2007). RTWT here.