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Nick’s Kicks

From The Soho News (November 24, 1981). — J.R.

Nick’s Movies (Nicholas Ray retrospective)

The Public Theater through December 13

Fantasy and counter-fantasy are perpetually at war in the films of Nicholas Ray — accounting in no small measure for the highly charged heat, light, fury, beauty, and pain that most of them project. In its most brilliant representations — the separate divisions of Vienna’s saloon  in Johnny Guitar (1954), an almost surrealist Western; the house and mind of Ed Avery in Bigger Than Life (1956), an almost expressionist domestic melodrama —  this graphic warfare actually becomes expressed in terms of discrete zones of action and confinement. “Down there I sell whisky and cards,” announces the imperious Vienna (Joan Crawford) on a stairway, gun in hand, to an itchy search party below that’s somewhere between a lynch mob and a sheriff’s posse. “All you can get up these stairs is a bullet in the head.”

Or consider another scene, one of the most memorable jaded love duets in movies, again spelled out through architecture and spatial balances as well as words and faces. Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) sits at a kitchen table, drink in hand, while Vienna stands behind him, on the other side of a serving window, also facing us. “Lie to me,” he says morosely. “Tell me that all these years you’ve waited for me.” “All these years I’ve waited for you,” she chants back at him in the semidarkness, and they continue this poker-face, blank-verse exchange — a song of lament that Godard wound up imitating in his second feature, Le petit soldat.

Fantasy and counterfantasy — a configuration assuming the shape of our own psychosexual, familial hangups in the 50s (and now), becoming an abstract expressionist roadmap, in a way, of our delirious imaginations and troubled politics. (If Ray has a directorial disciple working in America now, this may well be Dennis Hopper — whose Out of the Blue, shown at the Museum of Modern Art last summer, seems as Raylike in its preoccupations as The Last Movie.) The madness of Ed Avery (James Mason), the schoolteacher protagonist of Bigger Than Life – ostensibly yet inessentially linked by the plot to his use of cortisone — is the madness of America writ large, which becomes the madness of Hollywood, too: the insatiable hunger for the unattainable implied in the title that underwrites the mise en scène of our gaudiest self-projections.

Despite (or maybe because of) its romanticism, Ray’s cinema is in part a catalogue of Horrible Truths. One of the horrible truths of Bigger Than Life isn’t far from that of The Shining and Mommie Dearest (the latter another treatise on the madness of Hollywood) — that parents sometimes want to kill their offspring. As Number One Neurotic among Hollywood directors of the late 40s and 50s — who embarked on filmmaking at age 36 only after studying architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright and working in theater (with Elia Kazan), radio (with John Houseman, folk-song musicology (with Alan Lomax), and even as an administrator for the Office of War Information during World War II (where he reportedly gave painter and film critic Manny Farber his first job, as a toy “rejuvenator”) — Ray yearns after normalcy with an intensity that crackles and burns through his movies.

In his first film (and one of his best), They Live By Night (1948), the note of instability is set in the opening shots, behind the credits — the first helicopter shots in the history of cinema, which follow a runaway car (and later careen past a bigger-than-life billboard). This disequilibrium is maintained throughout by what can only be called an erotic handling of domesticity, which make a teenage couple’s efforts at settling down fragment into a scrapbook of fleeting instants. (Robert Altman’s remake of this movie, the 1974 Thieves Like Us, caught a little of the same quality.) The same kind of tension relating to the unachieved family runs like a live wire through Ray’s work, providing many of the strongest jolts.

If, in the earlier work, a life of crime (or, in the 1952 On Dangerous Ground, an equally brutal life of law enforcement) makes a family’s or even a couple’s security impossible, this dilemma becomes internalized in the domestic settings of Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life, where the family becomes eroded and threatened from within. Ed Avery, a normal man who dreams himself into the position of genius and sage reverses the predicament of Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart), the semiautobiographical scriptwriter hero of In a Lonely Place (1950) — an eccentric who tries to dream himself into a counterfantasy of normality. Or maybe it’s the same predicament, but seen through a mirror.

Derrière le miroir, the French release title of Bigger Than Life, translates as “behind the mirror”. And this shocking portrayal of Middle America losing its soul is, above all, a movie about looking into a mirror — another crucial link with Mommie Dearest, not to mention Raging Bull.  So it stands to reason that a key vertiginous moment occurs when the door of a medicine chest is angrily slammed by Ed’s wife, and Ed’s reflected face — which was just a moment ago posing and preening itself, Hollywood-style, in a seamless image — becomes fragmented into a broken mosaic. And the radical multi-image format of We Can’t Go Home Again — shot with Ray’s students at the State University of New York at Binghamton in the early 70s, and intermittently edited by Ray until his death in ‘79 — can be seen as the consequence of an analogous angry explosion, ignited in part by the 60s.

***

Why is the best and fullest presentation of Ray’s work that New York has ever seen (or is ever likely to see) being steadily ignored by most of the local media? On hand in the Public’s massive retrospective are newly struck 35mm prints of nearly all of Ray’s CinemaScope films — Rebel Without a Cause, Bigger Than Life, The True Story of Jesse James, Bitter Victory, and Party Girl – and at least three others (In a Lonely Place, Knock on Any Door, Wind Across the Everglades), plus old 35mm and 16mm prints of practically everything else. (Whether or not the major The Savage Innocents and the minor Run For Cover will be included is still pending as this article goes to press; check with the Public for future developments. Otherwise, the only missing Ray feature is the second and most negligible, the anonymous A Woman’s Secret.) Also included are regular screenings of Wim Wenders’ and Ray’s Lightning Over Water and, next month, the theatrical premiere of We Can’t Go Home Again.

Could the lack of response to this ambitious season be construed, at least partially, as fallout from the fear and confusion stirred up by Lightning and its associations with death? I suspect so. For this reason, I especially regret the absence from the retrospective of I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1974), a feature-length documentary about Ray that might have served as a possible bridge between Ray’s Hollywood work and the more radical presuppositions of We Can’t Go Home Again and Lightning.

As things stand, it appears that certain New York critics and other innocents have been responding to Lightning tribally, as if it were a sacred taboo — which saves them the bother of having to respond to it morally, aesthetically, or philosophically. The fantasies and counterfantasies of Wenders and Ray thus breed still more counterfantasies in the minds of some critics, motivated less by the film itself than by their fear of death. Could this help to explain the curious recent behavior of Stuart Byron in the [Village] Voice, who jocularly suggested that Wenders was a murderer — a charge couched in terms of a lit-crit pirouette that we’re all supposed to find amusing?

***

Ray’s work as a whole, like that of most romantics, is pretty uneven. I’ve never been able to work up much enthusiasm for Knock on Any Door, Flying Leathernecks, Run for Cover, The True Story of Jesse James, King of Kings, or 55 Days at Peking. (One finds flashes, though. There’s a neat Brechtian lesson in anarchist economics in the Jesse James film, when the title hero pays off a sweet old lady’s mortgage with stolen money, and then steals it back again from her landlord a moment later.)

By contrast, The Lusty Men, Bitter Victory, Party Girl, Wind Across the Everglades, The Savage Innocents, and even the often silly Hot Blood – the closest thing Ray ever came to doing a musical, with Cornel Wilde and Jane Russell as volatile gypsies — all have something crazed, flawed, and magnificent about them; and Rebel Without a Cause, for all its intricate datedness, still has its moments. (If memory serves, Born to Be Bad is interesting in a minor, caustic way.) The splashy colors and characters of Johnny Guitar are among the pivotal joys in American movies. And the enduring love between a beautiful dancer (Cyd Charisse) and a crippled, crooked lawyer (Robert Taylor) in the voluptuous Party Girl (1958), threatened by an evil 20s Chicago gangster named Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb) with a vial of acid, is a lush fairy tale delineated in Metrocolor and CinemaScope’s finest equivalents to bold strokes and purple prose.

-

“The subject of Ray’s films is not so much rebellion as the impossibility of rebellion,” Serge Daney wrote last year, “the perpetual dispute between two men, one young and one old, one the adopted and one the adopter.” Daney singled out two key lines of dialogue in Ray films to represent the poles of this recurring conflict: “I kill the living and I save the dead,” Richard Burton’s hopeless line in Bitter Victory (1957), stands for the son’s tortured impasse, while James Mason’s anguished conclusion in Bigger Than Life that “God was wrong” — for staying the murderous hand of Abraham against Isaac — encapsulates the mad father’s rage. Sometimes in the midst of all these wild fantasies and counterfantasies burns a constant, lurid light, tarnished but unrelenting, a little bit like Baudelaire; and the best of Nick Ray’s movies somehow keeps it going.

Bordwell on Dreyer (a book review)

From the November-December 1981 issue of Film Comment. I was gratified to learn recently from David Bordwell, via his own web site (as well as an email to me), that he’s eventually come around to agreeing with my major complaint about his book.

The photograph of Dreyer immediately below is by Jonas Mekas. — J.R.

The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer by David Bordwell. 251 pp., illustrations, index, University of California Press, $29.50

In relation to Roland Barthes’ distinction between readerly and writerly texts, David Bordwell — an academic marvel who organizes huge masses of material with an uncanny sense of what can or can’t be assimilated – should be considered a master of the teacherly text. His ambitious textbook written with Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (Addison-Wesley, 1979), has rightly been regarded as a landmark to many film teachers – a sort of Whole Systems Catalog of formal registers in film that, like Dudley Andrew’s The Major Film Theories, makes a good bit of relatively difficult material accessible to students. Almost alone among prominent American film academics. Bordwell has drawn a lot of sustenance from the Russian formalists and more contemporary critics such as Noël Burch to articulate a modernist position that, for better and for worse, has avoided most of the ideological debates that his predecessors have engaged in.

In part because he has always defined his terrain as exclusively academic -– a teacherly approach in more ways than one -– Bordwell has not had to worry about those questions od national, existential, and vocational identity that have plagued most other formalists during this century, including Carl Dreyer himself. (His applications of Burch, for example, have always tended to domesticate and deradicalize aspects of his work, making them part of an acceptable syllabus.) Defining his turf as the range of his library, readers, and students, he doesn’t mind working out a method for studying Japanese cinema that accommodates some of the critical categories of André Bazin as well as Burch -– as he demonstrated at a conference in Milwaukee a couple of years ago –- even if this entails gliding past philosophical or political issues that might place Bazin and Burch at loggerheads with one another.

Disciplined and expedient about what he takes and uses from others, Bordwell is nothing if not pragmatic about his approach to formal film study. He includes criticism of his own previous work -– an early appreciation of Citizen Kane in this magazine (Summer 1971)  extensively auto-critiqued in the anthology Movies and Methods and a critique of his Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Indiana University Press, 1973) –- if this brings him any closer to the clarity he seeks.

Many will not be able to afford the hefty cover price of his The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer. A beautiful object with large-format pages, beautifully illustrated throughout by many well-produced frame enlargements, this may be the most attractive of all the University of California Press’s book-length director studies to date, and belongs on the shelf of every devoted Dreyer lover In contrast to Tom Milne’s useful and introductory The Cinema of Carl Dreyer (A.S. Barnes, 1970) and Mark Nash’s interesting if semi-unreadable Dreyer (BFI, 1977) -– the latter is tactfully and justly reviewed by Bordwell in a lengthy footnote — The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer represents the first coherent exposition in English if Dreyer as a modernist filmmaker, and for this reason alone stands as a seminal study that other critics and teachers will build upon.

The early chapters show Bordwell at his best in setting down many of the formal parameters and conflicts in Dreyer’s work. There’s the use of a book or privileged text (beginning with the first shot of The President, Dreyer’s first film) to guarantee “a teleology of closure” that frames each film as “a model of the adequacy of token to truth.” Then there’s a fascinating account of the construction of space in the early films, and the way that Dreyer’s use of the painterly and theatrical tableau conflicts with narrative logic and the latter’s control of cinematic space. This takes on an additional interest and coherence when Bordwell gets to Dreyer’s use of the closeup: “In order not to relinquish the tableau, Dreyer turns the face into a theatre.”

The latter emphasis naturally becomes a central aspect of Bordwell’s analysis of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, which is effectively and copiously illustrated with frame enlargements taken from the Danish Film Archive’s print of the movie — making this chapter, like most of the others, in part an impressive slide lecture. Yet it seems characteristic of Bordwell’s approach that sixteen of the twenty-six pages in this chapter pass before something as basic to the film as blood is mentioned, and in a seemingly unconscious way that could hardly be more oblique: “The [spatial] uncertainty at work within each composition bleeds across most of the cuts as well.”

One senses that, for Bordwell’s Joan of Arc, the “bleeding” of a formal attribute counts for more than the actual blood shed by Falconetti; and a few pages later, he’s discussing Joan herself as a formal device. In the chapter on Day of Wrath, “Christianity becomes Dreyer’s most powerful formal device,” while in Ordet, “If a character typically possesses traits, desires, wishes, Johannes is not a character. He is, rather, a formal need of the text, a manifestation of Ordet’s demand for Christian legibility and narrative closure.”

The setting up and subsequent solving of problems becomes the focus of each chapter, with the Dreyer film often serving more as the medium than the message of the process. Consequently, the strength of Bordwell’s analytical grids and systems steadily grows as the book progresses, while the films themselves appear at times to shrink. In the chapter on Vampyr, there’s virtually no discussion of the film’s soundtrack or the incestual lesbian lust that’s mixed with the thirst for blood — two facets of Vampyr that I find fundamental — but the analysis of many of the more complex and ambiguously motivated camera movements and the diverse problems they raise are particularly illuminating.*

Occasionally, Bordwell’s absorption in his systems can make for a little unconscious humor. One chapter begins, “Day of Wrath is probably Dreyer’s most popular film, which already indicates something of the problem it poses.” (As a director who only managed to make about one feature per decade during the entire sound period, one wonders whether Dreyer might have appreciated the joke himself.) On the other hand, Bordwell’s flair for visual analysis remains striking and provocative:

One should not infer…that a chiaroscuro is statically laid against the decor, like the traceries in Morocco or the web-motif in Suspicion. In Day of Wrath, the blocks of light and darkness become visible only when a character passes through them. The steepness of many light sources is often not apparent in the static shot; figure movement is required to reveal the unexpected patches and angles of illumination. Evan as simple a task as crossing a room or going to a door…becomes a stream of optical transformations, inducing the characters to penetrate a three-dimensional network of darkness and light. This effect is most pronounced at night, when the rectory’s volume is shot though with a light evoking the supernatural. As Ann circles Martin, she passes through thicknesses of light and shadow which are never projected onto the floor but which endow her with an aura at once mysterious and sexual.

***

Significantly, it’s only when Bordwell arrives at the incomparable Gertrud that the limitations of his approach come to the fore. The passionately personal, intransigent, and relentless aspects of the film seem to confound him because he can’t rationalize them sufficiently into formal properties, so he tends largely to limit his view of the film to reductive criticisms. “This the film’s tempo creates a constant supply of dead spots,” he writes at one point, “from which no narrative information is forthcoming.” It appears that he’s defining a dead spot as a moment from which no narrative information is forthcoming.” This is a narrow piece of circular reasoning that fails to acknowledge the meditative dimensions of the film, a clear indication of Dreyer’s oft-expressed desire that the spectator reflect on what he or she sees and hears — think about the lines, for instance, and what they mean — and not merely be concerned with formal classifications.

The problem with Bordwell’s approach to Gertrud is that it simply draws a blank. Bordwell argues that the film possesses an “emptiness…[that] persistently seeks to negate meaning” — a curious hypothesis, insofar as emptiness is not ordinarily assigned a particular goal, much less a persistent one. But at this point in the argument, Bordwell is also willing to assign knowledge to a film rather than to a filmmaker or a spectator: “Knowing our desire to make the very absence of meaning significant, Gertrud does not actually destroy meaning; instead, the film proffers meaning only to withdraw it.”

Yet in fact, this is precisely what Bordwell does in his book — a sly bubble-dance that Gertrud cannot be accused of performing. And the critic’s withdrawal of meaning becomes, in effect, a denial of Gertrud’s towering and unbearable achievement. Thus a number of isolated elements in the film are reduced to clichés through Bordwell’s limited descriptions of them; these reductions are then labeled clichés so that we can be asked to consider Gertrud’s (as opposed to Bordwell’s) “use of the cliché”. Within the space of a couple of more paragraphs, this has developed into the position that we can’t accept the film as either a tragedy or a work of religious art; ergo, as the old civil rights anthem has it, We Shall Not Be Moved: “In large part, the film’s persistent emptiness denies the richness and complexity, the meaning and pleasure, of ambitiously humanistic art. Gertrud refuses to be a great film. We cannot call it a masterpiece (or a failed masterpiece, or a failure). Gertrud’s empty intervals declare it to be categorically against masterpieces.”

But the denial and refusal in this case are Bordwell’s, not Dreyer’s. A little later, he’s reverting to his (formerly persuasive) argument about privileged texts in Dreyer’s films; only this time he’s using his incomplete knowledge of Gertrud as a means of cinching his case, and I’m no longer convinced: “Earlier Dreyer films had halted us at the threshold of a secure authorial voice, a nondiegetic master meaning: the authorial word of the intertitles (Vampyr), Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), trial transcript and final title (Le Passion de Jeanne d’Arc) or Christian scripture (Ordet).”

According to Bordwell, Gertrud “refuse[s] to situate its narrative within such a framework.” But while he has even taken the trouble to compute the average shot length of Day of Wrath — 14.8 seconds, to be exact  – he is more lackadaisical about discussing Gertrud in its integral form. Despite his assurance at the book’s beginning that “As much as possible, this book returns to the original texts,” he has not taken the trouble to discover that all American prints of Gertrud are missing four or five intertitles of rhymed verse that were removed by the distributor; indeed, to all appearances, Bordwell seems unaware that these intertitles ever existed — and continue to exist outside the U.S.**

It’s on this basis, in any case, that Bordwell can deny Gertrud the framework outlined above. I would argue, first, that the intertitled rhymed verses which mark the play’s five-act divisions — which are “spoken as if by an interior voice to the heroine,” as Elliott Stein has noted in his invaluable piece about the film in the Spring 1965 Sight and Sound — constitute precisely this framework; second, that beautiful as these intertitles are, at least in my memory, they alone scarcely suffice to convert Gertrud from an “empty” film into a fully rounded masterpiece.

So there’s more at stake here than a minor textual dispute. The problem, I think, is that, like Stein and Milne, I’m more concerned with Gertrud, while the final concern of Bordwell, like Nash, appears to be with his own methodology and categories. This is a brilliant book, but Dreyer is a filmmaker who (fortunately) goes well beyond brilliance — and Gertrud a film that goes well beyond Bordwell.

Note

*On the sequence in which Leone, after being attacked, is carried into the chateau, I had occasion to make some related observations of my own, in my review of the film in the August 1976 Monthly Film Bulletin — which I mention here only because Bordwell and Nash both fail to do so in their bibliographies. Considering the fact that they both also omit any references to James Agee or Robert Warshow on Day of Wrath, though, I consider myself in good company.

**2010 note: My own account here is somewhat inexact. For a fuller (if still incomplete) account, cf. my subsequent essay “Gertrud as Nonnarrative: The Desire for the Image”, which also reproduces in its third section (”Gertrud as Passage and Process”) all four of the intertitles in English translation.

Czar Babies [Review of Nabokov’s LECTURES ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE]

From The Soho News (November 17, 1981). Ironically, this review was originally copyedited rather clumsily, so I’ve tried to restore some of its original logic and meaning. Incidentally, for those who might be interested, my earlier review of Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature for Soho News can be accessed here. — J.R.

Lectures on Russian Literature

By Vladimir Nabokov

Edited and introduced by Fredson Bowers

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95

Compare the book under examination to Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, reviewed in these pages last November. Is Volume II a worthy successor, an arguable improvement, or a distinct letdown? Explain. (Use concrete examples.)

All three. Issued in a uniform edition at the same price, only 50-odd pages shorter -– the jacket Indian-red in contrast to last year’s sky-blue –- the book can be considered a worthy successor. Insofar as it contains meaty selections from what I take to be Nabokov’s supreme act (and work) of literary criticism (not counting his voluminous notes on his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which I haven’t read) –- namely, his eccentric and indelible Nikolai Gogol, first published by New Directions in 1944 -– it can arguably be deemed an improvement, even over his exhilarating and enlightening lectures on Flaubert and Kafka in the first volume.

But in most other respects, Lectures on Russian Literature is a distinct letdown. Given the book’s title, it’s hard to adjust comfortably to the conspicuous absence of certain authors. (For the record, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorki, Tolstoy and Turgenev are the ones included.) Granted that Nabokov never taught a favorite like Andrei Bely’s Petersburg because no satisfactory English translation existed at the time. But what about his beloved Pushkin and Lermontov, both of whom he translated at length, not to mention such writers as Blok, Goncharov, and Leskov?

According to Nabokov’s son Dmitri, these and at least 11 more unrepresented Russian writers were taught by his father at Cornell at one time or another, but the lecture notes haven’t survived. Is it merely a whim of fate, then, that deprives us of Nabokov on Lermontov and Pushkin, while preserving his relatively forgettable and unexceptional asides on Maxim Gorky?  Or could this possibly have something to do with the fact that the editor curtly yet implicitly labels all the missing figures as “minor Russian writers,” in apparent contrast to Nabokovian aversions like Gorky and Dostoevsky?

This brings us to Fredson Bowers himself, described on the flyleaf of both volumes as “the leading authority in the field of textual editing” who “has prepared definitive editions of the works of Christopher Marlowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, and William James.” The brilliant presentation of Lectures on Literature left me in no mood to question the first credential, particularly in relation to all the heavy-duty credits that follow it. Now I’m wondering why he deserves a “the” in front of “leading authority” instead of an “a,” and whether “authority in the field of textual editing” is distinct from “textual editor” (or just “copyeditor,” for that matter). For the editing (and copy-editing) of this book is not always tidy. The discussion of The Brothers Karamazov is inexplicably missing from the table of contents, a few really awkward or downright gibberish sentences are left intact (e.g., of Anna Karenina, “The key to its structure is consideration in terms of time” and “The birth of faith in Lyovin, the pangs of faith birth”), and some passages are as needlessly choppy as one motorboat bisecting the wavy trail left by another. (“But nature comes in not only as the villain of the piece: it also has its good,” Nabokov says in relation to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”. “Very good and sweet side.” Is this a note, an afterthought, or a hiccup?)

***

Enough kvetching. Now tell me some more about what’s good in the book. Once again, be explicit and cite copiously.

When Nabokov really loves what he’s lecturing about, as with Gogol and Tolstoy –- not merely likes, as with Turgenev, or admires, as with Chekhov -– his style passes through some exciting sea changes, and what emerges is mimetic criticism of a very high order, appreciation that imperceptibly turns into a form of pastiche or parody:

“A creative reading of Gogol’s story [“The Overcoat”] reveals that here and there in the most innocent descriptive passage, this or that word, sometimes a mere adverb or a preposition, for instance the word “even” or “almost,” is inserted in such a way as to make a harmless sentence explode in a wild display of nightmare fireworks, or else the passage that has started in a rambling colloquial manner all of a sudden leaves the tracks and swerves into the irrational where it really belongs, or again, quite as suddenly, a door bursts open and a mighty wave of foaming poetry rushes in only to dissolve in bathos, or to turn into its own parody, or to be checked by the sentence breaking and reverting to a conjuror’s patter, that patter which is such a feature of Gogol’s style.” (At another point, this story “describes a full circle: a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces.”)

“Tolstoy follows the contours of the thought, the emotion, or the object until he is perfectly satisfied with his re-creation, his rendering. This involves what we might call creative repetitions, a compact series of repetitive statements, coming one immediately after the other, each more expressive, each closer to Tolstoy’s meaning. He gropes, he unwraps the verbal parcel for its inner sense, he peels the apple of the phrase, he tries to say it one way, then a better way, he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words.”

When he’s somewhat less engaged, Nabokov generally reveals his wit and talent more in stray phrases (e.g., “Siberia, that storeroom for Dostoevsky’s discarded waxworks”; “Dostoevsky’s mediocre imitators such as Sartre, a French journalist”) or epigrammatic one-liners: The Brothers Karamazov “is a typical detective story, a riotous whodunit — in slow motion”; “Chekhov’s books are sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can appreciate their sadness.”

Nabokov’s withering, aristocratic disdain — as for Dostoevsky and Sartre, above –– is as personal and as inconvenient, in a way, as a boil on a Gogol character. It crops up with “the second-rate French writer Maupassant (called for some reason de Maupassant),”  with “Upton Lewis,” with the translator Constance Garnett (mainly sniped at in footnotes), and with Conrad.

The latter two are skewered together when Nabokov cites Conrad’s letter to Garnett’s husband, revealing that Conrad thought little of Anna Karenina but found her translation “splendid”. “I shall never forgive Conrad this crack,” Nabokov snarls, and of course he didn’t. A curious thing about this sort of distaste –- often (if not invariably) connected to matters of class and which side of the Russian Revolution someone’s bread was buttered on — is that it defines Nabokov’s literary profile as cruelly as a crucifix while simultaneously bringing it to life and to our attention.

***

Is the following sentence ascribable to Bower’s editing (or lack of same), Nabokov’s mimetic critical approach, neither, or both? “The Stream of Consciousness or Internal Monologue is a method of expression that was invented by Tolstoy, a Russian, long before James Joyce, character’s mind in its natural flow, now running across personal emotions and recollections and now going underground and now as a concealed spring appearing from underground and reflecting various items of the outer world.” Be brief.

Your guess is as good as mine.

Old Wave Saved from Drowning (with Sandy Flitterman)

From American Film (November 1981). — J.R.

Old Wave Saved from Drowning

By Sandy Flitterman and Jonathan Rosenbaum

Think of French cinema, and the New Wave springs immediately to mind. This association is hardly accidental. History, it is often said, gets written by the victors. And the victories recounted in the standard film histories — whether they are critical successes or box-office triumphs — are inevitably at the expense of other movies, individuals, or social trends that presumably failed to scale the same heights.

But the New Wave, like other movements in film history, is significant not only for what it gave us — films like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Godard’s Breathless, and Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour — but also for what it took away, for the films it rebelled against, repudiated, buried in the dustbin of history. Now a fascinating new program of forty-six subtitled French films made between 1930 and 1960 helps sketch out the rudiments of just such an alternative history.

This group of films, appropriately entitled “Rediscovering French Film,” has been put together by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in cooperation with the French government and, after premiering in Manhattan this month, is scheduled to travel next year to Washington, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago. Selected by Adrienne Mancia and Stephen Harvey, of the museum, with the help of Richard Roud, director of the New York Film Festival, this package promises rich and various discoveries, and will undoubtedly lead us to revise some of our notions about the New Wave itself, as well as the cinema that preceded it.

For one thing, the youthful antiauthoritarian eclecticism and bohemianism projected by fledgling directors like Godard, Chabrol, and Truffaut led many American filmgoers to assume that the New Wave was thumbing its nose at stodgy postwar Gaullism. Today, in view of the astute political implications of the work of a Jean Renoir or a Jean Grémillon, it is possible to conclude that something closer to the reverse was true. (Godard himself now even refers to Breathless as a Fascist film.) At the very least, some of the films in this new series can help us to understand the difference between rebellious exuberance and class analysis.

It was precisely this kind of political ambiguity which was fostered by the appearance of Truffaut’s polemical l954 article “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in which he identified two warring camps-the “tradition of quality” and an “auteur’s cinema.” Indeed, what’s often overlooked about this article is that the objections it lodges against the so-called psychological realism and prestigious literary adaptations of such directors as Claude Autant-Lara, Yves, Allégret, René Clément, and Jean Delannoy are basically conservative ones. For Truffaut, sins of these filmmakers –- especially the scriptwriting team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who worked on such famous films as La Symphonie Pastorale (1946), Devil in the Flesh (1947), and Forbidden Games (1952), included their antimilitary and anticlerical attitudes as well as their aesthetic assumptions about adapting literary classics. This “tradition of quality” was perceived by Truffaut as blasphemous and profane in relation to the spirituality which he perceived in such individual, creative auteurs as Robert Bresson, Abel Gance, Max Ophüls, and Jean Renoir.

Partially as a consequence of the New Wave’s success, certain French films that preceded it in American art houses –- such as Devil in the Flesh and Forbidden Games – gradually went into decline. In 1929 — when eighty-five percent of the films shown throughout the world were made in the United States — according to film historian Léon Moussinac, French production dropped to only fifty features a year. In response to this dire situation, and perhaps out of a need to develop a national cinematic identity, certain French directors, scriptwriters, actors, and technicians forged lasting alliances which produced an exciting renaissance in French cinema. The movement combined poetic realism with the political sentiments of the Popular Front, injected populist sentiments and fresh subjects from daily life into the meat-and-potatoes staples of Saturday night cinema, and utilized the attraction of established actors for low-budget star vehicles.

Directors Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, scriptwriters Jacques Prévert and Charles Spaak, actors Jean Gabin and Arletty, and art directors Lazare Meerson and Léon Barsacq were all representative figures in this upheaval. It’s important to note the difference between this collective process and the systematization of Hollywood production of the same time. What marked French cinema during this period was the truly collaborative nature of the projects, as opposed to a strict division of labor.

Running parallel to this industry trend were the impulses that led, in 1936, to La vie est à nous – an anti-Fascist propaganda film supervised by Renoir for the French Communist party, and made in collaboration with Jacques Becker, Jean-Paul Le Chanois, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jacques B. Brunius, Gaston Modot, and many others, intended to be shown outside of commercial circuits, at public meetings. By that year, authoritarian governments were ruling Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Yugoslavia. The film was made collectively in the hope of influencing the May elections in France, and it was financed by the contributions of individual party members.

Renoir’s previous commercial feature, Le Crime de M. Lange, had already celebrated the growth of a worker’s cooperative. The more didactic nature of La vie est à nous makes it in some respects a film even further ahead of its time –utilizing bold displacements and transitions between documentary and fictional material, with techniques anticipating Citizen Kane, New Wave films, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler: A Film From Germany.

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On the basis of the dozen or so films in the upcoming French film program that we’ve been able to preview, it’s clear that one major source of interest in these movies is what they reveal about the temper and mood of France, socially and politically, at the time they were made. Most of them, to be sure, do this much less directly than La vie est à nous.

One intriguing “B” film called Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (1938) is a melodrama set in a boys’ school which co-stars two of the greatest heavy muggers of all time, Michel Simon and Erich von Stroheim, as rival teachers. Introducing itself in an opening title as an escapist tale about childhood adventures, the movie begins appropriately with the nocturnal meeting of a boys’ secret society, “Chiche-Capon.”

Before long, two of Chiche-Capon’s members mysteriously vanish from the school. The story eventually includes a subplot about counterfeiting, as well as frequent references in the dialogue to the imminent outbreak of war, which was indeed threatening France at the time. A paranoid fear of foreigners held by one of the teachers (Simon) leads to the persecution of another (Stroheim), contributing an expressionist overlay to the tensions of an otherwise routine thriller plot, routinely directed by Christian-Jaque.

Abel Gance’s Paradis perdu (1939), an even stranger kettle of fish, reflects war jitters more directly, by making the outbreak of World War I the key traumatic event in its ultraromantic plot. Pierre Leblanc (Fernand Gravey), an artist, meets Janine Mercier (Micheline Presle), a dressmaker, during a fireworks celebration on Bastille Day. After he enjoys a dreamlike, meteoric rise to fame as a dress designer, they marry, but war is declared during their honeymoon in the country (”Fishing’s over,” exclaims a peasant, “shooting’s started!”), and he goes off to the front. Janine dies in childbirth while he’s away, and in the remainder of the film we watch Pierre overcome his bitterness about his lost paradise, as his daughter, Jeanette (also played by Presle), finds her own romantic happiness.

Max Ophüls’ neglected De Mayerling à Sarajevo (1940) makes the link between the two world wars even more explicit. Its plot is a quasi-fictional prelude to the specific incident that precipitated the outbreak of World War I, the assassination of Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in l9l4. The film actually concludes with newsreel footage and a narrator stating (over a rousing version of *La Marseillaise”), “The sons of the men of l9l4 are now finishing the job of defending freedom and liberty that was started by their fathers.”

Prior to this uncharacteristic ending, the director shows his usual flair for examining the relationships within a social complex, in a style of long takes, which Ophüls shares with Renoir and Jacques Tati, that preserves the integrity of space. The opening scene depicts the frantic preparations for the birthday party of Emperor Franz Joseph in a series of fluid, choreographed camera movements. And throughout the film, royal symbols (such as the empire’s official seal, the Hapsburg crown, and an imposing military statue) provide much of the opulent visual subtext, contributing to the exquisite sense of detail characteristic of the man who directed Letter From an Unknown Woman and Lola Montès.

The plot concerns Francis Ferdinand (John Lodge), the emperor’s democratic-minded great nephew, who falls in love with Sophie Chotek (Edwige Feuillère), a Czech countess beneath his station, who shares his political views. Both his mother and great uncle try in different ways to subvert the romance, the former suggesting an amorous “arrangement,” the latter employing espionage and military strategies. But the crown-versus-heart theme is ultimately replaced by a more explicitly political concern. Forced to give up certain royal privileges in order to marry Sophie, Francis Ferdinand continues to work for a united Austria until he dies from an assassin’s bullet.

Marcel L’Herbier — whose spectacular (and spectacularly expensive) silent masterpiece L’Argent (1927), an updating of Zola’s Money, has only recently been rediscovered by critics — is a director still in the process of being reevaluated, and his four films in the series will undoubtedly speed up that process. All have rather fragrant titles, the first two of which are adaptations of works by pop writer Gaston Leroux: Le Mystère de la chambre iaune (1930), Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1931), Le Bonheur (1935, featuring Charles Boyer and Michel Simon), and La Nuit fantastique (1942).

La Nuit is a charming fantasy made during the Occupation that has the same two leads as Gance’s Paradis perdu, Fernand Gravey and Micheline Presle. It conveys some of the cozy chiaroscuro and film noir ambience one might associate with certain Hollywood films released the same year (Casablanca, I Married a Witch, The Magnificent Ambersons, Cat People), as well as with Truffaut’s recent movie about a theater group during the Occupation, The Last Metro.

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With the four films in the French show by Jean Grémillon — Gueule d’amour (1937), Lumière d’été (1943), Le ciel est à vous (1944), and Pattes blanches (1948) — one is faced with a seminal director whose work is virtually unknown in this country. According to critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz, Grémillon directed a variety of films “not much resembling each other, thanks to production problems as well as to a desire to repeat nothing and to refuse nothing, whether routine melodrama or an entry in the Encyclopédie filmée.” From an auteurist’s point of view, the diversity of Grémillon’s output might be seen as a professional liability, and it prevents us from neatly identifying him as a single creative force. On the other hand, Grémillon’s inventiveness and stylistic range mark him as one of the most exciting directors of the period.

Just on the strength of Lumière d’été, one of the incontestable masterpieces of French cinema during the Occupation, Grémillon must be regarded as an essential figure. The movie is remarkable on many counts. A complex portrayal of Vichy decadence, as represented by the wealthy country baron Patrice Le Verdier (Paul Bernard), a libertine whom Georges Sadoul linked to the heroes of the Marquis de Sade, it delineates a rather bold political subtext, particularly when a large group of mine workers spontaneously overcomes this rake on the edge of a cliff.

As an intricately composed mise en scène of social interactions enhanced by some striking sound innovations (including an impressionistic aural flashback in which an entire sequence of events is cunningly constructed out of evocative sounds and musical fragments), Lumière d’été suggests the work of Jacques Becker and Jean Renoir. (In fact, Becker’s last and best film, Le Trou [1960], a painstaking prison-escape account whose full, 126-minute version has never before been seen in this country, will conclude the series; Becker’s earlier Goupi mains-rouges [1943] and Les rendezvous de juillet [1949] will also be seen.)

Lumière d’été, a Racinean drama about a tragic relay of frustrated affections (wherein A loves B, who loves C, who loves D), was written by the poet Jacques Prévert, whose film credits also include Le Crime de M. Lange and Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945). All of the above elements (sociopolitical allegory, visual and aural patterning, trenchant dialogue) converge with the talented cast — Bernard, Madeleine Renaud, Pierre Brasseur, Madeleine Robinson, and character actor Marcel Levesque — at a climactic masked ball, a complex visual orchestration in which Grémillon’s dazzling mise en scène and Prévert’s literary allusions (to Manon Lescaut, Hamlet, and William Tell, as well as de Sade) are allowed to have a field day. Based on a 1937 incident, Grémillon’s Le Ciel est à vous, with dialogue by Charles Spaak, is a stirring populist drama about a working-class husband and wife (Madeleine Renaud and Charles Vanel) whose mutual aspirations drive them to sacrifice their daughter’s musical talent and risk the wife’s life to win a women’s aviation competition. Once again, music and sound play an unusually forceful dramatic role. At one point, a crowd’s feverish offscreen chanting of the hero’s name seems like an ominous threat rather than a warm invitation, recalling the vengeful miners in Lumière d’été.

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The MoMA series features several adaptations of classic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European novels: Raymond Bernard’s Les miserables (1934), Robert Bresson’s Les dames du bois de Boulogne (1945, derived from an episode in Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist), Georges Lampin’s The ldiot (1946), Christian-Jaque’s lengthy The Charterhouse of Parma (1948) — the latter two were vehicles for actor Gérard Philipe -– and Alexandre Astruc’s Une vie (1958), the only color film in the entire series.

In the case of the Bresson masterpiece, one finds a rare instance of relatively pure directorial authorship contradicting the collective and collaborative tendencies of the period. One should note, however, that Diderot’s dialogue in this film was adapted to a contemporary setting by Jean Cocteau, whose filming of his own plays Les parents terribles and L’aigle à deux têtes — both 1948 — provide further exceptions. The second and last of Bresson’s films to use professional actors, (notably Maria Casarès and Paul Bernard), Les dames du bois de Boulogne is also perhaps the first that clarifies his distance from psychological motivation and naturalistic detail.

While the interest of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot revolves mainly around Charles Spaak’s crisp dialogue, Léon Barsacq’s sumptuous sets (including a lovely miniature of St. Petersburg at night, which the camera twice traverses in a leisurely pan), and Gérard Philipe’s charming and nuanced performance as the twenty-seven-year-old Prince Myshkin (opposite Edwige Feuillère’s Nastasia), The Charterhouse of Parma tends to reduce Stendhal to little more than his intrigues. The latter film is particularly interesting, however, as a somewhat calcified Classics Illustrated form of literary piety — an attempt at a European Gone With the Wind which solidly embodies that “tradition of quality” which Truffaut and his New Wave colleagues wished to destroy.

There’s a scene in The Charterhouse of Parma during which the character Gina (Maria Casarès) sits at a mirror, applying face cream, while telling Count Mosca about the ravages of age on a woman’s beauty. It offers an interesting cross-reference to the sequence in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) in which Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) is also seen seated by a mirror, applying face cream. In the Christian-Jaque/”tradition of quality” version, Casarès’ makeup is unrealistically still intact by the end of the scene, the cream carefully applied in accordance with the photographic requirements of the star portrait. In the Truffaut/New Wave scene, on the contrary, Moreau’s face is left totally denuded at the end, giving it a deglamorized appearance — an effect which exemplifies the much-celebrated irreverent spontaneity of the New Wave.

The Charterhouse of Parma certainly confirms many of the New Wave’s accusations against the “tradition of quality,” but any true reevaluation of the missing links in French film history will undoubtedly have to plow back still further — through the limitations of this or any single selection. It will have to look into the broader question of what keeps certain films and filmmakers visible or invisible in our history books, which are always tentative and provisional places, regardless of what they may say.

Although a part of “Rediscovering French Film” seems to represent the very strain of that gilt-edged “quality” cinema of a literary bent that Truffaut opposed — including movies directed by Yves Allégret, René Clément, and Jean Delannoy — still another portion of the selection can be said to flesh out that cinéma d’auteur of Becker, Bresson, Cocteau, Gance, and Ophüls that he championed. Perhaps even more important, the range of work on display is sufficiently wide to pass beyond both of Truffaut’s neat categories of 1954 and to raise the suspicion that in order to arrive at a truly comprehensive picture of French film history, we may have to invent some new critical categories and reconnaissance strategies of our own.