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Review of AMERICAN DIRECTORS

From Film Quarterly, Spring 1984. -– J.R.

AMERICAN DIRECTORS

Two volumes.  Edited by Jean-Pierre Coursodon, with Pierre Sauvage. New York: McGraw Hill, 1983. $21.95 per volume cloth, $11.95 per volume paper.

On the whole, Jean-Pierre Coursodon’s 874-page, two-volume American Directors is closer in genre to Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary than it is to Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema. Like both predecessors, it is an encyclopedia of opinions first and facts second — although, to its credit, it has many more facts per entry (in filmographies and career summaries) than either of the earlier monoliths. Like the Roud and unlike the Sarris, it attempts exhaustive surveys rather than suggestive critical miniatures, and is authored by many hands. Coursodon wrote 66 of the 118 essays and co-editor Pierre Sauvage, who furnished all the filmographies, contributed l3; the remaining 39 are by 20 other writers.

Again like the Roud, the Coursodon stands or falls as a compendium more than as a book with a sustained viewpoint; consecutive or continuous reading is neither recommended nor viable. Overall, the criticism is homogeneous, perhaps too much so: the standard auteurist form of career survey — already a bit fossilized — as developed out of Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier’s Trente ans de cinéma américain (1970) and The American Cinema (1968) is so predominant here that other critical persuasions of the past two decades might as well have never existed. On the other hand, the critical frame of reference adopted by Coursodon and Sauvage is much wider than Sarris’s by virtue of being more truly bilingual. Even if Kael gets four times as many citations in the index as Bazin (while Bellour, Fieschi and Heath get predictably none), French appreciation of American cinema is basic to the underpinnings of the subject, making this collection an ideal starting place for Americans who wish to learn more about the French enthusiasm for Tay Garnett, Jerry Lewis, Frank Tashlin and Don Weis (among others) in English. The fact that Coursodon winds up being somewhat equivocal about all four is characteristic, but it is precisely this balanced ambivalence that makes him an excellent mediator. A specialist in Hollywood comedy, Coursodon makes an unexpected, noble defense of Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories — a lot more interesting to read than all the predictable hatchet-jobs — and comes down hard on Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong no less persuasively, with particular emphasis on the continuity errors. The other French contributors are four able critics largely identified with Positif: Jean-Loup Bourget, Michael Henry, Alain Masson and Yann Tobin.

The remaining writers vary widely in effectiveness, although all tend to come across as competent. Ronnie Scheib’s study of Ida Lupino is so strong that one regrets that she didn’t contribute more to the collection; the chapter on Coppola by Diane Jacobs, the only other female contributor, regrettably doesn’t extend beyond Apocalvpse Now. Other pieces break down for me on individual caveats: in the essays on Budd Boetticher by Barry Gillam and William Wellman by Todd McCarthy, both otherwise respectable surveys, the two most experimental (and, to my mind, most interesting and effective) films by each director — A Time for Dying (1969) and Track of the Cat (1954), respectively — aren’t even discussed. Myron Meisel is perceptive about John Cassavetes in general, but misses the extent to which the closing reel of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie encapsulates the director’s personal testament (above all, in the use of “l Can’t Give You Anything But Love” in the nightclub). In his Michael Ritchie entry, Mark LeFanu just about wins me over when he relates Smile to Ibsen, but strains my credulity when he compares Semi-Tough to Makavejev.

It’s in many of the shorter entries that the auteurist method seems most questionable; reliable deadwood facts and measurements tend to accumulate, often to little purpose. The first sentence by Pierre Sauvage on Norman Z. McLcod doesn’t exactly compel one to read further: “In the course of a career devoted primarily to comedy and secondarily to musical comedy, Norman Z. McLeod, whose manner on movie sets was soft- spoken and unassuming, seems to have displayed little more than modest if occasionally serviceable craftsmanship.” A similar aim seems to be behind much of the critical writing, with mixed results. One can only speculate over the system of inclusion that makes way for dutiful term papers on such directors as McLeod, Lloyd Bacon, Edward L. Cahn, Jack Conway, Gordon Douglas, Norman Foster, Hugo Fregonese, Stuart Heisler and Vincent Sherman, while excluding such diverse figures as René Clair, Monte Hellman, Dennis Hopper, Phil Karlson, Albert Lewin, Elaine May, Max Ophüls, Jean Renoir and James Whale.

The overall virtue that most of the contributors successfully strive for is judiciousness — a quality that especially characterizes David Sterritt on Robert Altman, John Belton on Robert Mulligan and Edgar G. Ulmer, Roger McNiven on Gregory La Cava and Jacques Tourneur, and Charles Wolfe on Busby Berkeley, Cecil B. De Mille and Mervyn LeRoy. It is the sort of reasonableness that one commonly associates with Positif rather than Cahiers du Cinéma, and relative Cahiersists like myself may regret the relative absence of passionate hyperbole and delirium (LeFanu on Ritchie is a rare exception) that aims at polemics more than straight assessments. The problem is merely one of temperament, and other readers may value and even cherish American Directors precisely for some of those sturdy reasons that make me respect it more than enjoy it. Insofar as commonsensical critical judgments rather than provocations or challenges are the main bill of fare, this hefty work avoids the eclecticism of Roud’s Critical Dictionary as well as the aphoristic bravado of early Sarris to settle on a steady, classic diet of meat and potatoes, served with dependable regularity. Students of the subject could do far worse: determined aesthetes may want to look further.                         –JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Rotterdam: Jancsó, Potter, Ruiz [1984]

From the Spring 1984 issue of Sight and Sound. This was the first time I attended the film festival in Rotterdam and the first time I encountered the work of Raul Ruiz. It’s sadly emblematic that the Jancsó TV miniseries, even though it wound up being shown on the BBC, is so forgotten and out of reach today that I can’t even find a satisfactory still for it on the Internet. — J.R.

It’s a curious festival that can make young filmmakers like Henry Jaglom, Nicolas Roeg and John Sayles seem like commercial Hollywood directors. Devoted to the relatively unseeable and intractable independents across the globe whose work exists between the parentheses of an industry, Rotterdam has lasted for thirteen years, and under Hubert Bals’ inspired direction has this year added a market to amplify its already hefty fare. For an American who can hardly keep up with a Ruiz, Duras, Garrel or Jancsó without crossing the Atlantic, it was like stumbling into a forbidden forest of plenty, loaded with potential traps and unexpected rewards.

Among the more solid achievements this year was a nine-hour TV series by Miklós Jancsó, intriguingly titled Faustus Faustus Faustus. Billed as `excerpts, illustrations and variations’ from László Gyurokó’s The Blessed Descent to Hell of Dr Faustus and covering nearly half a century of Hunagrian political life (from the hero’s birth in 1927 to his death in 1973), this sensual if somber chronicle stuns first of all by being at once wholly Jancsó and wholly television, with no sense of compromise at either end.

Narrated by an offscreen Faustus who refers to the hero as `my protégé’, the series all but literalises the notion of caméra-stylo by floating from one detail to the next with the fluidity of writing. Mirrors, changes in lighting and focus and perpetual camera movements conspire to give the mise en scène a Wellesian rigour, with transitions between narration and dialogue and between background and foreground equally seamless and functional. One never regrets not seeing the images on a cinema screen, spectacular as they often are. Already subtitled in English, this masterwork seems a natural for the BBC, although one suspects that American TV is still too undeveloped to cope with its dimensions.

A good half-dozen festival selections centred on filmmakers: documentaries on Bresson and Mankiewicz; a useful survey of black African cinema (Férid Boughedir’s Caméra d’Afrique); Manoel De Oliveira’s disappointingly lackadaisical Nice à propos de Jean Vigo [see first photo above]; Jackie Raynal’s cockeyed, cartoonish and semifictionalised account of her own American film career (with surrealist displacements) in Hotel New York [see second photo above]; and Wim Wenders’ querying of sixteen colleagues at Cannes in 1982 – from Godard and Antonioni to Herzog and Spielberg – in Room 666 [see photo]. If the latter two are real films and the first three more conventional audio-visual tools, Nice falters between these options, coming fully to life only when Vigo’s silent footage takes over.

The presence in Rotterdam of Joseph Mankiewicz and two of his quirkier films (People Will Talk, The Honey Pot) added to the interest of Luc Béraud’s All About Mankiewicz, two hours of talk without clips. It’s in the second hour, when Mankiewicz is allowed free rein as a hollywood racounteur (rather than begrudging auteur to Michel Ciment’s Boswell) that his wit really shines. Room 666 adopts the minimalist strategy of planting each director in the same hotel room beside a TV set, alone, to respond to a pessimistic query from Wenders about the effacement of cinema by television. Whether by chance or design, the juxtaposition of silent video fare with directors — Godard with tennis, Fassbinder with cartoon cavemen, Antonioni with static — are delightfully apposite. For complex portraiture, however, Steve Dwoskin’s Shadows from Light, about still photographer Bill Brandt, was the most dialectical exchange between filmmaker and subject — a fascinating crossover whereby Dwoskin’s camera movements somehow manage to translate themselves into Brandt’s eerie forms of stasis.

If the new cinema needs to be outrageous, Sally Potter’s BFI production The Gold Diggers grandly fulfills that requirement by forging a feminist sci-fi musical extravaganza — with Babette Mangolte’s most impressive black and white cinematography to date — which has no obvious British precedent, apart from Potter’s own Thriller. Shown only in the Market, it has not yet found many defenders, yet its `work on the image’ alone deserves applause, and its ragtag anthology of avant-garde tropes — ranging from Richard Foreman’s theatre work to Welles’ The Trial (with odd near-echoes of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T) — remains consistently fresh and unpredictable. As graceful costars, Colette Lafont and Julie Christie merge into the dense allegorical/alchemical tapestry with scarcely a ripple.

For powerfully framed visuals, The Gold Diggers was certainly rivalled by the paintbox pyrotechnics of Raúl Ruiz’s splendid La Ville des Pirates — a breathtaking surrealist nightmare that crossbreeds Walt Disney and Gothic 1950s melodramas — and certain emotive closeups of Maurice Garrel, Emmanuelle Riva, and Christine Boisson in Philippe Garrel’s black and white Liberté, la Nuit, a noble if mannered attempt by Garrel to convert his brand of romantic poetry into haunted newsreel prose about childhood memories of France during the Algerian war, memorably assisted by a solo piano.

Seeing a double-system projection of a workprint of a poorly acted feature shot with damaged stock is hardly anyone’s idea of a jolly time. But if Ruiz’s Point de Fuite — his seventh film in  the past year – still carries a perverse fascination, this is partly because of the way it wears its shoddiness like a crown. Oscillating between half a dozen languages, mainly atonal English and monotonal French, it drives one slightly batty with its portentous gambling metaphor (poker games between three variously bandaged men), its seemingly irrelevant jazz drums on the soundtrack, and the capacity of each line reading to make the petulant dialogue (someone’s ex-wife left the US `because she couldn’t stand the chicken there’) sound even less likely than it reads.

Shot just after La Ville des Pirates [see two stills below], on the same Portuguese island, it reportedly rose in part out of a dare that Ruiz surpass Fassbinder’s record of shooting seventy-odd camera set-ups nonstop; without bothering about retakes, Ruiz inched that record into the eighties. Cinema in spite of everything, because of everything: working worlds apart from Jancsó, Ruiz exhibits a comparable talent for renewal that ultimately enhances the bad work along with the brilliant. Like Godard during most of the 60s and Rivette during much of the 70s, he simply can do no wrong.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM