JonathanRosenbaum.com

Review of CINEMA STYLISTS [1984]

From the Summer 1984 Film Quarterly (Vol. XXXVII, No. 4). I can happily report that some copies of this book are still available on the Internet. — J.R.

CINEMA STYLISTS

By John Belton. Metuchan, N.J. & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1983. $19.50.

From the outset, in his Introduction, John Belton makes the organizing stance of Cinema Stylists admirably clear. Revised auteurism — that is to say, non-vulgar and non-biographical auteurism, an auteurism brought more in line with the qualms of Barthes and Foucault (and subsequently Wollen) about authorship, and tempered with some of the notions about authorial presence in Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction — is the dominant (if not exclusive) mode in this collection of over three dozen pieces, written over the past fourteen years. With the specters and examples of Robin Wood and Andrew Sarris hovering over his shoulders – his right and left consciences, as it were – Belton lacks the stylistic fluidity of either of his mentors, but has certain sound academic virtues which match and occasionally surpass the capacities of both.

A champion of the underdog film as well as the neglected figure, Belton can be seen going to bat in Cinema Stylists for Robert Mulligan, Edgar G. Ulmer, Teresa Wright, Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn and Topaz, Borzage’s I’ve Always Loved You and even Preminger’s Rosebud. (Which is not to say that more conventional topics — from Griffith and Hawks to John Wayne and James Stewart — aren’t examined with equal discernment and scrutiny.)

Scrupulously alert to such matters as correct screen ratios, the importance of collaborators (yielding an interesting piece about Don Siegel, whom Belton terms “The Last of the Dependent Independents”) and the interference of producers (as on Shark!), Belton remains a sort of liberal-minded traditionalist in most of his aesthetic positions. If he comes across as more strictly academic than either Wood or Sarris, there is a sureness about his steps, however plodding, which leads unerringly to whatever point he wishes to make. The physicality of Hawks, the spirituality of Borzage and the doom-ridden metaphysics of Ulmer are all constructed postulates of critical perception that lead Belton confidently through several essays, bringing coherence and shape to a good many local observations. (His more fragile and vulnerable treatment of Ulmer, rhetoric and all, closely resembles the passionate defense of Cornell Woolrich by Francis M. Nevins, Jr., in Nightwebs without being quite as biographical.)

In the midst of a polemic on Samuel Fuller, Belton sets down a particular credo that sheds considerable light on his own work as a whole:

…If someone were to force me to classify my artistic tastes politically, I would have to confess that I love “reactionary” art; that I am drawn to art that looks backward, that reaffirms traditional beliefs and values in conventional forms. Though it makes no sense critically, I prefer Griffith’s nineteenth-century, melodramatic vision to Eisenstein’s twentieth-century, didactic one; Ford’s collapse of events into the timeless order of memory to Capra’s forward-looking visionary utopianism; Hitchcock’s profound, romantic fascination with the past to Kubrick’s empty, futuristic cynicism. Yet an essentially irrelevant fondness for reactionary art on my part is not criticism but bias. It obscures the distinction that must be made and preserved between politics and cinema; as such, it threatens this article’s first assumption that art is, finally, apolitical and that politics is not art.

Griffith, Ford and Hitchcock are great not because of their affirmation of traditional values and beliefs but because of the way in which they make this affirmation. This is also true of Fuller. Although the content of his films is often political, his style transforms the politics into art.

Here, in a nutshell, are what might be regarded as Belton’s strengths as well as limitations. As a frank and honest acknowledgment of an ideological tendency in much auteurist criticism (which made, for instance, American Ford criticism in the late sixties and early seventies one of the only plausible refuges for closet patriotism available), this is at once disarmingly American and, from an eighties vantage point, academically foolproof. (Incidentally, it also helps to account for the vantage point from which a Car Wash or D.C. Cab can be dismissed as message-ridden non-art, and a Kramer vs. Kramer, My Dinner with André, E.T., or Zelig embraced as truthful art –- namely, a class position.) It also exhibits the ability to call a spade a spade, a conscientious awareness of where certain arguments lead (and a corresponding tact in judging how far to take them), a capacity to encapsulate a complex stylistic pattern in a simple phrase or concept, a decision to be precise and careful at all costs, and the academic assumption that criticism is neither art nor politics but applied theory.

For the most part, Belton is a critic of découpage -– that is, mise en scène plus editing – and this is basically what guides and structures his detailed appreciations of Le boucher, The Crucified Lovers, True Heart Susie, Gun Crazy, I’ve Always Loved You and Hawks’s Monkey Business, to cite only half a dozen of the better essays. His attempts to reach for wider social contexts -– as in “Hawks, Warner Bros., and the War” and “The Backstage Musical: 42^nd Street and French Cancan” -– are provocative but somewhat less certain forays into methodologically difficult areas. While I fully agree with the conclusion of the latter piece, that “Genre criticism needs to go beyond genre,” I’m less persuaded by the position of virtual equality assigned to Bacon and Berkeley’s likeable musical and Renoir’s masterpiece, and even more dubious when Belton cites 7 Brides for 7 Brothers (along with West Side Story) as a musical “shot outdoors,” in opposition to “studio musicals” (which only proves that he’s a sucker for painted backdrops). The article on Hawks and Warner Brothers is first-rate as far as Belton takes it; but since most of the piece is about Hawks rather than Warner Brothers, the degree of modified auteurism that emerges –- as opposed to old-fashioned, personality-cult auteurism –- is relatively slim. But the amount of solid, workmanlike close analysis in this collection is impressive as well as directly useful, and it is hard to think of another volume from Scarecrow that I could recommend as highly. –- JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

THE GOLD DIGGERS: A Preview

This originally appeared in the twelfth issue of Camera Obscura (Summer 1984). I’m delighted that a DVD of Sally Potter’s overlooked, neglected, and scandalously undervalued masterpiece is finally in the works, from the British Film Institute, and that I’ll be writing a short essay for the accompanying booklet. –J.R.

The Gold Diggers: A Preview

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Sally Potter’s much heralded British Film Institute production has been encountering a lot of resistance since it premiered at the London Film Festival late last year. When I saw it at the Rotterdam Film Festival in early February, its presence even there was regrettably nominal: screened only once, and in the Market rather than as a festival selection, it was received rather coolly, and many of the critics present left well before the end. Finding the film visually stunning, witty, and pleasurably inventive throughout, I can only speculate about the reasons for the extreme antipathy of my colleagues.

Historically, The Gold Diggers demands to be regarded as something of a proud anomaly. While it contains many familiar echoes of avant-garde performance art (including music, dance, and theater), its only recognizable antecedent in the English avant-garde film tradition appears to be Potter’s own previous Thriller. (An English language film which is international in conception as well as execution, it is marginal in the best and most potent sense of that term.) Beyond that, the formal and stylistic eclecticism of what Ian Christie aptly calls “a post-modernist musical” seems part and parcel of the film’s overt feminist aggression. As with the otherwise very different Daisies, Céline et Julie vont en bateau, and Born in Flames, one can see the laughter of Medusa shattering form and decorum alike.

Shot by Babette Mangolte in black and white and co-starring Julie Christie and Colette Laffont, the film is well synopsized by Potter herself: “In The Gold Diggers two women are searching for their own kind of gold. One, Celeste, is a black French woman living in London and working as a computer typist in a bank in the City. She starts to ask questions about what lies behind the figures she is typing and gradually finds gold to be the key. Her investigations lead her to the secrets and rituals of ownership that lie behind the movement of money.

“The other women, Ruby, is first seen in a ballroom as the center of attention, being passed from one man to the next during a long waltz.  Suddenly Celeste bursts in on horseback, sweeps her up and carries her away. As Celeste questions her about her past, Ruby’s identity emerges. Her search for gold is the search for her own occluded history and a look behind herself as an iconic figure.

“Their story evokes the alchemists’ search for the ‘celestial ruby’ (the formula for creating gold) and also relates to cinematic portrayals of women from early silent cinema to musical entertainers and film noir heroines. Filmed in London and Iceland, The Gold Diggers makes use of visual extremes (deserted night city streets and white snowscapes) and changes of physical scale and time scale to develop the theme of the search for the truths of personal and political transformation.”

The preceding text is taken from Potter’s introduction to her season at the National Film Theatre in London last May, “Gold Diggers and Fellow Travellers,” which presented her film in tandem with twenty-five others, a selection suggesting both influences and pertinent cross-references. Because these other films provide a helpful critical context for The Gold Diggers, they are worth citing in full: The Gold Rush; Way Down East; Kuhle Wampe; Doctor Zhivago; The Lady Vanishes; Queen Christina; Lives of Performers; La Souriante Madame Beudet; Rat Life and Diet in America; Alexander Nevsky; The Saragossa Manuscript; The Red Shoes; Dance, Girl, Dance; Darling; Lola Montes; Hellzapoppin’; Study in Choreography for the Camera;  The Trial; Persona; Gold Diggers of 1933; Une Femme est Une Femme; Madame de…; Julia; The Power of Emotions; The State of Things.

In conclusion, here is one more text from Potter about the film, provided in the B.F.I.’s press kit:

“I see this film as a musical describing a female quest. Making it has demanded asking the same questions during the working process as the film endeavors to ask; about the connections between gold, money, and women; about the illusion of female powerlessness; about the actual search for gold and the inner search for gold; about imagery in the unconscious and its relationship to the power of cinema; looking at childhood and memory and seeing the history of cinema itself as our collective memory of how we see ourselves, of how we as women are seen.

“Working with two female central roles meant continuously asking how can I build/find characters and images of women that will serve our intelligence and mirror the complexities of our struggles. The feature film format sets up its own expectations in terms of what it must offer, which makes a useful discipline to work with and learn from and also to push against where it seemed necessary to create a tension with the genre.

“So much for intentions. In practice the ideas were developed through a mass of technical details and decisions: the choice of lens, of light, of movement, gesture, location, timing, cut. There was a brief rehearsal where I choreographed some sections, started to work on the two central characters and to build up a coherent screen presence for performers from diverse backgrounds and ranges of experience.

“Julie’s presence resonates not only with her own work history but also with the iconic power of the face in cinema; through her part we worked to suggest aspects of the history of the cinematic heroine: silent movie stars with their language of exaggerated gesture; the Hollywood belle descending the archetypal ballroom staircase; the film noir mystery woman, an enigma even to herself. I had worked with Colette before in Thriller and with her developed the part of the female investigator, the observer within the frame. The male parts were developed more as caricature – of bureaucratic anxiety, academic stasis (the expert and his assistant) and of anonymous pursuers and street terrorizers. I wanted to call the male bluff and disperse some of the fear and seriousness that usually surrounds those images; to clear the ground. The landscape itself was a performer – Icelandic light changing moment to moment and offering contradictory aspects of itself. In the shoot and in the editing process I attempted to create “layers” in each scene – of genre reference and internal cross-reference (the dancer who “freezes,” the frozen landscape, etc.), the frame as the inner projection (Ruby’s memory), and to work with the conventions of the musical (the dream sequence, the backstage scenes, the songs, etc.)

“Ultimately my own desire was and is to give pleasure; to heal the `pleasure time blues’ of the opening song.”

(from Camera Obscura 12, Summer 1984)