JonathanRosenbaum.com

On WINSTANLEY

The British Film Institute’s Roma Gibson recently contacted me about reprinting a review of Kevin Brownlow’s Winstanley (1976) that I included in my “London Journal” for Film Comment (January-February 1976) with the BFI’s forthcoming DVD release of the film. I responded by requesting that she substitute a couple of lines from my Time Out capsule review of the same period for the last couple of lines in my already somewhat hyperbolic Film Comment review, and she agreed.

I thought it might be instructive for me to reproduce that composite review and then juxtapose it here with “Time Traveler” — my April 23, 1999 Chicago Reader review of Winstanley and Brownlow’s preceding feature, It Happened Here, which explains some of the polemical context that provoked some of the hyperbole in my earlier reviews.  —J.R.

There’s really not much to be said for Winstanley, except that it’s the most mysteriously beautiful English film since the best of Michael Powell (which it resembles in no other respect) and the best pre-twentieth-century historical film I can recall since The Rise of Louis XIV [Rossellini] or Straub-Huillet’s Bach film [Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach]. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but I can’t help it. Mysteriously beautiful films which tell one something about the past are rare commodities, and one certainly doesn’t expect to find anything as idiosyncratic as this one in the English cinema.

Brownlow and Mollo have been damned because they refused to follow most of the unwritten rules. They shot the film’s prologue – a lightning-quick historical survey, as crotchety as any of Straub-Huillet’s, including a battle scene and Griffith-like explanatory titles – in 16mm, and the rest in 35. All the roles but two are played by non-professionals. And the fanatical pains taken with period detail – including everything from original battle armor and home-made huts and costumes to virtually extinct breeds of cows, pigs and birds, and a barn transferred from Essex piece by piece – could be called comparable to Stroheim’s if it weren’t for the fact that all this was done on an impoverished budget.

Predictably, most of this authenticity is invisible (as it is in Stroheim), but it obviously had its effect on the participants. The intransigence of the film and its makers matches that of its hero and his cause at so many levels that the two become merged in one’s mind, bridging a gap of some 325 years. As a writer Brownlow has always been more a fan and chronicler of silent film than a critic of it, but his absorption has never been a matter of conventional nostalgia; and Winstanley is a genuine expression of silent film sensibility rather than a homage to it. Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky music is used in the prologue, but as a silent film accompaniment, not as an Eisenstein score. Like Miles Halliwell’s haunted and haunting performance as Winstanley and the sheer physicality of the film’s awesome grasp of people, weather, and terrain, it belongs to another world, but a world of textures that is re-created from the roots, not recollected in tranquillity out of scrapbooks.

Above all – and paradoxically – it is a disarmingly (even disturbingly) modest film, just as Winstanley’s revolutionary pamphlets, which serve as narration, appear to have been supremely modest. Since modesty strikes me as the quintessentially English virtue, I persist in seeing Winstanley as a quintessentially English film, for all its maverick status and originality, and one which will outlast all its contemporary detractors.

Like Barry Lyndon, it is s-f about the past where a vanished era becomes the focus of the same sort of curiositty, awe and wonder commonly reserved for the future. It refuses to pander to simplistic demands for ‘contemporary relevance’ (rather than let this emerge naturally from the material), betraying a respect for the audience that is all but anachronistic.

Jonathan Rosenbaum  (reprinted from reviews in Film Comment, Jan/Feb 1976, and Time Out, February 20-26, 1976)

*****

Time Traveler

It Happened Here

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo

Written by Brownlow and Mollo

With Pauline Murray, Sebastian Shaw, Honor Fehrson, Rex Collett, Nicholas Moore, and Colin Jordan

Winstanley

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Kevin Brownlow

Written by Brownlow and Andrew Mollo

With Miles Halliwell, Alison Halliwell, David Bramley, Dawson France, Phil Dunn, and Terry Higgins.

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Music Box will be showing the only two features by English film historian Kevin Brownlow Tuesday through Thursday, April 27 through 29. Both are low-budget independent efforts in black and white, and both have been virtually lost to history because they fall outside what’s usually regarded as the history of English cinema, though their modesty makes them English to the core.

Brownlow is best known for his excellent English TV series, codirected by David Gill, about silent cinema (including Hollywood, Unknown Chaplin, Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, D.W. Griffith: Father of Film, and Cinema Europe) and for his books (including The Parade’s Gone By… and Behind the Mask of Innocence). He’ll never be remembered as a major filmmaker, because his methods of historical reconstruction are too fanatical to allow for the sort of dramatic shaping demanded of major period films. But his two movies can’t be dismissed. Their sheer eccentricity demands some attention; they’re roads not taken by others.

Properly speaking, the first of these efforts, It Happened Here (1966) — an intricate imagining of England in 1944 if it had lost the war in 1940 and been occupied by the Germans — qualifies as science fiction. And the second, Winstanley (1975) — an account of the failed effort of a nonviolent religious sect called the Diggers to establish a commune in Surrey in 1649 — qualifies as a period piece. But to my mind both films are science fiction, because a vanished era is the focus of the sort of curiosity, awe, and wonder commonly reserved for the future. In part because of the fanaticism about period details, both works are theoretically and stylistically somewhat naive movies, endowing the past with a voluptuous sense of mystery rarely found in more accomplished pictures.

This was certainly my reaction when I first saw Winstanley in London a year after it was completed. At that point it still didn’t have an English distributor and had turned up for only a limited run shortly after the release of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. It was difficult not to see the films as doing similar things: both directors had previously made SF films — in Kubrick’s case, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange – before delving into the remote past. Though we tend to regard the past as known and the future as unknown, Brownlow and Kubrick understood that the past is just about as unknowable as the future — and just as worthy of wonder. (Incidentally, Kubrick furnished Brownlow with some of his leftover 35-millimeter film stock from Dr. Strangelove to shoot It Happened Here; another commercial director, Tony Richardson, later helped pay for its completion.)

I hasten to add that Brownlow is an antiquarian with none of Kubrick’s prophetic vision, craft, or talent. When a respected art and film critic who was one of Kubrick’s biggest champions complained to me in the 70s that Winstanley seemed the work of a very old man, I replied that this was precisely what I liked about it. I still more or less feel that way. For her, 2001 powerfully imparted a sense of weightlessness, where Winstanley was weighted down by gravity in every sense of the word. I still can’t refute that charge, but the sheer intransigence of Brownlow’s two features makes them uncommon acts of devotion toward the past.

I only recently caught up with It Happened Here, which is showing in the U.S. in its original form for the first time. Back in 1965 United Artists excised seven minutes of it under pressure from Jewish groups that objected to a sequence in which Colin Jordan — at that time head of the British National Socialist movement and playing a leader in the fictional Immediate Action Organization in the film — spontaneously aired his opinions about Jews and euthanasia. Fearing his words might be taken seriously by members of the audience who didn’t pick up on of the film’s anti-Nazi position, the groups argued that the sequence was too dangerous.

It’s typical of Brownlow’s method that only a real fascist would be called upon to express fascist positions; by the same token, patients suffering from tuberculosis in the film were played by real TB patients in a real TB rehabilitation center (actually the former house of Sir William Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan). In any case, it took Brownlow more than 30 years to regain the rights to the film so that he could restore the sequence — which is in some respects the most interesting one in the film. If some of the gestures toward authenticity in this film and Winstanley register as naive — if only because the fruits of exhaustive research are at times more apparent to the filmmakers than they possibly could be to spectators — here the gesture clearly pays off, lending a documentary-like authenticity to any speculation about what an English Nazi in 1944 would have sounded like. Even Jordan’s faltering speech patterns lend credence to the portrait.

Brownlow started work on It Happened Here in 1956, at the age of 18, finished it eight years later, then had to wait two more years for United Artists to release it. (From inception to release, Winstanley took nearly as long.) He enlisted military historian Andrew Mollo to help with the 40s costumes and eventually invited him to collaborate on the script and direction, and Mollo persuaded him to discard the footage he’d shot and start over again. Most of the actors in both pictures are nonprofessionals, and though the status of both movies as “amateur” productions often works in their favor, the superiority of the one professional in It Happened Here (Sebastian Shaw, playing Dr. Richard Fletcher) to everyone else in the cast is hard to miss.

It Happened Here launched the filmmaking careers of two notable collaborators. Production assistant Peter Watkins subsequently made many meticulous and powerful pseudodocumentaries, including The War Game and The Battle of Culloden, and his methods show him clearly indebted to Brownlow and Mollo. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky went on to shoot Leo the Last, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Empire Strikes Back, Mars Attacks!, and all the films of David Cronenberg since Dead Ringers, including eXistenZ; the focused dramatic intensity associated with these later movies is found only sporadically in It Happened Here and Winstanley, which are relatively studied and distanced by comparison.

Suschitzky’s work on It Happened Here is pretty stunning throughout, yet one often feels that Brownlow and Mollo are more interested in creating and contemplating a particular world than in telling a particular tale. (Significantly, the story doesn’t end with a clear climax or resolution; it simply stops.) To some extent, this argues in its favor: we’re offered an encapsulation of what English fascism in the mid-40s might have looked, sounded, and felt like — and trusted enough as spectators to find our own ways through this material rather than being taken along a carefully programmed conveyor belt. The central character is a district nurse (Pauline Murray) in Salisbury who travels to a demilitarized London after resistance activity drives the Germans to evacuate citizens, and she winds up being trained to work for the fascist-controlled Immediate Action Organization. She’s an apolitical figure repulsed by the violence of partisans and fascists alike, but circumstances eventually force her to recognize that these two forms of violence hardly amount to the same thing. The film is much more interested in the everyday details of what she encounters than in constructing a consciousness-raising polemic. The same impulse is even more apparent in Winstanley, which is passionate about historical detail but relatively unconcerned about making a connection between communal aspirations in 1649 and those during the height of the counterculture in the 1970s — a connection that more commercial filmmakers would have sought rather than avoided. The motive behind this avoidance is clearly an interest in making the film more amenable to multiple interpretations of what Gerrard Winstanley’s commune meant and continues to mean, but viewers looking for easy equations of past and present are likely to feel somewhat cheated.

The movie challenges us to become as fascinated and obsessed with the mysteries of the past as the filmmakers are. They even went so far as to scour England and consult animal-husbandry experts to find birds, cows, and pigs that were most likely to resemble those of the 17th century and to transfer a barn from Essex piece by piece; in It Happened Here they contrived to find mainly original rather than merely authentic costumes and props (buses as well as artillery) and refrained from using any archival footage, even when they needed newsreel material from World War I. Most viewers might interpret this as a form of perversity or madness, but they could also regard it as a form of uncommon respect.

The textures of Ernest Vincze’s cinematography in Winstanley are even more studied than those of Suschitzky’s work — again, documentation mainly triumphs over narrative. Winstanley was inspired by David Caute’s novel Comrade Jacob – a book brought to Brownlow’s attention by Miles Halliwell, who played an Immediate Action Organization political lecturer in It Happened Here and wound up being cast as Winstanley – but the independent research of Brownlow and Mollo reportedly drove them away from their source as they proceeded. The film is at pains to teach us a detailed lesson about a neglected chapter in English history, yet at times one feels that the deeper Brownlow and Mollo dug the more questions they had. Still, films that raise questions rather than provide answers usually haunt us more than films that satisfy standard Saturday-night urges. (It’s worth adding that Marxist film theorists in England at the time  – the most influential of whom congregated around the journal Screen – didn’t welcome Brownlow and Mollo’s efforts, regarding them as naive and “undertheorized.”)

The framing, lighting, and editing of both films show how much Brownlow absorbed from silent cinema, though this influence is much more pronounced in Winstanley, which opens with a prologue in which Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky score accompanies a battle scene straight out of silent Russian cinema (or Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight), punctuated by explanatory intertitles (”1646: The King Against Parliament” reads the first). The avowed visual sources of the remainder of the film are two silent pictures, Arthur von Gerlach’s The Chronicles of the Grey House and Carl Dreyer’s The Parson’s Widow. On the whole Winstanley is even more ambitious than It Happened Here – less dramatically engaging but more mysterious as it contemplates the great bottomless density of the past.

Insofar as Winstanley’s presocialist “experiment” was an abysmal failure, it has an enduring sense of pathos that reflects the filmmakers’ effort to do the impossible. There’s also a remarkable sense of immediacy in the handheld camera work of both Brownlow’s pictures that reveals how shopworn and streamlined the supposedly innovative Normandy-landing sequence of Saving Private Ryan actually is. Indeed, if nothing else, It Happened Here and Winstanley offer lessons on how stupefyingly insulting the period re-creations of most commercial movies are; much as It Happened Here diminishes Spielberg, Winstanley makes the period plushness of Shakespeare in Love and of Merchant-Ivory look like window dressing. And as SF movies with an enduring sense of wonder about the world, despite a conspicuous lack of special effects and production values, they surpass virtual-reality games like The Matrix and eXistenZ, which for all their provocative and eye-filling virtues can’t hold us much longer than their running times. Even if you don’t enjoy these black-and-white movies every moment that you’re watching them, my guess is you won’t forget them. They seep into your consciousness like the photos in the most intimate of family albums, redefining who you are in the process.

Sexism in the French New Wave

From Film Quarterly (Spring 2009). — J.R.

One way of looking back at the sense of male privilege underlying much of the French New Wave would be to consider Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) as a belated commentary on it. I’ve long regarded that masterpiece as a late-blooming, final flowering of the New Wave, especially for its referentiality in relation to cinephilia and film criticism. For one thing, it glories in the kind of compulsive doubling of shots and characters that François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette himself all discovered in Alfred Hitchcock’s movies. But it also puts a kind of stopper on the New Wave in the way it both underlines and responds to that movement’s sexism through the services of its four lead actresses, all of whom collaborated on its script: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier. Every male character, both in the story proper and in the film-with-in-the-film, is viewed as absurd, both as a romantic fop and as a narcissist who ultimately elicits the heroines’ scorn and ridicule: the patriarch (Barbet Schroeder) in the Phantom Ladies over Paris segments, playing his two phantom ladies (Ogier and Pisier) off against one another; and, in the story proper, Julie’s small-town suitor (Philippe Clévenot), Céline’s boss (Jean Douchet), and various male customers at the cabaret.

Some of that movie’s male fans could laugh at this ridicule and still be slow in recognizing its feminism. As an American expatriate in Paris and London who was friends at the time with Eduardo de Gregorio — the film’s only credited male screenwriter apart from Rivette — I could attend many early private screenings of the work print and could interview Rivette along with a couple of friends (Gilbert Adair and Lauren Sedofsky). But I could also write a series of dithyrambic pieces about the movie in the mid-1970s — in Sight and Sound, Film Comment, and London’s Time Out — withoutalluding once to feminism, as Robin Wood would point out in this magazine several years later (“Narrative Pleasure: Two Films of Jacques Rivette,” Film Quarterly, fall 1981).

I don’t think I was hostile to the feminist insights about male entitlement that would emerge with greater force by the 1980s, having already read Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) more sympathetically than defensively in the early 1970s. But feminism had yet to become an everyday fixture in my arsenal of reference points, and the fact that I’d spent the first part of the 1970s in Paris certainly hadn’t helped matters much. I can still recall hearing about what may have been the first significant, well-publicized act of the French feminist movement of that era — in August 1970, during my first year abroad, only two years after the May 1968 uprisings — and even then the gesture had seemed pretty archaic: Christianne Rochefort, Monique Wittig, and others placing a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier dedicated to “the unknown wife” of the Unknown Soldier.

No less characteristically, I recall a quarrel I had with a French feminist many years later about the sexism of Rivette’s first feature, Paris Belongs to Us (1960). Though I could readily concede the misogyny lurking behind the rather artificial character of Terry Yordan (Françoise Prévost) — a noirish bitch goddess, clearly indebted (like much else in the film) to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) — I maintained that surely one felt a lot of empathy and even identification with Anne (played by Betty Schneider, who’d also appeared in Tati’s 1958 Mon oncle), the young Sorbonne dropout who’s the film central figure and is far more lifelike. I certainly knew that’s how I felt when I saw the film for the first time as an NYU freshman, at Cinema 16 circa 1961. To which my interlocutrice replied, indignantly, “Mais elle est moche!” (“But she’s ugly!”) — a startling indication of what she evidently considered necessary to both identification and respect. By these standards, it would appear that Emmanuèle Riva in Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim (1962), and Corinne Marchand in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) all owed much of their status as feminist heroines to their credentials as glamorous fashion plates.

And what about A, the glamorous heroine played by Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad (1961)? A broader part of the critique of Geneviève Sellier’s Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, recently published in Kristin Ross’s English translation (Duke University Press, 2008), takes on the “masculinist” cult of the male protagonist (in this case, Giorgio Albertazzi) and auteur (Alain Robbe-Grillet) — with the former becoming the designated “alter ego” of the latter — that she associates with the New Wave, as well as the privileging of formal innovation over issues of representation. In both regards, Last Year at Marienbad takes on the status of a bad object, being described as “a film that gives an exorbitant privilege to the male protagonist by making him the narrator of a story whose interpretation he imposes at the expense of the female character” (11).

This characterization (not to mention the demonizing of auteurism) sounds more plausible if Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay is imposed at the expense of Alain Resnais’s direction. But plainly the film owes much of its power to the tug of war between writer and director as well as the struggle betweenAlbertazzi’s X and Seyrig’s A. Sellier acknowledges that Robbe-Grillet even scripted a rape scene that Resnais refused to film, and T. Jefferson Kline has published a couple of fascinating studies that show Resnais subverting Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay and its gender bias in a number of ways, drawing particular attention to the insertion of a pointed reference to Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm via a theater poster — a play involving both female emancipation and incest that Freud analyzed. (The fact that Resnais first encountered Seyrig in New York when she was acting in another Ibsen play, The Enemy of the People, is also deemed significant.)

The first of Kline’s studies, cited by Sellier, is “Rebecca’s Bad Dream: Speculations on/in Resnais’s Marienbad,” a chapter in Kline’s Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); the second is Kline’s essay, “Last Year at Marienbad: High Modern and Postmodern,” included in the collection Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, edited by Ted Perry (Indiana University Press, 2006). In the first of these essays, the Rebecca in question is Ibsen’s heroine, not Alfred Hitchcock’s — although Rebecca (1940), and in particular its trancelike opening sequence, could certainly be cited as one of Resnais’s key filmic sources. The second essay argues in fascinating detail that Resnais “would produce a film . . . that enacted a high modernist (consciously Freudian) reinterpretation of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s postmodern (unconsciously Lacanian) scenario” (209). And in a delirium of interpretation — a kind of activity that Last Year at Marienbad in particular seems to provoke — Kline begins his second essay by discussing Goethe’s “Marienbad Elegy” and Jacques Lacan’s attempt to present his paper on “The Mirror Stage” in Marienbad in 1936 before being silenced by Ernest Jones.

Given Resnais’s subtle subversion of Robbe-Grillet’s script as well as his insistence on treating Marguerite Duras as an equal creative partner on Hiroshima, mon amour, he clearly has more credibility from a feminist perspective than most of the other early male directors of the French New Wave. It’s worth adding that the recent French DVD of Hiroshima, mon amour, lamentably unavailable in North America, reprints letters, clippings, and photographs that were sent by Resnais in Hiroshima to Duras in Paris while he was scouting various locations for the film — which suggest that she may have never traveled to the title city herself and that the film’s extraordinary grasp of place, reflecting Resnais’s background as a documentary filmmaker, may have been entirely his own, even if he modestly (and characteristically) avoided taking any credit for it.

Part of the problem in figuring out the gender biases of the French New Wave and its audiences is differentiating boys’-club thinking in much of western culture during this period — for example, not just early features by Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard, but also such Beat manifestos as Kerouac’s On the Road — from specific French inflections and versions of that mindset. Take, for instance, the rather divisive ambiguity about male privilege and sexual double standards in Agnès Varda’s La Bonheur (1964), which shows a salt-of-the-earth carpenter (Jean-Claude Drouot) driving his faithful wife (Claire Drouot) to a probable suicide when he starts an affair with a postal worker (Marie-France Boyer), then marrying his lover to help raise his children while continuing to cultivate his kitschy happiness to the strains of Mozart. Varda herself has compared this film to a piece of fruit with a worm inside, but the late English critic Jill Forbes in The Cinema in France (Macmillan, 1992), among others, deemed it “unforgivable” — comparing its style to that of “soap powder advertisements” and ruling out the possibility of any ironic subterfuge on Varda’s part. A more general problem of identifying Varda too closely with her heroines — the title heroine (Marchand) of Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), for instance— is sometimes matched by committing the same error regarding Godard’s identification with Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Breathless (1959), or Chabrol’s with his own boorish heroes. Even if Godard himself would later call Breathless “a film that came out of fascism [and is] full of fascist overtones,” it would surely be oversimplifying matters to equate him simply with his gangster hero.

Sometimes the inflections are not merely French but 1960s French. Many commentators have persuasively argued that François Truffaut diminished the feminism of Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel Jules and Jim by combining most of its women characters into a single figure and ascribing many characteristics to that figure that were felt to be “eternally feminine.” It might also be maintained that some of the gendered aspects of the French language itself militate against certain feminist precepts. Consider the implicit confusions in the following passage from the novel (in Patrick Evans’s translation): “It was not long before Jules, as master of ceremonies, proposed that they abolish once and for all the formalities Monsieur and Mademoiselle and Madame by drinking to brotherhood, Brüderschaft trinken, in his favorite wine, and that to avoid the traditional and too obtrusive gesture of linking arms the drinkers should touch feet under the table — which they did.” And consider also the ideological confusions of 1960s counterculture that could embrace the bohemian “freedoms” of Truffaut’s characters without always examining everything they meant. As John Powers wrote in his liner notes to the Criterion DVD, “Sixties audiences didn’t merely see [François Truffaut’s] movie; they wanted to live it.” What living it might have consisted of is something we’re all still figuring out.

A Piece of Folk Wisdom from Little Rock

I had a very pleasant time this past weekend in Little Rock attending the Arkansas Literary Festival and promoting my collection Essential Cinema there, at a very well-attended session hosted by the editor-in-chief of the Oxford American, Marc Smirnoff. I also enjoyed gobbling a good many hush puppies at Flying Fish, a hangout not far from my hotel on the river front. There was even an hour or two on Sunday, after the rain slackened, when I could take an old-fashioned streetcar ride across the Arkansas River to North Little Rock and back. This is where my grandfather, Louis Rosenbaum, once operated a movie theater called the Princess, roughly between 1916 and 1918, before he moved with his wife and son to Florence, Alabama and continued his career in movie exhibition there for another four decades. (My father had a dim memory of taking a streetcar from North Little Rock to Little Rock to see Intolerance when he was in the first grade.)

The only sour note I can recall during the weekend was making the mistake of opening a local newspaper while having breakfast Saturday morning and reading the lead letter to the editor, opposite the editorial page. This letter maintained that (1) hallucinogenic drugs were and should be illegal and (2) the worst of these drugs was socialized medicine, which, in spite of the wistfully misplaced idealism and delusions of people who believed in it, never worked and couldn’t work.

Having lived for almost eight years under socialized medicine in two separate countries, France and the U.K., mainly during the 1970s, I could only ponder whether the confident author of this letter assumed that I and the 125 million or so other individuals in these countries who foolishly thought we were benefiting from this blighted system were all actually suffering from acid trips. And what about all the other countries in the world, then and now, afflicted with the curse of National Health? (And did the same author assume that alcohol, unlike hallucinogenic drugs, was some kind of truth serum?)

When I reflect on what led me to leave Alabama at the age of 16 and never return except for holidays, family reunions, and the like, I suspect that the impulse that goaded me into sharing LSD visions about socialized medicine with most of the other people on the planet must have played a small but significant role. [4/21/09]

High and Low: Eisenstein’s IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Written for Criterion’s Current (web site), April 21, 2009. — J.R.

I recently had occasion to show Ivan the Terrible in a course on forties world cinema I’m teaching at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and found it more mind-boggling than ever. This has always been the Eisenstein feature that’s given me the most pleasure — the greatest Flash Gordon serial ever made as well as a showcase for the Russian master’s boldest graphics. But ever since I first saw it in the 1960s, this is a pleasure I’ve often had to apologize for, thanks to the vagaries and confusions of cold-war thinking. This thinking maintained that Eisenstein caved into Stalinist pressures, denounced the montage aesthetic that was central to his best work, and turned out an archaic, made-to-order glorification of a dictator.

Part of the problem has been reconciling the film’s multiple paradoxes — how much it functions as Eisenstein’s autocritique and apologia as well as an attack and glorification of Stalin, meanwhile combining elements of both high and low art at virtually every instant with its tortured angles and extreme melodrama. (Though portions of Part II could be termed inferior to Part I, the moment the film switches to color, using Agfa stock seized from the Germans during World War II, it moves into dizzying high gear, reminding us that Walt Disney was one of Eisenstein’s favorite filmmakers.) Some critics did take a slightly more nuanced view of things in Part II, but even a few of these writers, such as Dwight Macdonald, wound up adding homophobic invective to their charges, maintaining that Eisenstein’s homosexuality distorted his view of history — a dubious complaint that, as I later discovered, tended to oversimplify Eisenstein’s (bi)sexuality as well as the historical record. At least Orson Welles’s two mixed reviews of Part I — written in 1946, when he was a newspaper columnist and saw the film without subtitles at a special United Nations screening — placed proper emphasis on what might be called Eisenstein’s visual rhetoric, which tends to drown out most other considerations.

Thanks to the remarkably detailed scholarship of Joan Neuberger and Yuri Tsivian, who have both written invaluable monographs about the film and contributed fascinating audiovisual essays to the Criterion DVD editions, we now know that Ivan, far from being any sort of ideological collapse, was in fact Eisenstein’s most courageous gesture, above all in its highly ambivalent and often critical treatment of Stalin. Part I, which was milder overall, may have garnered the Stalin prize, but Part II, whose sexual and stylistic delirium went much further, was banned for a dozen years, following a now legendary February 1947 Kremlin meeting of Eisenstein and his lead actor, Nikolai Cherkasov, with Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov. It appears that Eisenstein agreed to make some cosmetic changes but then edited the film to suit himself, and died just afterward — having already vowed in his diary to work himself to death, after apparently being more appalled than pleased by Stalin’s initial endorsement of his project (according to Russian film scholar Leonid Kozlov).

Even if he never got around to shooting more than a few fragments of Part III (now lost, apart from a test), what Eisenstein left behind in the preceding two parts is surely one of the most complexly nuanced works in cinema history, simultaneously celebrating, critiquing, and analyzing Ivan, Stalin, and himself. What struck me most of all watching it this time was its shameless embrace of excess on all these fronts, registering both as a giddy kind of pop art and as a morbid exercise in medieval history. Despite its discarding of Eisenstein’s earlier montage aesthetic, I don’t think he ever made anything else in his career that was more personal or more expressive.

FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: THE STORY OF AMERICAN FILM CRITICISM

Full disclosure: Gerald Peary’s 80-minute documentary accords me two sound bites — one near the beginning (about Manny Farber), the other towards the end (about internet criticism) — and one lingering look at this web site (specifically, my 2005 essay about Susan Sontag).

Overall I’m fundamentally in agreement with David Bordwell’s verdict about this film on his own web site, after seeing it recently in Hong Kong: “In all, For the Love of Movies offers a concise, entertaining account of mass-market movie criticism, and I think a lot of universities would want to use it in film and journalism courses.”

I’m writing this in one-sentence paragraphs because that’s pretty much Gerry’s discursive style and manner here, largely carried by the narration (delivered by Patricia Clarkson), for better and for worse. So — to expand my own discursive style here into two sentences, one of them fairly long — in the two or three minutes devoted to Manny Farber, unless you’ve already read and digested a couple of his key articles, you might wind up concluding that “termite art” has something directly to do with “low-budget crime melodrama,”  even though snippets of Farber’s prose and a couple of lines from a late onstage interview are also included.

My biggest single objection is to one chapter heading — “When Criticism Mattered (1968-1980)” — which I read as a generational marker of sorts (even though it’s worth stressing that Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema and Pauline Kael’s I Lost it at the Movies, unlike Farber’s Negative Space, both made their first appearances before 1968). Gerry belongs to the same generation as me, but there’s a world of difference in how the two of us relate to this fact.

My own experience, for whatever it’s worth, is that criticism matters a great deal to some young hard-core cinephiles today, and in very much the same way that criticism mattered to some young hard-core cinephiles between 1968 and 1980. Among the key differences are the facts that this criticism is often found today in different places (i.e., on the Internet and much less often in libraries), that there’s considerably more of it (including academic stuff, omitted from Peary’s survey), that whether or not it’s American is of little consequence (though whether or not it’s in English is vital), and that it’s about many more films than anyone could have possibly had access to between 1968 and 1980.

Most mainstream moviegoers tend to think that film criticism is basically a matter of telling you which movies you should see, not trying to direct or redirect how you think about them. There’s a little in this documentary that contradicts this premise, but not a lot.

That said, this movie is a lot of fun. And you should see it. [4/16/09]