Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 17 - March 31, 2024
Probably neither Tyler nor Farber would have returned to fame without the canonization of Agee.
Agee proved sympathetic to the home front drama and comedy, while Farber bore witness to the brutal action pictures the French would label film noir.
And they freshened up the familiar faults-and-beauties rhetoric of reviewing with paradox (Farber), a search for exactitude of judgment (Agee), and a calm willingness to go beyond the bounds of reason (Tyler).
They knew the standard story of film history, handily traced in Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now (1930) and Lewis Jacobs’s Rise of the American Film (1939).
These critics seem to me aesthetes pursuing modern beauty from various angles.
Most intellectuals had thought you couldn’t talk about a Cary Grant movie as an artwork. Ferguson and company understood that you could, if you favored criteria like liveliness, poignancy, force, and arresting detail. Most intellectuals couldn’t recognize art in mass-market movies because Hollywood had redefined what artistry was.
Ferguson cared more than the others about a movie’s unity, but all of them realized that in the popular media, parts sometimes outranked wholes. Most movies lacked the formal rigor of classic art. Instead of finding this worrisome, these writers found it exhilarating. Each one was alert to momentary diversions, odd spots, places where something unpredictable seemed to leak in around the cracks.
The vagrant items might enrich the action or detour it. Sometimes directors and actors designed the casual bits to yield flashes of diversion or glimpses of real life.
the American moral jungle from which fundamentally all famous creeps must be said to crepitate.
In the 1940s, every intellectual was expected to answer two questions. What do you think of Communism? What do you think of popular culture?
a famous review, at the height of American solidarity with the Soviet defense of the homeland, Farber charged the Russian war film The Rainbow (1944) with naked cruelty. He also declared The Birth of a Nation, despite its outrageous bigotry, the greatest film yet made.
In mounting those lines of defense, they risked condemnation by the most intellectually intimidating critic of the culture industry, the German émigré Theodor W. Adorno.
By the twentieth century, the true artist could express only the inability to achieve harmony.
If Ulysses and Schoenberg’s Erwartung are your prime examples of valid art, His Girl Friday isn’t going to measure up, let alone Rhapsody Rabbit.
haven’t found any piece by Adorno or Horkheimer that troubles to analyze closely any product of the Culture Industry. Writing on Mahler or Berg, Adorno gets somewhat concrete, but he never dismantles a simple jitterbug tune. As a “social philosopher” rather than a critic, he produces a general denunciation that exempts him from looking closely.
The rise of various musical avant-gardes employing complex compositional procedures, as in serialism, demanded ever more sharply focused studies of form. While Adorno and Hanns Eisler were denouncing kitsch music in film soundtracks, musicologists were dissecting Objective Burma!, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The Best Years of Our Lives, and other scores.
He asked that leftists “stop demanding a ten-reel feature on the Rise of Western Imperialism and look around to see what can be done with pictures.”
This overall momentum isn’t easy to attain; in Ferguson’s view even Citizen Kane and How Green Was My Valley were too episodic.
André Bazin famously dated the crystallization of “classical” storytelling to 1939 with Stagecoach. Ferguson, with his love of vernacular comedy, set the turning point back in 1934, his first year on the job, with Sing and Like It and The Thin Man and Twentieth Century and The Gay Divorcee and above all It Happened One Night.
He’s especially hard on the evasive treatment of drunkenness in The Lost Weekend. What has Wilder missed? The causes of Birnam’s alcoholism, the many moods of drunkenness, the chronic narcissism, self-loathing, and self-pity, and the “horrible distortions of time” suffered in a hangover.
By 1945, Farber has become perfectly explicit. “The purist argument inevitably starts by narrowing painting down to a matter of designed line and color on a flat surface instead of showing that design is constantly driven, controlled, and ordered by the expression.”
Farber’s unpretentious emphasis on feeling as carried by form allowed him to do what the other Rhapsodes managed in their own fashion: to sidestep the mass culture debate and face popular art straightforwardly. And on occasion to embrace it.
What’s striking about his angle of approach, though, is that he treats cinema as different from modern painting.
Lost Boundaries, despite a laudable message about black Americans, is pictorially “as spineless as vanilla pudding.”
“Having a voice, eyes and legs, [film] is more fluid than any other medium. Like the mind, it is physically unbounded and can paint.” It paints, he implies, not a Mondrian or a Malevich, in which the frame edges create their own dynamic, but something like what we find on an unrolling picture scroll. James Wong Howe’s shots in Air Force reveal a space “uncentered in the old sense taken from painting, so that it seems to spread out in all directions past the boundaries of the screen.” Anticipating Bazin’s conception of the porous frame, Farber finds the unboundedness of cinematic space central
...more
Yet almost no American critics of the time spotted this trend. Welles’s technical innovations were well covered in the press, and most reviews of Kane mentioned what Gregg Toland had done, but reviewers didn’t seem to notice other filmmakers’ take-up of the style throughout the decade. Even Farber’s New Republic pieces refer to depth staging in the oblique ways I’ve just mentioned, and he doesn’t go into lens length, film stocks, lighting, and other matters that were widely discussed in the technical journals of the day.
What can we learn about 1940s film aesthetics from all this? The split decision on Huston opens up a problem in the Ferguson legacy. If two sensitive critics with so much in common can’t agree on when a director is doing smooth, straight work and when he is showboating, how can we understand the distinctive features of American filmic storytelling? Was Hollywood cinema of the 1940s an era of expressive naturalism, integrating details with unassuming fluency, or was it an era of mannered filigree? Both, I think. In every era Hollywood makes films in a plain style (whose norms shift somewhat)
...more
Freudianism became particularly influential in the 1940s. It furnished both a popular explanation for how nations like Germany could “go mad” and a therapeutic technique that might help troubled people and traumatized veterans. It’s not surprising, then, that books like Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites’s The Movies: A Psychological Study (1950) would hinge their case for recurring character types on the Oedipus complex and other syndromes.
prime example of a crevice is the way films elide a basic fact: Did they have intercourse or not? He and she are alone together in a parlor or bedroom. If we’re in the lush countryside, perhaps they’re caught in the rain and take shelter. Fade or dissolve. Later, they’re dressed as before, but something has happened.
He dares to ask of Frankenstein’s monster: “Does he not ghoulishly reappear among us as the physically, mentally, or socially deformed ex-soldier?”
By treating interpretation as a game rather than a denunciation, he’s able to suggest of Arsenic and Old Lace: “Itself a spoof of macabre monster movies, this film contains an inner dimension of zany fun within an outer dimension of zany fun.”
The drama’s context is social, not cosmic; the conflicts involve not morality and unsettling self-knowledge, but merely law, custom, and proof. Is our hero guilty as charged? Will boy get girl? Who is the real killer? What does “Rosebud” mean? Social harmony outweighs tragic fate.
Tyler aroused the ire of the avant-garde with Underground Film: A Critical History (1969) and proposed a curious account of cinema’s poetic powers in The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building: A World Theory of Film (1972).
Meanwhile, as sexual mores were changing, he wrote frankly and amusingly about varieties of eroticism in Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1973) and followed it up with A Pictorial History of Sex in Films (1974).
Even the most naturalistic work may harbor form, artifice, and poetic evocation, and it is these that make something a Tylerian classic.
The somnambule, that vacant, succulent man or woman who drifted through Hollywood movies, reappears in so many 1940s films that P. Adams Sitney borrowed Tyler’s formulation to describe an entire genre of “trance films.”
Considering all four is important, I think, for a balanced picture of Hollywood then and now. Current nostalgia for the studio years tends to favor the hard, cynical pictures. The cult of noir and of murderous bad girls has little room for the gentleness of Happy Land or The Yearling. We need to be reminded of Dumbo and Intruder in the Dust. If today more people enjoy Hawks than Ford, or Raoul Walsh than Clarence Brown, or His Girl Friday than The Shop around the Corner, that’s partly because our tastes favor swaggering aggression (look at our current pantheon, from Martin Scorsese to Paul
...more
