What does a movie mean?
"This is this!"
-- Michael Vronsky (Robert De Niro), The Deer Hunter
Three little words (well, two, really) -- each, individually and collectively, with flexible meanings. Yes, the significance of that short statement really does depend on what the definition of "is" is -- and "this," in both contexts, at the beginning and the end of the sentence. What does he mean when he says this? Well, to even begin to understand, you have to consider the moment in the movie and go from there.
When a critic adopts the attitude of De Niro's character, well, film criticism itself is automatically made superfluous. A bullet is a bullet, a killer is a killer, a zombie is a zombie, a gangster movie is about gangsterism, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and don't even ask about the cigar. Lift and separate "content" from the movie and, once you've removed the context, what more needs to be said? In Keith Uhlich's eloquent words, such an approach exemplifies "the dubious product of American literalism, of an inability to grapple with a film's numerous layers of experience, falling back on easy prejudices and dichotomies as a way of stopping discussion and disagreement cold." (That's from a profile of Jonathan Demme at sensesofcinema that I recommend to literalists and non-literalists alike.)
We're familiar with the ways politicians use this technique (invading Iraq = war on terrorism; questioning policy = siding with terrorists; smoking gun = mushroom cloud). Substituting dogma for evidence is an easy way to evade the possibility of meaningful debate, something that might challenge an assertion of monolithic authority. The same thing happens in film criticism all the time. The trick is simply to eliminate the subject (the film itself) from the equation. This way, opinions don't have to be based on anything because there is no verifiable external reality with which to compare them.
Richard T. Jameson's article, "Style vs. 'Style'" (Film Comment, March/April, 1980), which I have recently re-read (and hence have been quoting a lot), ought to be as widely anthologized as any piece ever written about film, for the way it zeroes in on the heart of what a movie is:
"Content" is not content; "the meaning" is not a concrete certitude cunningly buried so that one may have the pleasure of a civilized, mental version of hide-and-seek, strip-mining through "the story" to get to "the themes." "The meaning" is only one more piece of material, as deformable by the operation of the artistic sensibility as the sea is by the pull of the moon's gravity. Content is what happens from moment to moment, and then in the suspended moment that is one's life within the aesthetic life-system the artist has created. And content is at the beck of style.This would be a good opportunity to jump into a discussion of the confusion of "craft," "technique" and "style" (all related; by no means equivalent) that riddle so much film criticism today, but I'd like to save that for a separate piece.
In a moving and illuminating 2005 article (that poetically invokes Jonathan Richman's haunting "That Summer Feeling," a favorite song of mine), Adrian Martin wrote that his view of film, and writing about film, is shaped by "a rigorous analytical sense, a demonstration of some form-to-content logic... often dazzlingly intuited and demonstrated."
These days, film criticism — even the best-written — does little for me, finally, unless it can unearth, propose and in a way prove the existence of the logic that makes a film 'tick', as we say, that coheres it into some kind of whole work, whether classical-expressive or modernist-disjunctive. Godard, in fact, said it best in his challenge to Kael and, beyond her, all critics: "Bring in the evidence," he demanded. Film analysis or criticism without that logic, that evidence, is just assertion, and assertion is something I can take or leave (perhaps depending on whether or not I agree with it!).Then again, assertion as a substitute for thought, as David Bordwell has written (citing specific examples), is "so glancing and elliptical that we can scarcely judge it as right or wrong."
I should mention that, in his very next sentence, Martin cites a generally well-respected, long-time critic (the very same one Bordwell was criticizing) with whom I have taken issue on this blog three times in the past year for crucial, specified failures to "bring the evidence" ("Letters from Iwo Jima," Ingmar Bergman, "No Country for Old Men"). So, just to be clear, I'm not saying that anyone I quote here would necessarily take "my side" on any or all of those instances. But that is the point I hope to make: the work exists independently of any opinion or ad hominem rhetoric. In order for ideas about film to have meaning, they must be rooted in observations of the film. Sounds simple, but it's not. As George Orwell wrote: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
Now, let's see some movies.
Comments
Gee, this post isn't rife with opportunity for comment debate or anything now is it?
There's far too much here to discuss without writing a thesis but I would like to say that I tire of the film criticism bashing of the style perpetuated by Adrian Martin. Not because Martin may or may not have a point but because it sounds smug and elitist. It makes the writer sound as if he's the only one who truly understands film or thinks about it seriously and woe is he that he has to suffer so many fools ("If only people were as deep as me" - that kind of thing) And frankly, lines like "...that coheres it into some kind of whole work, whether classical-expressive or modernist-disjunctive smack of the kind of pseudo-intellectual labelling that Diane Keaton and Michael Murphy do so well in Manhattan.
Since he mentions Godard here are two quotes about Godard that come from two revered filmmakers who are engaging in the kind of film-criticism that might best be summed up by the "This is this" quote from The Deer Hunter.
"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film."
- Werner Herzog
"... his gifts as a director are enormous. I just can't take him very seriously as a thinker -- and that's where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin. But what's so admirable about him is his marvelous contempt for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves -- a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic contempt for the medium -- which, when he's at his best and most vigorous, is very exciting."
- Orson Welles
Posted by: Jonathan Lapper | November 16, 2007 06:37 AM
I really enjoyed this post and it expresses some of the problems that I personally have with so much film criticism I've read (old and new) over the years. It's also a great companion to the recent post Girish made about the British New Wave at his own blog.
Which brings me to something else I loathe about a lot of film criticism I read - sameness. Herd mentality is rampant among critics. British cinema suffered from it terribly during the sixties and seventies, but thankfully the DVD age is allowing a younger generation to make up their own minds about British cinema.
That Adrian Martin piece is terrific by the way, and now I hope to get my hands on a copy of Noël Burch's Theory of Film Practice.
Posted by: Kimberly | November 16, 2007 09:34 AM
I agree with Kimberly completely about the herd mentality of critics. I should make clear that my critical comment on Martin was in his wording, which sounded a bit elitist to me, as if he has no time for those of us writing about film because we're not doing it up to his standards (I take things a little personal sometimes).
Posted by: Jonathan Lapper | November 16, 2007 12:35 PM
Jonathan: I'm glad you've come around! How can a piece be smug and elitist when it begins by evoking Jonathan Richman's subtle "That Summer Feeling" and ends (well, this quotation does) with a self-deprecating joke!?!?
Posted by: jim emerson | November 19, 2007 02:23 PM
As you may well know, this subject is one of my pet peeves, Jim. About two years ago, in my essay The Shape of Substance, I've argued against the massively over-used "style over substance" accusation. So many reviewers confuse aesthetics with cosmetics, it's not even funny. To the substance police, style is a fancy gift wrap that's not to be trusted and as such, people are attempting to read films without paying attention to their vocabulary.
Style is supposed to express content, dammit--not disguise a lack of it! The meaning of a film is in what these images on the screen (and don't forget the sounds!) do to you while you experience them. (As you so eloquently put it: a film is about what happens to you when you're watching it.)
If you ask me, we should stop seeing style and content as seperate entities. In a good film, they're a natural unity.
Posted by: Peet Gelderblom | November 20, 2007 01:42 PM
Peet: No wonder I liked you when I first started reading you. That's a simple concept (an obvious one, I'd think) but many persist in seeing "syle" as a kind of mortar that can be slathered on with a trowel in between "bricks" of "content." To pretend you can separate the style from a work of art is like pretending you can separate an apple into its color, its shape, its texture, its smell and its taste, and line those things up for examination, side by side. It's metaphysically absurd, man.
Posted by: jim emerson | November 20, 2007 02:27 PM
Peet:
That's precisely why 300 impacted me so much -- its style was inseparable from its story, to the point where every expression, word, shot, piece of costuming, etc contributed completely to the world it was creating. I know a lot of people consider it "low" cinema, but I get the feeling what we saw was exactly what Zack Snyder and Frank Miller pictured in their heads -- and that, if nothing else, is a profound achievement.
Posted by: Ken Lowery | November 23, 2007 01:32 PM