My recent post called "Framed" triggered memories of one the most evocatively titled books about cinema: Leo Braudy's "The World in a Frame." (What does it evoke? See quote from Martin Scorsese in upper right corner.) Published in 1976, the sub-title is "What We See in Films," and re-reading the introduction and early chapters reminds me that we no longer see movies the way we did back then. Technology has fundamentally altered our perceptions of what a movie is. Here's an observation (true at the time) from the intro, "Movies in Mind," that I find rather moving:
Incidental talk after a screening, fan magazine biographies, and film criticism -- all serve first of all to bring the short-lived image into a continuous world of ordinary discourse, to ensure its life beyond those moments in the dark, to make it exist. Unlike the products of the other arts [musical or theatrical recordings], movies are ephemeral. They aren't available, at least not yet, for easy reference on bookshelves, in prints, or on records. One of the first problems for the student of film is taking notes in the dark -- to catch for a moment the rapidly vanishing sound and image. So, too, the aesthetic situation of the movie audience in general is reminiscent of Homer's first audiences. Once the bard has sung a line, the audience can't demand to hear it again; and so the movie audience is passively drawn from scene to scene, with no ready text or score against which to judge their particular experience, with only the experience itself to generate its own standards, for when movies are repeated, unless you have a video-tape machine and can pirate fragments, they must be repeated in their entirety.
What Braudy describes there, of course, is the way all but those who worked in the movie business (from camera operators to editors to projectionists) had always experienced movies -- as events that occurred at a particular time in a particular place. When we buy a ticket to a theatrical screening, we're not purchasing anything concrete (besides the receipt that serves as proof-of-purchase for entry); we're just renting space -- a seat in an auditorium -- for a particular length of time while images are projected on a screen, accompanied by synchronized sounds. There's no guarantee that we will enjoy the images, or that we will find the experience worthwhile, only that we'll be shown the movie whose title is printed on the ticket.
The things Braudy describes as uniquely characteristic of the movies are no longer defining properties. Those quaint black plastic bricks with the reels of tape inside them, today's shiny silver discs and miniature hard drives (soon to be replaced by solid-state storage) and on-demand digital downloads and streaming, have radically altered the ways we conceptualize movies (as objects or property rather than ephemeral experiences) and the ways we watch them (anytime, anywhere, any size, discontinuously, while doing other things). In other words, they've profoundly transformed what we mean by "movies." Many have remarked on these evolutionary changes over the years, but as I was perusing "The World in a Frame" -- this time reading it as a historical volume from the perspective of 2010 -- made the transmutations all the more dramatic for me.
One of Braudy's goals is (I suppose I should say "was," but even though the book was published in 1976, I read it in the present tense -- the same way I watch movies) was to cultivate a language for film criticism that approached film as film and not as some bastardized form of literature or theater or dance or painting or some other pre-existing art. That was a big battle in academia at the time, and the movie reviews that appeared in most newspapers and magazines were literary/dramatic plot synopses with a few sentences about the actors and an adjective about the "cinematography."
Whatever else has changed about movies, the "talk" Braudy mentions above -- in person, in film criticism, online in blog posts and comments, even on Twitter -- is still vitally important. Cinema doesn't mean anything without a culture to frame and give it context and meaning. Without that culture, movies are just diversions and time-fillers -- as most people still experience them. "How then," Braudy writes,
do we create that talk known as film criticism and interpretation, with its special obligation to enlarge and enrich our responses not just to one work but to future works as well? Most of the critical standards that any of us have come from experience and training in the older arts, where the principles of value and understanding have been generally established and the principal artists -- whose work constitutes a definition of value in itself -- are safely dead. Since movies are such a recent discovery, there is only beginning to be a canon of principles and great men [sic]. People may talk about movies or write about them, but such talk and such writing has rarely explored what movies have taught us about themselves -- what conventions of form and content we have learned. Following the late nineteenth-century assumption of a hierarchy of the arts, much serious film criticism has either imported a critical vocabulary from already established disciplines or sprinkled analogies to the work of established artists in other art forms. [...]
At present the two most obvious examples of what I am criticizing in film are the schools of semiology and auteurism. Christian Metz, whose "Film Language" is one of the main semiological texts, ladles out enough terminology to feed a generation of Aristotles. Andrew Sarris, who has popularized the director-oriented ideas of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other writers around Andre Bazin's magazine Cahiers du Cinema, is a much looser and more genial figure. But neither should be blamed for the near-religious dimensions that semiological and auteurist methods have taken in many graduate film schools. Both an be fruitful methods of approaching film, but not so long as they are applied with a purified single-mindedness.
David Bordwell ("Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema," "Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies," edited by Bordwell and Noël Carroll) also cautioned against attempts to cram individual works into theoretical cubbyholes. Braudy chose to concentrate on accessible critical approaches to narrative films:
The methodology of film criticism must finally be brought into the world of story, whether fiction or non-fiction. Experimental films may define the limits of film art, but they say little about the rich complexity of what those limits contain and how the normal experience of films has changed our perceptions of the world. I think it is difficult to defend any criticism that discusses a popular form in mandarin terminology designed to limit its audience to the initiates. the potential of film to absorb and renew the other arts is reflected in the potential of film criticism to be the crossroads of humanistic study rather than just another outpost. Experimental films, like purely formalist aesthetics, are finally private languages, understood by few, although potentially by many more. But I am interested here in the languages that are immediately understood by many, the commercial film where private artistic language has been forced to go public.
Contrast this with, say, Kevin Smith's limited view of film criticism as a scam in which critics get to see his movies for free. He's not wrong. He's just a commercial filmmaker who sees criticism as an extension of his movies' marketing campaigns. Again, not wrong. But not the whole story, either...
11 Comments
Jim, nice to see you highlight that last bit by Braudy. He says so much in that one paragraph. My general impression is that you're fairly sympathetic to "formalist aesthetics" at least whenever it comes into conflict with "the world of the story." I'm thinking of your appreciations of films like THE LIMITS OF CONTROL and THE AMERICAN for instance. I suppose lovers of narrative cinema will always be balancing this tension, arguing over it and renewing it. I'm forever after just the right mix. I think of movies as akin to architecture, an art with an ultra-practical mandate at its core. A building can be beautiful, but if it isn't habitable, so what? And the same thing with a narrative film. If it doesn't tell a good story, what's the point?
THE LIMITS OF CONTROL and THE AMERICAN are narrative films that examine what I suppose you could call the architecture of story. That's one of the things I like about them.
Hmm. Would love to hear how The American examines the architecture of story, since you didn't write a word about it in your entry on the movie when it came out. Seems like a lot to say, with zero justification, about any film. I say "seems like" because it's also incredibly vague...when is a movie examining story, and when are you just examining the movie? If it does, indeed, "examine" the architecture of story, then what are its findings?
Same as the movie I compared it to: Jarmusch's "Limits of Control." Strips story down to its basic elements, a series of tasks and encounters, with little embellishment.
Ok. I think it's a leap to call a shopping list of clichés an examination of the architecture of story, especially when those clichés don't add up to anything more than "you can't outrun your past" or "love - good." "Limits," at least, uses clichés to challenge you with something too unique to easily put your finger on. But maybe you saw more in "The American" than I did.
Your original entry, "Framed," was masterfully persuasive and insightful and has been one of the most profound pieces of film criticism I have ever read. The reason for this is because, like the venerable Robin Wood, film criticism for you is not just empirical, historical and political but personal as well--and thus it is quite accessible. (Another comparison between your criticism and Wood's is the writing style: Leavisian-Faulknerian; always passionate, always with voice, or as Wood put it himself, "annotating vocal inflection and relative emphasis"--
"One of Braudy's goals IS (I suppose I should say 'was,' but even though the book was published in 1976, I read it in the present tense -- the same way I watch movies) WAS to cultivate a language for film criticism that approached film as film and not as some bastardized form of literature or theater or dance or painting or some other pre-existing art.") (How did you get away with parenthetical clauses like these when you were writing for publications? Did your editors insist upon the same journalese paradigm (full stops and one/max of two liners) that Wood had to fight against?)
Thanks, Cory. I used to have to straighten out my sentences more for newspaper journalism in the '80s and '90s. I know it drove some editors (and readers) crazy. Thing is, that's just the way I think -- in digressions, asides, tangents, comparisons, loops -- and given that I try to write fast (once I actually sit down at the keyboard I like to write as directly as I can, so it's more conversational than honed -- probably just a lack of self-discipline on my part) that's the way it comes out!
I see. Well, to site Woods once again: "It seems (but nowadays isn't) a truism to suggest that a critic's quality is inseparable from how he writes." And: "a plea to my fellow critics to rediscover the rich resources of the English language (and with those resources their own voice), its capacity for precision, nuance, and complexity, its quality as spoken language."--thanks for answering his plea! (P.S. These, although I know you know it, are from the introduction to "Hitchcock's Films")
Wood's "Hitchcock's Films" was the first book of criticism I ever encountered. No wonder I immediately loved it!
This post made me think about the idea of the "well-made" movie. Lately it seems that to describe a movie as simply well-made is almost to dismiss it. It seems as though to tell a compelling story and to tell it in both a professional and accessible way isn't of much merit anymore. I feel as though there are some film lovers who elevate only those films that speak to them in "private languages."
I love the stylistic signatures of Truffaut and Godard that grew out of auteur theory but I also believe that a great film doesn't necessarily require a show of technical virtuosity. I suppose this might be leading to a confrontation between style and substance but I guess my point is that I appreciate what Baudy is saying about creating something that is in a language that is understood by the many.
Jim,
Looks like I should give this Braudy character a shot. His comments on Metz are very similar to how I felt when I read some of his work: that his writing is more about creating an insular framework for viewing movies, rather than trying to communicate ideas to a broad audience or to stoke discussion. Semiotics are interesting, I suppose, but I found that looking at films through that framework taught me more about semiotics than it did about the films themselves.
While I see the value in using consistent, well-defined terminology when discussing film (or any particular art form), I'm ultimately a bigger supporter of using plain, clear language. If you talk about what's "there" in a film in a straightforward, descriptive manner, then more people can join the conversation.
One thing I've greatly admired about your blog, Jim, is that even when you get high-minded, theoretical or esoteric, you keep your writing fun and conversational. Which I find much more valuable to me, as a film viewer, than I do in too much intellectual, vocabulary-drenched film theory.
Leave a comment