I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  The time-honoured differentiation between form and content of artistic achievements affords a convenient starting-point for an analysis of story types. It is true that in any given case these two components of the work of art interpenetrate each other insolubly: each content includes form elements; each form is also content . . . But it is no less true that the concepts “form” and “content” have a basis in the properties of the artistic work itself. And the near-impossibility of neatly validating these concepts in the material is rather a point in their favour. With complex live entities the accuracy of definitions does not suffer from the fact that they retain a fringe of indistinct meanings. Quite the contrary, they must be elusive to achieve maximum precision — which implies that any attempt to remove their seeming vagueness for the sake of semantically irreproachable concepts is thoroughly devious.

  Kracauer really cannot be accused of deviousness, and certainly his form and content are insoluble.

  What do movies have to do with the “redemption” of “physical reality”? Our physical reality — what we experience about us — is what we can’t redeem: if it’s good, marvelous; if it isn’t, we can weep or booze, or try to change it. Redemption, like sublimation, is a dear, sweet thought. And Kracauer’s theory of film is a theory imposed on motion pictures: he’s too much of a theoretician to develop a critical attitude or approach on the basis of what he likes (that would be too simple, too sensible). He presents a theory and then presents foundations and documentation (dogmentation, I almost said) to support it. The foundations are so laboriously laid that there is a tendency to accept certain assumptions, just to get things moving (after all, who wants to stay at the pre-film level forever?). But we may not feel too cheery about where things are heading when informed that “The following historical survey, then, is to provide the substantive conceptions on which the subsequent systematic considerations proper will depend.” Doesn’t exactly sound like an invitation to a party, does it? So many people who fled from Hitler, stripped of their possessions, seem to have come over carrying the worst of German pedantry in their heads.

  Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality is expensively got out by Oxford University Press; it is, I suppose, Kracauer’s major work since that Freudian-Marxian heavy entertainment From Caligari to Hitler, which is always referred to as a landmark in film scholarship — I suppose it is, in the sense that nobody else has done anything like it, Gott sei dank! The book carries such dust-jacket blurbs as Paul Rotha saying it is “The most important work to date in the English language on the theory and aesthetics of the Film. It will make a deep impact in all places where the Cinema is regarded as an art.” And Richard Griffith, the curator of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, says “Dr. Kracauer’s work supersedes all previous aesthetic theories of the film.”

  There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one’s own preferences into a monomaniac theory; in film criticism, the more confused and single-minded and dedicated (to untenable propositions) the theorist is, the more likely he is to be regarded as serious and important and “deep” — in contrast to relaxed men of good sense whose pluralistic approaches can be disregarded as not fundamental enough. During the years in which dialecticians were stating the thesis that “the art of the motion picture is montage” some very good movies were being made that had nothing whatever to do with “montage.” (And those who were making a religion of the theory usually pointed out as examples the films Eisenstein made long after he’d abandoned — or been forced to abandon — “montage.”) Related monomaniac schools developed — for example, Sight and Sound wants movies to be “firm” (a term one might think more applicable to a breast or a conviction).

  Siegfried Kracauer is in the great, lunatic tradition: he believes that the cinema is “animated by a desire to picture transient material life, life at its most ephemeral. Street crowds, involuntary gestures, and other fleeting impressions are its very meat . . . films are true to the medium to the extent that they penetrate the world before our eyes . . .” He says that this assumption “that films are true to the medium to the extent that they penetrate the world before our eyes . . . “ is “the premise and axis” of his book. But what does it mean? Either it’s a general sort of remark, a harmless tautology indicating that movies have something to do with the world — like presenting images of it; or he is trying to distinguish two classes of movies, those which presumably “penetrate the world before our eyes” and those which don’t. But as we don’t know what he means by this penetration, we accept his “premise and axis” as meaningless and move on. At almost every step in his reasoning we must do the same: would it be some terrible evidence of superficiality if we could penetrate what he’s talking about?

  For Kracauer, as for Hegel, all nature and all history are marching toward one culmination:

  If film is a photographic medium, it must gravitate toward the expanses of outer reality — an open-ended, limitless world which bears little resemblance to the finite and ordered cosmos set by tragedy. Unlike this cosmos, where destiny defeats chance and all the light falls on human interaction, the world of film is a flow of random shots involving both humans and inanimate objects. . . . Once you start from the assumption that the camera retains major characteristics of photography, you will find it impossible to accept the widely sanctioned belief or claim that film is an art like traditional arts. Works of art consume the raw material from which they are drawn [I’d love an example! He sounds like a materialist running amok in a neighbour’s field], whereas films as an outgrowth of camera work are bound to exhibit it. [Is it the medium or Kracauer standing on its head? The camera work is an outgrowth, if we must use such vegetable terms, of the conception of the film.] However purposefully directed, the motion picture camera would cease to be a camera if it did not record visible phenomena for their own sake. It fulfils itself in rendering “the ripple of the leaves.”

  I am puzzled to know how this ripple of the leaves theory could possibly help us to see into the art of the film: often the worst and most embarrassing part of a film is the accidental, the uncontrolled, the amateurish failure which exhibits its unachieved intentions; and the finest moment may be a twitch of the actress’s cheek achieved on the fiftieth take. There are accidents which look like art and there is art that looks accidental; but how can you build an aesthetic on accident — on the ripple of the leaves? How do you discriminate between the “accidental” that is banal or awkward or pointless and the “accidental” that is “cinema” — without referring to some other standards of excellence or even relevance? How can you say “accidents were the very soul of slapstick”? In comedy what looks accidental is generally the result of brilliant timing and deliberate anarchy and wild invention and endless practice.

  What it comes down to in Kracauer is that film is Lumière’s “nature caught in the act” — or neo-realism: the look of so many good movies during the period he was gestating this book becomes his definition of cinema itself.

  What is this nature that is appealed to, a nature that excludes works that are staged, stylized, or even carefully wrought, if not simply another kind of selection from nature? Kracauer regards films dealing with the life of the poor or films using non-professionals as more “natural.” Why? “Film,” he tells us, “gravitates toward unstaged reality” and “the artificiality of stagy settings or compositions runs counter to the medium’s declared preference for nature in the raw.” How and when did the medium declare its preference, I wonder? The trouble with this kind of Hegelian prose is that the reader is at first amused by what seem to be harmless metaphors, and soon the metaphors are being used as if they were observable historical tendencies and aesthetic phenomena, and next the metaphor becomes a stick to castigate those who have other tastes, and other metaphors.

  What are we to make of a statement like “Herschel not only predicted the basic features of the film camera but assigned to it a task which it has never since disowned: ‘the vivid and lifelike reproduction an
d handing down to the latest posterity of my transaction in real life . . . ’ ”? Well, I can’t say that the film camera has ever disowned this task, any more than it ever claimed it. But I can certainly cite numerous people who have used it for recording life they arranged for the camera. Griffith and Eisenstein, for example — and just about everybody else who ever made a movie. When Kracauer says “Film . . . is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality and, hence, gravitates toward it,” either he is including whatever is photographed in “reality” — an empty generalization — or trying to claim that film “gravitates” toward “raw,” “unstaged” reality, nature caught in the ripple of the leaves, and is once again indulging in the metaphorical sleight of mind by which he seeks to convince us that film “gravitates” — i.e., is drawn toward his idea of what movies should be. “Imagine a film which, in keeping with the basic properties, records interesting aspects of physical reality but does so in a technically imperfect manner; perhaps the lighting is awkward or the editing uninspired. Nevertheless such a film is more specifically a film than one which utilises brilliantly all the cinematic devices and tricks to produce a statement disregarding camera-reality.” But what is camera-reality? What can it be but the area of reality he wants the camera to record? To put it simply and crudely, Earth is no more real than Smiles of a Summer Night. Kracauer is indulging in one of the oldest and most primitive types of thinking — he’s like a religious zealot who thinks his life of prayer and fasting is more “real” than the worldly life of men in big cities, and that “nature” has somehow dictated his diet of nuts and berries.

  “It is evident that the cinematic approach materialises in all films which follow the realistic tendency.” Obviously — by his definition of cinema. Can tautology go much further? But then, once he has convinced himself that the art of the motion picture follows natural laws, he forgets that these natural “laws” are simply descriptive, and begins to talk about the “medium’s recording obligations” — as if natural laws were prescriptions and commands, to be followed and obeyed. And it is but a short next step for “nature” to decide what the content of films should or must be.

  “The hunting ground of the motion picture camera is in principle unlimited [Don’t trust this man. You’d better get a license — he’d be the first to turn you in for poaching.]; it is the external world expanding in all directions. Yet there are certain subjects within that world which may be termed ‘cinematic’ because they seem to exert a peculiar attraction on the medium. It’s as if the medium were predestined (and eager) to exhibit them.” The “medium” has become such an animate creature that we might as well start looking around for ways to punish it when it misbehaves.

  Starting from Kracauer’s basis of looking for what cannot be done in any other medium, surely one could make an equally good case for the tricks and magic of Méliès. In what other medium would much of Cocteau’s Orphèe or Dreyer’s Vampyr or Karel Zeman’s Invention of Destruction be possible? Kracauer says Méliès “failed to transcend” the theater “by incorporating genuinely cinematic subjects”: we can translate this to mean that once you define “genuinely cinematic” as “the ripple of the leaves” or “nature caught in the act,” the staged or deliberately magical becomes “uncinematic” — by definition. But why should we go along with him in playing this game of arbitrary definitions that simply lead us back to his starting point? It’s a dull game: a nursery game.

  “Mary Jane, be a good girl and eat your neo-realist bread pudding.”

  “I had that for supper last night. Tonight I want something choice, like some Jean Cocteau nouvelle vague ice cream.”

  “But that isn’t good for you. Neo-realist bread pudding is much more nourishing. If you don’t eat what’s good for you, you won’t grow up straight and healthy.”

  “If you like it so much, why don’t you eat it yourself?”

  “You need it more than I do.”

  “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  In his effort to distinguish “cinematic subjects,” Kracauer draws some curious lines of demarcation. He finds, for example, that in film “inanimate objects stand out as protagonists and all but overshadow the rest of the cast.” He cites “unruly Murphy beds,” “the mad automobiles in silent comedy,” and so on. I would suggest that these inanimate objects are generally used on screen as props, in basically the same way they are used in vaudeville, in the theater, or in the circus — and that there is nothing the matter with such use in a film or in any other medium; no line of demarcation is either possible or necessary. Chaplin’s “Murphy bed” routine in One A.M. is either funny or not funny (I don’t lose my mind over it); it probably could be done very similarly on stage. So what?

  Other examples cited, the cruiser Potemkin and the oil derrick in Louisiana Story, are less feasible on stage, but how does that make them more cinematic than something which is easy to put in a theater? Both are, incidentally, much less interesting objects on the screen than they are generally asserted to be: the exciting action in Potemkin has little reference to the cruiser itself (extras can run around on a stage, too), and I have never discovered any source of great cinematic excitement in Louisiana Story. “The fact,” says Kracauer, “that big objects are as inaccessible to the stage as small ones suffices to range them among cinematic subjects.” Who cares whether the objects on the screen are accessible or inaccessible to the stage, or, for that matter, to painting, or to the novel or poetry? Who started this divide and conquer game of aesthetics in which the different media are assigned their special domains like salesmen staking out their territories — you stick to the Midwest and I’ll take Florida?

  Film aestheticians are forever telling us that when they have discovered what the motion picture can do that other arts can’t do, they have discovered the “essence,” the “true nature” of motion picture art. It is like the old nonsense that man is what differentiates him from the other animals — which is usually said to be his soul or his mind or his ability to transmit information from one generation to another, etc. But man is also what he shares with the other animals. And if you try to reduce him to some supposed quality that he alone has, you get an absurdly distorted view of man. And the truth is, as we learn more about animals and about man, the less we are sure about what differentiates him from other animals, or if it’s so very important. And what motion picture art shares with other arts is perhaps even more important than what it may, or may not, have exclusively.

  Those who look for the differentiating, defining “essence” generally overlook the main body of film and stage material and techniques which are very much the same. Except for the physical presence of the actors in a theater, there is almost no “difference” between stage and screen that isn’t open to question; there is almost no effect possible in one that can’t be simulated, and sometimes remarkably well achieved, in the other. Of course, there are effects in films that seem marvelously “filmic” — like the long tracking shots at the opening of Welles’s Touch of Evil, or the ladies burning in Dreyer’s The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc and Day of Wrath, or the good old car racing the train at the close of Intolerance; but it isn’t beyond the range of possibility for a stage director to get very similar effects. Close-ups, long-shots, fast cutting are all possible on the stage, even though they require somewhat different techniques. And there is no more reason for a stage director to avoid fluid techniques that resemble movies (he can’t avoid them in staging, say, Shakespeare or Büchner or Peer Gynt or To Damascus) than for a moviemaker to avoid keeping his camera inside one room — if a room is where his material belongs. We can take pleasure in the virtuoso use of visual images in Dovzhenko’s Arsenal or Gance’s Napoleon; we can also take pleasure in a virtuoso performer like Keaton simply changing hats in Steamboat Bill, Jr.

  Perhaps the most lovable side of Kracauer is his desperate attempt to make musicals, which he obviously adores, fit his notion of cinema as nature in the raw. A man who likes Fred Astaire can
’t be all pedant. How touching he becomes when he tries to explain that it is Astaire’s dancing “over tables and gravel paths into the everyday world . . . from the footlights to the heart of camera-reality” that makes him acceptable. He’s like a man trying to sneak his dear — but naughty — friends into heaven.

  As if our delight in the performance of a song or dance depended on the degree to which it grew out of the surrounding material — as if our pleasure had to be justified! This is a variant of the pedagogical Puritan notion that you mustn’t enjoy a poem or a story unless it teaches you a lesson: you mustn’t enjoy a movie unless it grows out of “nature.” “In making its songs appear an outgrowth of life’s contingencies, the genre shows an affinity, however mediated, for the cinematic medium.” Phew! Our pleasure in song and dance, as in motion picture itself, is in the ingenuity with which man uses the raw material of his existence — not in the raw material itself, or in a visible link with it.

  Once again he falls back on his strange use of language. “Astaire’s consummate dancing is meant to belong among the real-life events with which he toys in his musicals; and it is so organised that it imperceptibly emerges from, and disappears in, the flow of these happenings.” The crucial word here is “meant.” Who means it — some cosmic force? I think it may be almost disingenuous of Kracauer to pretend that the Astaire-Rogers musicals represent the “flow of life.” Isn’t it enough that they represent the American film musical comedy tradition of rhythm and romance and high spirits, a tradition that has collapsed under the weight of “serious” ideas and “important” dance? He cannot accept even the early classic René Clair comedies for their wit and choreographic grace and movement, their poetic, imaginative stylization — but because “ . . . it is the vicissitudes of life from which these ballets issue.”