I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  In other words, he attempts to build an aesthetic not on art (the formalized expression of experience) but on whether the raw material of art is still visible (or he can pretend it’s visible) in the finished work — a very curious standard indeed. Why not then simply reject all art and go back to “nature”? His “aesthetics,” carried out with any intellectual rigour, rejects art. If you can only accept dancing in films by such bizarre claims as “ . . . what could be more inseparable from that flow (of life) than ‘natural’ dancing?” some nebulous conception of “nature” has become your standard of art. It is, of course, on this same basis that reviewers of musicals often praise works like On the Town or West Side Story — and denigrate infinitely better musicals like Singin’ in the Rain or The Band Wagon — though patently nothing is more embarrassing than the transparent efforts to make it appear that the musical numbers are “growing out” of the story. The dialogue becomes as flat and functional as the recitatives of opera. In a musical production like The King and I, the best sequence is the theatrical presentation of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin ballet; the attempted integration of song into the plot, the contrived “natural” ways in which the characters break into little songs, are puerile and depressing. It is this clumsy effort to make things look “natural” instead of accepting the stylization of song and dance which helps to make so many musicals seem simpering and infantile.

  But when Astaire goes into an exuberant routine that involves leaping over luggage and chairs, we are as aware of the pretense, the convention that this “grows out” of the plot situation, as we are aware of the conventions of any backstage musical, with the elaborate presentation of opening night and the understudy becoming the star. Surely nobody but “serious” critics takes one set of conventions for “life” and hence cinema art, and the other set of conventions for the dreadful error of “staginess.” What matters is simply how good the numbers are (and how much talent or artistry have gone into making the conventions of musical film amusing and acceptable). A poorly choreographed dance over luggage and chairs would be no better because it seemed to “grow out” of the plot.

  The lengths to which many theoreticians of the film will go to avoid accepting any form of convention or stylization is extraordinary. You may begin to suspect that they regard style as decadent; as if it were nature spoiled. For example, Kracauer’s lengthy consideration of photography omits color — which obviously involves types of control that would be a bit upsetting to this theory of “accidents” and “nature” and “unadulterated life.” In his system the stylized use of color would be like tampering with nature. And music? “The all-important thing is . . . that musical accompaniment enlivens the pictures by evoking the more material aspects of reality.” (But the more music does so, the worse it is as music. Even program music like Respighi’s Pines or Fountains does not evoke pines or fountains, but only images in the minds of people who would rather daydream than listen.)

  And how is this for another effort to justify dancing by reference to the “candid” camera? “Records of dancing sometimes amount to an intrusion into the dancer’s intimate privacy. His self-forgetting rapture may show in queer gestures and distorted facial expressions which are not intended to be watched . . . However, the supreme virtue of the camera consists precisely in acting the voyeur.” But the supreme virtue of an Astaire is precisely that you don’t see the sweat and grimaces and months of nerve-wracking preparation: you see the achieved elegance. Astaire has the wit to make the dance appear casual and, as audience, we recognize that this nonchalant ease is the true grace note of his control. We are never for a minute taken in by the ruse that the dance is spontaneous; it is partly because we recognize the dance to be difficult and complex, that we enjoy the convention that it just happened.

  Here is an example of Kracauer’s critical method at work on the film Hamlet, with reference to Olivier’s “To be or not to be,” spoken from a tower, with the ocean underneath:

  No sooner does the photographed ocean appear than the spectator experiences something like a shock. He cannot help recognising that this little scene is an outright intrusion; that it abruptly introduces an element incompatible with the rest of the imagery. How he then reacts to it depends upon his sensibilities. Those indifferent to the peculiarities of the medium, and therefore unquestioningly accepting the staged Elsinore, are likely to resent the unexpected emergence of crude nature as a letdown, while those more sensitive to the properties of film will in a flash realise the make-believe character of the castle’s mythical splendour.

  If you have to be sensitive to realize that!

  Of course the ocean is an intrusion: it intrudes on the stylized sets, it disturbs our acceptance and enjoyment of the Shakespearean conventions, and it adds an extra, visual layer of meaning to the soliloquy itself by introducing a redundancy — another means of suicide. But those “so sensitive to the properties of film” that they want to throw out the castle and have more ocean, are throwing out Shakespeare. I don’t wish to demean the visual grandeur of the ocean, but can’t we have some poetry and drama, too? Those who unquestioningly accept the staged Elsinore are not “indifferent to the peculiarities of the medium”; they are testifying to the director’s success in involving them in the world he has created on the screen. Yes, the ocean is a miserable mistake in Hamlet, but in Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet the Friar’s little outdoor scene gathering herbs is exquisite — a moment of absurd sweetness and innocence. Surely there are no hard and fast rules: it all depends on how it’s done. In Richard III, Olivier succeeds with the soliloquies as neither he nor anyone else has done on film before; instead of treating them as outmoded or improper theatrical conventions and trying to fuse them with the dramatic action, he ignored film theories and used the soliloquy as a perfectly valid cinematic device. These moments when Richard puts the audience in his confidence are the most exciting in the film — intimate, audacious, brazen. What better demonstration could we have of the variety, the infinity of possibilities in moviemaking?

  Kracauer finds that “the medium has always shown a predilection for . . . phenomena overwhelming consciousness [If consciousness is overwhelmed, what becomes of phenomena?] . . . elemental catastrophes, the atrocities of war, acts of violence and terror, sexual debauchery, and death.” Is it the “medium” that shows this predilection? If so, it is not the only medium that does. Shakespeare dealt with such phenomena in poetic drama, Tolstoy in War and Peace, Beethoven in his symphonies, Goya in his Disasters of War, Picasso in Guernica. Was it the film “medium” that showed a predilection, or is it that artists like Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Kurosawa wanted at certain times in their creative lives to deal with such phenomena, just as they might want at other times to express more personal emotions? The Shakespeare who wrote Macbeth also wrote the sonnets; is Griffith’s Broken Blossoms less cinematic than The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance?

  In no other art do theoreticians insist that the range of subject matter is determined by the medium. We can love Middlemarch without having to reject The Wings of the Dove. But Odessa-steeped film critics tell us that Eisenstein’s “goal, a cinematic one, was the depiction of collective action, with the masses as the true hero” — and this battle hymn has become the international anthem of film criticism. In the fall 1961 New Politics, Ernest Callenbach writes “a letter to a young film maker” and says “Get thee to Cuba, and after that to Latin America elsewhere, and then Africa.” Would the same advice be given to a young writer or painter? Why are moviemakers obliged to make history? In the dialectics of film criticism, the violent movements of men are as “natural” as the rippling of the leaves. But, but — suppose the young film maker doesn’t know Spanish, can’t stand the sight of blood, was drawn to the film medium after seeing L’Avventura, and has prepared a fine, elliptical scenario on the uneventful life of Emily Dickinson? He’ll probably make a terrible movie, but surely the first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself. Ca
llenbach, like so many film critics, regards Kracauer’s position as basically sound. Writing of Theory of Film, he summarizes the views, and says, “True. But what of the exact ways in which the potentially good materials are handled?” In other words, after you get to Cuba, where presumably you can find Kracauer’s and Callenbach’s kind of filmic “collective action” which is somehow raw nature, how should you proceed? Let’s leave them to work it out, but it’s worth noting that Kracauer’s position is still dominant in much of film criticism.

  Callenbach says the “general position must be retained. Theory of Film is indeed a landmark.” You’d think there were no movies made between post-revolutionary Russia and post-war Italy and . . . Cuba. The application of this kind of theory in the past decades has resulted in such critical evaluations as Richard Griffith’s selection of A Nous La Liberté as René Clair’s “masterpiece” (over Le Million!) and his decision that La Grande Illusion was “fatally the projection of a literary argument. Nevertheless, the film was a determined attempt to comment upon events and if possible to influence them.” That tells us what counts in making movies, doesn’t it? You can mitigate your crimes against the “medium” if you attempt to influence history — in the direction the critic approves. The standard film histories still judge movies by the values of the “Resistance.” Probably de Broca’s The Five-Day Lover can’t be taken seriously unless he goes to Cuba; then mitigating social attitudes can be discovered in it.

  American audiences and exhibitors have their own variant of the Kracauer position; they want the theater screen to do what the television screen can’t do: overpower them. The wide screen is a Procrustes bed, and all movies that don’t fit its proportions have their tops and bottoms cut off. In the reissue of Gone with the Wind, Vivien Leigh not only has lost her feet, she ends in mid-thigh; in the now standard “SuperScope” Henry V, Olivier has no hair, often no head. Movies are blown-up and reissued with their color drained away, the focus blurred. Just as silent movies are projected at sound speed (enabling audiences to laugh at the jerky, primitive, early flickers) every composition in a widened film may be destroyed — but movies are bigger than ever. It might be thought that the “small” movie is the domain of the foreign film theaters, but increasingly the art-houses are not only projecting everything in wide-screen but are looking forward to more “art blockbusters,” on the model of La Dolce Vita and Two Women. However, if the art-house audience has its monomania for one element at the expense of others, it is for what is euphemistically described as a more “adult,” “frank,” or “realistic” treatment of human relations. One man’s “reality” is poverty and mass movements; another man’s reality is sex.

  Some critics are wet behind the ears; Kracauer is dry behind the ears. “One thing is evident: whenever a film-maker turns the spotlight on a historical subject or ventures into the realm of fantasy, he runs the risk of defying the basic properties of his medium. Roughly speaking, he seems no longer concerned with physical reality but bent on incorporating worlds which to all appearances lie outside the orbit of actuality.”

  Why doesn’t he just come out with it and admit that he thinks art is unnatural? Let’s stop spinning and look at some movies: Is De Sica “defying the basic properties of his medium” when he turns the great Emma Gramatica into an angelic old rattlebrain flying through the skies of Miracle in Milan (never mentioned in the book)? Is he “obeying” these “basic properties of the medium” when he takes a “non-professional,” a college professor, and turns him into the great Umberto D (cited some fifteen times)? Both films are staged and acted; how and why is the fantasy defying the medium, and how is it that Umberto D, which is just as staged as a movie set in medieval Japan or Gothic Ruritania, is supposed to have an “unfixable flow” — “the omnipresent streets breathe a tristesse which is palpably the outcome of unfortunate social conditions.” May we not deduce that for Kracauer the “basic properties” of the film have more to do with “unfortunate social conditions” than with art? But Miracle in Milan also has something to do with “unfortunate social conditions” though De Sica’s form is a comic fable about human brotherhood and innocence, a fantasy demonstration that the pure in heart must seek the Kingdom of Heaven because, literally and ironically, they have no kingdom on earth.

  Is this too stylized a treatment of social conditions to be compatible with Kracauer’s notions of cinema? But then how is it that Eisenstein’s triumphs of geometry and engineering “convey to us the paroxysmal upheavals of real masses”? When he moves real masses (of extras) he’s helping us to see the “blind drive of things,” and some of the most imaginative stylization of all time in handling masses — in Metropolis — can only be justified as cinema by a real howler: “the fleeing crowds (in the flood episode) are staged veraciously and rendered through a combination of long shots and close shots which provide exactly the kind of random impressions we could receive were we to witness this spectacle in reality.” But all is not really well. “Yet the cinematic impact of the crowd images suffers from the fact that the scene is laid in architectural surroundings which could not be more stylized.” In other words, a movie is a movie only if you can pretend it isn’t a movie. By stylized he obviously means “unreal” or “unnatural”; he should visit the new science-fiction Los Angeles airport, which is glaringly “real.” There, “raw life” makes Metropolis seem far more prophetic than say, October. Perhaps a belief in progress (via the dialectic, of course) is also part of his concept of “nature.”

  Middle-class Marxists hate actors (who wants to be bothered by the mysteries of personality?) almost as much as they hate fantasy. Films with “non-actors” win Kracauer’s special approbation: they have “a documentary touch.”

  Think of such story films as The Quiet One, Los Olvidados, or the De Sica films, Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D: in all of them the emphasis is on the world around us; their protagonists are not so much particular individuals as types representative of whole groups of people. [Jaibo a type! There isn’t one great character in literature, in drama or in film who is a type. And in our daily lives, only the people we don’t get to know function as types.] These narratives serve to dramatise social conditions in general. The preference for real people on the screen and the documentary approach seem to be closely related.

  The inferences become inevitable: the non-actor is “real.” The professor who gives such a great performance as Umberto D is acceptable because Kracauer can confuse him with nature in the raw, and he’s ever so much more “real” than a highly trained actress like Emma Gramatica. (If a famous old actor had played Umberto D, Kracauer would probably have to go into prolix apologetics before reconciling the film with the “documentary approach.”) But some hidden standards must also be at work: The Roof, which would seem to satisfy all Kracauer’s notions of the “medium’s” requirements, is never mentioned. Perhaps even the “medium” is depressed by dull movies.

  Kracauer’s description of the nature of cinema excludes, limits, rejects. Le Sang d’un Poète and Un Chien Andalou are tossed out as “a film type” — “stagy fantasy” which “cannot help producing an uncinematic effect.” And with them go all the marvelous possibilities for associational editing, which for some of us makes a film like Un Chien Andalou seem an indication of whole new areas in art. We hadn’t recognized, it seems, that such “inner life” interests ignore camera-reality. He sets us straight about Cocteau — “a littérateur rather than a filmmaker”; that quickly disposes of some of the greatest works of our time. Orphée (never mentioned) is, by his system of definitions, not a movie at all.

  Soon we learn that “a sensitive spectator or listener” at the film version of Menotti’s The Medium is “caught in a terrifying clash between cinematic realism and operatic magic . . . he feels he is being torn asunder.” (Kracauer’s aesthetic sensibilities are so delicate that he suffers excruciating tortures when his film sense is violated; now how can any reasonable person get so upset by a moderately successful film ver
sion of a mediocre opera?) But not only does the audience suffer: we learn that “the cinema takes revenge upon those who desert it” — poor Powell and Pressburger, their crime was that “having thrown out the cinema as a means of capturing real life” they “reintroduce it to evolve an imagery which is essentially stage imagery, even though it could not be staged in a theatre.” (Isn’t it amusing to discover that although what is essentially “cinema” is what can’t be done in other media, there is such a thing as “essentially stage imagery, even though it could not be staged in a theatre.”)

  Couldn’t we introduce, at this point, some sensible criteria instead of these essences and retrogressions and punishments? The trouble with Tales of Hoffmann is not that “it is cinema estranged from itself” or that its imagery is stagy, but that it suffers from the same monotony and failure of imagination that blight so many ballet presentations. Kracauer says, “It is natural for film — and therefore artistically promising — to prefer the enchantments of an obscure railway station to the painted splendour of enchanted woods.” Couldn’t we say simply that as anything a camera can record is “natural,” nature is not a criterion in judging movies? An obscure railway station may be enchanting, so may painted woods. Oberon’s procession in Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an exquisite, magical moment on film — indicating that what is the matter with most of the movie is not the “uncinematic” use of stylized sets, but the way they are conceived and used, how the actors and camera move, how the lines are spoken, the quality of the visual, imagery, the rhythm of the action and editing, or any of the infinite number of elements that may come between a creative artist and the achievement of his goal. It may even be that Reinhardt’s goal was not imaginative enough, or it may be the front office thought it was too imaginative and put restrictions on him. But there is nothing uncinematic about the attempt. What an artist wants to do can’t always be set in obscure railway stations or in the streets, or in contemporary settings. Why should theorists who see the poetry of the streets want to throw out the poetry of the past and of imaginary worlds?