I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  I suppose we should be happy for Sirk and Preminger, elevated up the glory “scale,” but I suspect that the “stylistic consistency” of, say, Preminger, could be a matter of his limitations, and that the only way you could tell he made some of his movies was that he used the same players so often (Linda Darnell, Jeanne Crain, Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, et al., gave his movies the Preminger look). But the argument is ludicrous anyway, because if Preminger shows stylistic consistency with subject matter as varied as Carmen Jones, Anatomy of a Murder, and Advise and Consent, then by any rational standards he should be attacked rather than elevated. I don’t think these films are stylistically consistent, nor do I think Preminger is a great director — for the very simple reason that his films are consistently superficial and facile. (Advise and Consent, an auteur “masterpiece” — Ian Cameron, Paul Mayersberg, and Mark Shivas of Movie and Jean Douchet of Cahiers du Cinéma rate it first on their ten best lists of 1962 and Sarris gives it his top rating — seems not so much Preminger-directed as other-directed. That is to say, it seems calculated to provide what as many different groups as possible want to see: there’s something for the liberals, something for the conservatives, something for the homosexuals, something for the family.) An editorial in Movie states: “In order to enjoy Preminger’s films the spectator must apply an unprejudiced intelligence; he is constantly required to examine the quality not only of the characters’ decisions but also of his own reactions,” and “He presupposes an intelligence active enough to allow the spectator to make connections, comparisons and judgments.” May I suggest that this spectator would have better things to do than the editors of Movie who put out Preminger issues? They may have, of course, the joys of discovering links between Centennial Summer, Forever Amber, That Lady in Ermine, and The Thirteenth Letter, but I refuse to believe in these ever-so-intellectual protestations. The auteur critics aren’t a very convincing group.

  I assume that Sarris’s theory is not based on his premises (the necessary causal relationships are absent), but rather that the premises were devised in a clumsy attempt to prop up the “theory.” (It’s a good thing he stopped at three: a few more circles and we’d really be in hell, which might turn out to be the last refinement of film tastes — Abbott and Costello comedies, perhaps?) These critics work embarrassingly hard trying to give some semblance of intellectual respectability to a preoccupation with mindless, repetitious commercial products — the kind of action movies that the restless, rootless men who wander on Forty-second Street and in the Tenderloin of all our big cities have always preferred just because they could respond to them without thought. These movies soak up your time. I would suggest that they don’t serve a very different function for Sarris or Bogdanovich or the young men of Movie — even though they devise elaborate theories to justify soaking up their time. An educated man must have to work pretty hard to set his intellectual horizons at the level of I Was a Male War Bride (which, incidentally, wasn’t even a good commercial movie).

  “Interior meaning” seems to be what those in the know know. It’s a mystique — and a mistake. The auteur critics never tell is by what divining rods they have discovered the élan of a Minnelli or a Nicholas Ray or a Leo McCarey. They’re not critics; they’re inside dopesters. There must be another circle that Sarris forgot to get to — the one where the secrets are kept.

  Outside the Circles, or What Is a Film Critic?

  I suspect that there’s some primitive form of Platonism in the underbrush of Sarris’s aesthetics.* He says, for example, that “Bazin’s greatness as a critic . . . rested in his disinterested conception of the cinema as a universal entity.” I don’t know what a “universal entity” is, but I rather imagine Bazin’s stature as a critic has less to do with “universals” than with intelligence, knowledge, experience, sensitivity, perceptions, fervor, imagination, dedication, lucidity — the traditional qualities associated with great critics. The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in it that shouldn’t be, what is not in it that could be. He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work than they could see for themselves; he is a great critic, if by his understanding and feeling for the work, by his passion, he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there, waiting to be seized. He is not necessarily a bad critic if he makes errors in judgment. (Infallible taste is inconceivable; what could it be measured against?) He is a bad critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, enlarge the interests and understanding of his audience. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others.

  I do not understand what goes on in the mind of a critic who thinks a theory is what his confrères need because they are not “great” critics. Any honest man can perform the critical function to the limits of his tastes and powers. I daresay that Bogdanovich and V. F. Perkins and Rudi Franchi and Mark Shivas and all the rest of the new breed of specialists know more about movies than some people and could serve at least a modest critical function if they could remember that art is an expression of human experience. If they are men of feeling and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to be a little ashamed of their “detailed criticism” of movies like River of No Return?

  I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic. But this does not mean a scrambling and confusion of systems. Eclecticism is not the same as lack of scruple; eclecticism is the selection of the best standards and principles from various systems of ideas. It requires more care, more orderliness to be a pluralist than to apply a single theory. Sarris, who thinks he is applying a single theory, is too undisciplined to recognize the conflicting implications of his arguments. If he means to take a Platonic position, then is it not necessary for him to tell us what his ideals of movies are and how various examples of film live up to or fail to meet his ideals? And if there is an ideal to be achieved, an objective standard, then what does élan have to do with it? (The ideal could be achieved by plodding hard work or by inspiration or any other way; the method of achieving the ideal would be as irrelevant as the “personality” of the creator.) As Sarris uses them, vitalism and Platonism and pragmatism do not support his auteur theory; they undermine it.

  Those, like Sarris, who ask for objective standards seem to want a theory of criticism which makes the critic unnecessary. And he is expendable if categories replace experience; a critic with a single theory is like a gardener who uses a lawn mower on everything that grows. Their desire for a theory that will solve all the riddles of creativity is in itself perhaps an indication of their narrowness and confusion; they’re like those puzzled, lost people who inevitably approach one after a lecture and ask, “But what is your basis for judging a movie?” When one answers that new films are judged in terms of how they extend our experience and give us pleasure, and that our ways of judging how they do this are drawn not only from older films but from other works of art, and theories of art, that new films are generally related to what is going on in the other arts, that as wide a background as possible in literature, painting, music, philosophy, political thought, etc., helps, that it is the wealth and variety of what he has to bring to new works that makes the critic’s reaction to them valuable, the questioners are always unsatisfied. They wanted a simple answer, a formula; if they approached a chef they would probably ask for the one magic recipe that could be followed in all cooking.

  And it is very difficult to explain to such people that criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply, just because you must use everything you are and everything you know that is relevant, and that film criticism is particularly exciting just because of the multiplicity of elements in film art.

  This range of experience, and dependence on experience, is pitifully absent from the work of the auteur critics; they seem to view movies, not merely in isolation from the other arts, but in isolation ev
en from their own experience. Those who become film specialists early in life are often fixated on the period of film during which they first began going to movies, so it’s not too surprising that the Movie group — just out of college and some still in — are so devoted to the films of the forties and fifties. But if they don’t widen their interests to include earlier work, how can they evaluate films in anything like their historical continuity, how can they perceive what is distinctive in films of the forties? And if they don’t have interests outside films, how can they evaluate what goes on in films? Film aesthetics as a distinct, specialized field is a bad joke: the Movie group is like an intellectual club for the intellectually handicapped. And when is Sarris going to discover that aesthetics is indeed a branch of ethnography; what does he think it is — a sphere of its own, separate from the study of man in his environment?

  Some Speculations on the Appeal of the Auteur Theory

  If relatively sound, reasonably reliable judgments were all that we wanted from film criticism, then Sight and Sound might be considered a great magazine. It isn’t, it’s something far less — a good, dull, informative, well-written, safe magazine, the best film magazine in English, but it doesn’t satisfy desires for an excitement of the senses. Its critics don’t often outrage us, neither do they open much up for us; its intellectual range is too narrow, its approach too professional. (If we recall an article or review, it’s almost impossible to remember which Peter or which Derek wrote it.) Standards of quality are not enough, and Sight and Sound tends to dampen enthusiasm. Movie, by contrast, seems spirited: one feels that these writers do, at least, love movies, that they’re not condescending. But they too, perhaps even more so, are indistinguishable read-alikes, united by fanaticism in a ludicrous cause; and for a group that discounts content and story, that believes the director is the auteur of what gives the film value, they show an inexplicable fondness almost an obsession — for detailing plot and quoting dialogue. With all the zeal of youth serving an ideal, they carefully reduce movies to trivia.

  It is not merely that the auteur theory distorts experience (all theory does that, and helps us to see more sharply for having done so) but that it is an aesthetics which is fundamentally anti-art. And this, I think, is the most serious charge that can possibly be brought against an aesthetics. The auteur theory, which probably helped to liberate the energies of the French critics, plays a very different role in England and with the Film Culture and New York Film Bulletin auteur critics in the United States — an anti-intellectual, anti-art role.

  The French auteur critics, rejecting the socially conscious, problem pictures so dear to the older generation of American critics, became connoisseurs of values in American pictures that Americans took for granted, and if they were educated Americans, often held in contempt. The French adored the American gangsters, and the vitality, the strength, of our action pictures — all those films in which a couple of tough men slug it out for a girl, after going through hell together in oil fields, or building a railroad, or blazing a trail. In one sense, the French were perfectly right — these were often much more skillfully made and far more interesting visually than the movies with a message which Americans were so proud of, considered so adult. Vulgar melodrama with a fast pace can be much more exciting — and more honest, too — than feeble, pretentious attempts at drama — which usually meant just putting “ideas” into melodrama, anyway. Where the French went off was in finding elaborate intellectual and psychological meanings in these simple action films. (No doubt we make some comparable mistakes in interpreting French films.)

  Like most swings of the critical pendulum, the theory was a corrective, and it helped to remind us of the energies and crude strength and good humor that Europeans enjoyed in our movies. The French saw something in our movies that their own movies lacked; they admired it, and to some degree, they have taken it over and used it in their own way (triumphantly in Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player, not very successfully in their semi-American thrillers). Our movies were a product of American industry, and in a sense, it was America itself that they loved in our movies — our last frontiers, our robber-barons, our naiveté, our violence, our efficiency and speed and technology, our bizarre combination of sentimentality and inhuman mechanization.

  But for us, the situation is different. It is good for us to be reminded that our mass culture is not altogether poisonous in its effect on other countries, but what is appealingly exotic — “American” — for them is often intolerable for us. The freeways of cities like Los Angeles may seem mad and marvelous to a foreign visitor; to us they are the nightmares we spend our days in. The industrial products of Hollywood that we grew up on are not enough to satisfy our interests as adults. We want a great deal more from our movies than we get from the gangster carnage and the John Ford westerns that Europeans adore. I enjoy some movies by George Cukor and Howard Hawks but I wouldn’t be much interested in the medium if that were all that movies could be. We see many elements in foreign films that our movies lack. We also see that our films have lost the beauty and innocence and individuality of the silent period, and the sparkle and wit of the thirties. There was no special reason for the French critics, preoccupied with their needs, to become sensitive to ours. And it was not surprising that, in France, where film directors work in circumstances more comparable to those of a dramatist or a composer, critics would become fixated on American directors, not understanding how confused and inextricable are the roles of the front office, the producers, writers, editors, and all the rest of them — even the marketing research consultants who may pretest the drawing powers of the story and stars — in Hollywood. For the French, the name of a director was a guide on what American films to see; if a director was associated with a certain type of film that they liked, or if a director’s work showed the speed and efficiency that they enjoyed. I assume that anyone interested in movies uses the director’s name as some sort of guide, both positive and negative, even though we recognize that at times he is little more than a stage manager. For example, in the forties, my friends and I would keep an eye out for the Robert Siodmak films and avoid Irving Rapper films (except when they starred Bette Davis whom we wanted to see even in bad movies); I avoid Mervyn LeRoy films (though I went to see Home Before Dark for Jean Simmons’s performance); I wish I could avoid Peter Glenville’s pictures but he uses actors I want to see. It’s obvious that a director like Don Siegel or Phil Karlson does a better job with what he’s got to work with than Peter Glenville, but that doesn’t mean there’s any pressing need to go see every tawdry little gangster picture Siegel or Karlson directs; and perhaps if they tackled more difficult subjects they wouldn’t do a better job than Glenville. There is no rule or theory involved in any of this, just simple discrimination; we judge the man from his films and learn to predict a little about his next films, we don’t judge the films from the man.

  But what has happened to the judgment of the English and New York critics who have taken over the auteur theory and used it to erect a film aesthetics based on those commercial movies that answered a need for the French, but which are not merely ludicrously inadequate to our needs, but are the results of a system of production that places a hammerlock on American directors? And how can they, with straight faces, probe for deep meanings in these products? Even the kids they’re made for know enough not to take them seriously. How can these critics, sensible enough to deflate our overblown message movies, reject the total content of a work as unimportant and concentrate on signs of a director’s “personality” and “interior meaning”? It’s understandable that they’re trying to find movie art in the loopholes of commercial production — it’s a harmless hobby and we all play it now and then. What’s incomprehensible is that they prefer their loopholes to unified film expression. If they weren’t so determined to exalt products over works that attempt to express human experience, wouldn’t they have figured out that the mise-en-scène which they seek out in these products, the director’s perso
nal style which comes through despite the material, is only a mere suggestion, a hint of what an artist can do when he’s in control of the material, when the whole film becomes expressive? Isn’t it obvious that mise-en-scène and subject material — form and content — can be judged separately only in bad movies or trivial ones? It must be black comedy for directors to read this new criticism and discover that films in which they felt trapped and disgusted are now said to be their masterpieces. It’s an aesthetics for 1984: failure is success.

  I am too far from the English scene to guess at motives, and far away also from New York, but perhaps close enough to guess that the Americans (consciously or unconsciously) are making a kind of social comment: like the pop artists, the New Realists with their comic strips and Campbell’s soup can paintings, they are saying, “See what America is, this junk is the fact of our lives. Art and avant-gardism are phony; what isn’t any good, is good. Only squares believe in art. The artifacts of industrial civilization are the supreme truth, the supreme joke.” This is a period when men who consider themselves creative scoff at art and tradition. It is perhaps no accident that in the same issue of Film Culture with Sarris’s auteur theory there is a lavishly illustrated spread on “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez” — a fairly close movie equivalent for that outsized can of Campbell’s soup. The editor, Jonas Mekas, has his kind of social comment. This is his approach to editing a film magazine: “As long as the ‘lucidly minded’ critics will stay out, with all their ‘form,’ ‘content,’ ‘art,’ ‘structure,’ ‘clarity,’ ‘importance’ — everything will be all right, just keep them out. For the new soul is still a bud, still going through its most dangerous, most sensitive stage.” Doesn’t exactly make one feel welcome, does it? I’m sure I don’t know what the problem is: are there so many “lucidly minded” critics in this country (like Andrew Sarris?) that they must be fought off? And aren’t these little “buds” that have to be protected from critical judgments the same little film makers who are so convinced of their importance that they can scarcely conceive of a five-minute film which doesn’t end with what they, no doubt, regard as the ultimate social comment: the mushroom cloud rising. Those “buds” often behave more like tough nuts.