I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Salt of the Earth

  The Editor, Sight and Sound

  Sir, — Had I praised Salt of the Earth no doubt your correspondents would have considered me properly “objective” and my line of thought would not have been turned into an obstacle course. As I expressed something less than delight, Walter Lassally found that, “Her description . . . clearly derives from the viewpoint of one who has never been in close contact with working class people,” J. D. Corbluth thought it “a pity that some critics are rather far away from real life and those sections of the populace who work with their hands.”

  Surely Mr. Corbluth has let the cat out of the social realist bag: manual workers are more real than other people. The callus is mightier than the pen.

  The crude view of reality held by some of the correspondents is, not too surprisingly, shared by the producer and director — “we were agreed that our films must be based in actuality. . . . A true account of the miners of the South-West and their families, predominantly Mexican-Americans, begged to be told. . . . We asked the miners and their families to play themselves . . .” etc. For social realists, artistic truth means not the artist’s fidelity to his individual vision, but an approximation, a recreation of “actual” existence. (Cocteau seeks to “rehabilitate the commonplace,” the social realist seeks to deify it.) The miners are not to play roles but to “play themselves.” This aesthetic would take art back to before the beginnings of art: it aims, ostensibly, to reproduce the raw material from which art derives. A ludicrous aesthetic but not without a purpose: by means of it, material which is not really raw at all can be offered as more true (based in “actuality”!) than art which is a clear and open transformation of experience. Salt is real to them because, they claim, it happened once; Les Parents Terribles is not real — though it happens forever.

  Ralph Bond suggests that the method of “collective constructive criticism” means simply that you consult strikers when you are making a film about a strike — as if it were no more than using good sense. We are all aware, or I thought we were, that artists who begin by sacrificing independent judgment in order to serve and express the masses, end up merely dramatizing political directives. What a parody of democracy the makers of Salt hold up for our admiration: four hundred people sit in on the script! Visualize Dreyer confronted with a committee asking for a little more earthly humor in a scene, or Cocteau trying to explain to a few hundred people why he needed the glazier in the “zone.”

  To the degree that Christopher Brunel can so confuse the film with a slice of life that he can reprove me for not being “moved by the struggles of the Mexican Americans for a better life,” the social realist method has succeeded, with him at least. Salt wasn’t a strike, it was a movie; but the confusion goes to the heart of the propagandistic aesthetic — you’re considered a strike breaker if you didn’t like it.

  Communist propagandists do not attack the values of American prosperity because that prosperity would be too attractive to poverty-ridden countries. They claim it’s an illusion, “a big lie,” and that the “real” America is a picture of class war: poor workers are dispossessed, capitalists set race against race, only the plutocrats enjoy the benefits of productivity, etc. (Russian propaganda identifies Cadillacs with capitalists, Americans identify Cadillacs with Negroes.)

  G. M. Hoellering is mistaken in thinking that had I not known who made the film, I would not have objected to it. Esperanza tells us that the house belongs to the company “but the flowers, the flowers are ours” — does one have to be briefed? (Did Mr. Hoellering accept the saccharine nobility of Greer Garson or the wartime Claudette Colbert? Why should he be more willing to accept Miss Revueltas’s saccharine deprivation?) If we’re familiar with propaganda methods we know that “oppressed” women don’t have babies like the rest of us, that they go through epic labor pains, with the life force finally triumphant in the birth of the little worker. How else is mediocre propaganda to achieve symbolic stature? When “the oppressed” see themselves as a chosen people, and they certainly do in Salt, they become as morally and aesthetically offensive as any other righteous band. If those who made the film experienced “fearful pressures,” so did the Seventh Day Adventists in Hitler’s concentration camps — did it ennoble them or make their dogma any more acceptable? A man may be ennobled when he fights for a good cause; a cause is not ennobled by fighting men.

  At no point did I suggest that Communists, fellow travelers, or anyone else should be prevented from making movies, publishing books, or otherwise addressing the public. But, believing in the free dissemination of ideas, I must defend my right to criticize any of those ideas. Is it in good faith that some of the correspondents set up a double standard — defending freedom of expression for those who would set up an image of a fascist United States, and attacking freedom of expression for anti-Communists as witch hunting? I cannot accept the implication that because Communists and fellow travelers have been subjected to some abuse in the United States, they are therefore exempt from analysis of their methods, purposes, and results. Is one not to call a spade a spade, because Senator McCarthy lumps together spades, shovels, and plain garden hoes?

  Are we to pretend that there are no spades? Are we to look at Salt and say with Mr. Brunel, “All right, so it’s propaganda — for a better understanding between races.” But why, then, does the film caricature the Anglo-Saxons and why are the representatives of business and government all Anglo-Saxons? If Salt is supposed to be an accurate “realistic” picture of the United States, what explains this split — which is at complete variance with the statistical facts of American life?

  The social realist aesthetic develops out of a political dogma, and the whole meaning of the aesthetic is that art must, so to speak, pay its way — by serving immediate socio-political ends. When a film is as loaded as Salt, surely the critic is obliged to examine what it’s aiming at. Or is the film critic supposed to limit himself to sight and sound as if they had no relation to meaning?

  Yours faithfully,

  PAULINE KAEL

  San Francisco.

  [1954]

  Notes

  * Based on Prosper Merimée’s one-act play, Le Carrosse du Saint Sacrement, which was derived from the same Peruvian story that served as source material for an episode in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. ↑

  * Rinaldo Smordoni (Guiseppe) became a baker; Franco Interlenghi (Pasquale) became a film star. ↑

  * This is the only film version of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. The Bertolt Brecht–Kurt Weill The Threepenny Opera which was filmed by Pabst in 1931 merely uses the John Gay original as source material for the characters and concepts. ↑

  * This production ran three hours twenty minutes in Japan; as shown at Venice in 1954, it ran two hours thirty-five minutes; as later circulated in the United States under the title The Magnificent Seven it runs two hours twenty-one minutes. An American production, also called The Magnificent Seven, based on the story material of the Japanese film but changing the samurai into gunmen, was released in 1960. ↑

  * “In Marienbad, the important phenomenon is always the basic lack of substance at the heart of this reality. In Marienbad, what is chimerical is ‘last year.’ What happened — if something did happen once upon a time constantly produces sort of a gap in the story. . . . In Marienbad, at first we believe that there was no last year and then we notice that last year has crept in everywhere: there you have it, entirely. In the same way we believe that there was no Marienbad (the place, that is), and then we realize we’re at home there from the beginning. The event refused by the young woman has, at the end, contaminated everything. So much so that she hasn’t stopped struggling and believing she won the game, since she always refused all of it; and, at the end, she realizes that it’s too late, that in the final analysis she has accepted everything. As if all that were true, although it well might not be. But true and false no longer have any meaning.” How’s that again? ↑

 
* Even while I was saying these words on the radio, I was aware that they weren’t adequate, that I was somehow dodging the issue. Though I believe that whatever moves people is important, I am, perhaps by temperament, unable to understand or sympathize with those who are drawn to the La Notte view of life. ↑

  * And, by the way, the turning point came, I think, not with Moby Dick, as Sarris indicates, but much earlier, with Moulin Rouge. This may not be so apparent to auteur critics concerned primarily with style and individual touches, because what was shocking about Moulin Rouge was that the content was sentimental mush. But critics who accept even the worst of Minnelli probably wouldn’t have been bothered by the fact that Moulin Rouge was soft in the center, it had so many fancy touches at the edges. ↑

  * In another sense, it is perhaps immodest. I would say, give Cukor a clever script with light, witty dialogue, and he will know what to do with it. But I wouldn’t expect more than glossy entertainment. (It seems almost too obvious to mention it, but can Sarris really discern the “distinguishable personality” of George Cukor and his “abstract” style in films like Bhowani Junction, Les Girls, The Actress, A Life of Her Own, The Model and the Marriage Broker, Edward, My Son, A Woman’s Face, Romeo and Juliet, A Double Life? I wish I could put him to the test. I can only suspect that many auteur critics would have a hard time seeing those telltale traces of the beloved in their works.) ↑

  * This might help to explain such quaint statements as: Bazin “was, if anything, generous to a fault, seeking in every film some vestige of the cinematic art” — as if cinema were not simply the movies that have been made and are being made, but some preëxistent entity. If Bazin thought in these terms, does Sarris go along with him? ↑

  * In contrast with the situation in the film, some of the actual problems of furniture manufacturers might provide material for farce: how to make furniture that will collapse after a carefully calculated interval (refrigerator manufacturers are studying the problem of “replacement” — i.e., designing refrigerators that will necessitate replacement in ten years rather than fifteen or twenty years) or that will be outmoded by a new style (automobile manufacturers are wrestling with consumers’ lag — people just don’t yet understand that the 1950 car is to be discarded with the 1950 hat). The designer-hero of Executive Suite can be a real menace to American business: good designs last too long. ↑

  * The New Yorker carries sophisticated consumption to extremes: it is “knowing” about everything. The reader is supposed to “see through” what he buys — whether it’s a production of Macbeth, a lace peignoir, a biography of Freud, or a $10 haircut (executed by Vergnes himself). One must admit that the consumer who doesn’t take anything too seriously is aesthetically preferable to the unsportsmanlike consumer who takes buying so seriously that he pores over Consumer Reports. ↑

  * Miss Rosaura Revueltas (Esperanza): “In a way it seemed I had waited all my life to be in this picture. My own mother was a miner’s daughter.” ↑

  * The glorification of the common man denies him his humanity in the very process of setting him up as more human than others. If you believe in the greatness of the oppressed, you are very likely not looking at the oppressed at all, but at an image of what they should be. Marx predicted that a degenerate society would degrade the working class; the latter day “Marxists” accept the notion of a degenerate society but hold as a concomitant the curious notion of an uncontaminated “oppressed.” The concept is not analytic, of course, but propagandistic. ↑