L’Eclisse is about an eclipse, a natural event and a helpless metaphor, and it’s not possible to watch its coda without seeing the fading light as a cultural omen. But the Antonioni trilogy is persistently concerned with the light and its loss. It was made in the years 1959–62, and I have been harping on that time, when the world and the medium turned and ideas about light shifted from pioneer innocence to existential disquiet.
Part III
Film Studies
The Italian poster for Chinatown
In the early 1960s, there was confusion over what to call this transaction—was it film, the movies, or cinema? You could tell a person’s taste and agenda by the word he used most often. “Cinema” meant the history, and the suggestion that it had been superior then; “film” was the essential function and might be covering an urge to make the stuff; while “movie” usually meant America and fun. In preparing Jaws, Steven Spielberg told Richard Dreyfuss, “I don’t want to make a film, I want to make a movie.” The choice of words was especially delicate in a surprising new area. For the transaction had caught the attention of academia. But if it was going to get traction there, how could it be managed without the correct language and a reading list on the cinema of existential disquiet? You couldn’t use “movie” in that context.
If a disillusioned English teacher had walked into the office of his academic dean at an American university in the early 1960s and said, “Look, I’m not getting anywhere with Paradise Lost or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Suppose I switch to a seminar on Fred Astaire or Cary Grant?,” he would have been endangering his tenure prospects. I’m not sure there were people with that much nerve, let alone the instinct to watch Astaire or Grant until the ideal of an American gentleman sank in. But if the reckless suggestion had been made, the dean would have turned to frost and asked, “Are you proposing we give young people credit for watching motion pictures?”
The University of Southern California offered a few courses in film from 1927. It was a kind of local specialty, well intentioned and useful, bringing practitioners to the university to tell stories, and perhaps opening up lines of future funding. The practitioners liked it because it gave them a feeling of respectability. But this was an isolated instance. In 1945 the University of California at Berkeley started to publish a magazine, the Hollywood Quarterly, but by 1958 it had become Film Quarterly. Apart from that, there were several illustrated fan magazines, not reliable in what they printed, but part of the promotional thrust that sold movies. The modest film bookshelf consisted largely of the self-serving ghosted memoirs of industrial leaders and a few novels that were more valuable and educational. So anyone interested might be better off reading Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Gavin Lambert’s The Slide Area, or Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park.
In Britain, there was the British Film Institute, established in 1933 and resolved after the war to encourage the appreciation of “filmic art” rather than get involved in production. It had a quarterly magazine, Sight & Sound, begun tentatively in the 1930s but developed by the editorship of Gavin Lambert and Penelope Houston. Another BFI facility was the National Film Theatre, started in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain but moved to its Waterloo Bridge site in 1957 and devoted to the regular screening of great films from all over the world. In 1960, America had no national film institute or theater, no national archive, and no magazine like Sight & Sound, except for Film Quarterly and Film Culture, started in 1954 by Jonas and Adolfas Mekas but aimed principally at independent, avant-garde filmmaking.
In 1960 there was not a single place of higher education in Britain that offered a film class, let alone a major area of study in film. There was just the London School of Film Technique, located in Brixton, in South London, with a title that signaled professional training. Alas, the school lacked the funds, the equipment, and the regular teachers to carry that out. But it was better than nothing, and it tempted me to give up a place at Oxford, where I would have read history. When I say there was nowhere in higher education that taught film, I should add that there was also no school that sought to take five-year-olds and upward and ask, “Do you realize how much film you are seeing in 1960? And have you thought how far this affects your sense of reality?”
Filmmakers were invited into the teaching system. Surely they knew what they had been doing well enough to advise the young? In the early 1970s, Nicholas Ray was hired at Harpur College, in Binghamton, New York, to do whatever he could. He and his students started to shoot film for a project that was never quite identified. He died (in 1979) with the project unfinished. It would be called We Can’t Go Home Again, and in 2011 it was finally assembled and shown by Susan Ray, his last companion. I fear it is unwatchable, yet it was an experience—like knowing Ray in those years—that changed many lives. In 1980, Michael Powell taught a term at Dartmouth. He went down to New York one weekend to see Martin Scorsese editing Raging Bull. That’s when he met the editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who would become his wife.
June 1962 had seen the first publication in London of Movie, a magazine edited by Ian Cameron, with Mark Shivas, V. F. Perkins, and Paul Mayersberg as associates. This was influenced by the writings in Cahiers du Cinéma and by the way so many of those writers had become filmmakers. Its first issue included what the editors called a “talent histogram,” a table of evaluation of British and American directors, with the categories “Great,” “Brilliant,” “Very Talented,” “Talented,” “Competent or ambitious,” and “The Rest.” Only two people made it as “Great”: Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. “Brilliant” was Joseph Losey, George Cukor, Stanley Donen, Anthony Mann, Leo McCarey, Vincente Minnelli, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Jacques Tourneur, Raoul Walsh, and Orson Welles.
So the French heroes were saved again. But further down the line—and this was aggressive or “rude” in a British publication—“Competent or ambitious” included David Lean, Michael Powell, Carol Reed, Tony Richardson, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann. This was meant to upset the old guard, and the Movie group was happy to deride the way Sight & Sound had barely reviewed (or had omitted) works such as Psycho, Rio Bravo, and Written on the Wind.
At much the same time, in Film Culture, in an issue dated 1962–63, Andrew Sarris published an essay, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” This was in the spirit of André Bazin’s 1957 article in Cahiers, “La Politique des Auteurs,” in which he generally accepted the idea that directors made films and good directors tended to make them well. Bazin knew that some hero worship and professional ignorance fostered this attitude, but he understood it was one of the best ways for a newcomer to approach the vast body of unseen films. He concluded:
The politique des auteurs seems to me to hold and defend an essential critical truth that the cinema needs more than the other arts, precisely because an act of true artistic creation is more uncertain and vulnerable in the cinema than elsewhere. But its exclusive practice leads to another danger: the negation of the film to the praise of its auteur. I have tried to show why mediocre auteurs can, by accident, make admirable films, and how, conversely, a genius can fall victim to an equally accidental sterility. I feel that this useful and fruitful approach, quite apart from its polemical value, should be complemented by other approaches to the cinematic phenomenon which will restore to a film its quality as a work of art. This does not mean one has to deny the role of the auteur, but simply give him back the preposition without which the noun auteur remains but a halting concept. Auteur, yes, but what of?
The intellectual openness of that—to collaboration, commercial pressure, the personality of stars, of genres—is worth recalling in the furor that would spring up in America over auteurism. Andrew Sarris—talented as both writer and critic, and not shy of argument—did believe in auteurism, and he would offer his own grading system in the 1968 book The American Cinema, where his ranking of directors was argued with wit and insight. Still, he became caught up i
n fierce controversy—with Pauline Kael, above all—in which the principle of auteurism came under attack as a nearly un-American elitism. After all, wasn’t film a business where many hands contributed? And if auteurs had really been responsible for it all, where did that leave Hollywood standing? (Of course, Hollywood was collapsing, and that was a large reason for the auteur theory.)
In time, Kael found her own auteurs—Altman, Bertolucci, De Palma, for instance—and the thrust of personal adoration or discovery should never be forgotten. But something more fundamental was at work, for now the disaffected teachers of Milton and Hopkins could go to their academic dean and say, Orson Welles is an American artist, Alfred Hitchcock is a unique figure, Ingmar Bergman is very serious and important. You had to be careful, still, in the 1960s: you couldn’t really float a whole course on Nicholas Ray or Vincente Minnelli or Jacques Tourneur. But academia rejoiced in the idea of artist figures—especially those who might have been wronged and misunderstood by commerce—and so such figures worked their way into the curriculum.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, universities and colleges began to present film courses in their catalogues. And if you were going to offer a seminar on Hitchcock, didn’t you also need Film 101: a historical survey; an introduction to criticism; film and the novel; and even an introduction to filmmaking? Was there a reading list to make these courses seem substantial? It was growing year by year. In 1967 the National Endowment for the Arts set up the American Film Institute. In 1968, Pauline Kael—who had once programmed a repertory movie theater in Berkeley, California, and been a freelance film writer—took up a position as film critic at The New Yorker. Sarris taught, at Columbia, but Kael never accepted a teaching position—indeed, it was her opinion that if anything could ever kill the movies it was academia.
The audience for such writers was the young generation excited by Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni and beginning to reappraise American film history. The sources for that still were films on television, or films at repertory theaters and university museums. Television had fallen on old movies with a vengeance: How else could it fill all that air time cheaply? The pictures might be cut, interrupted with ads, and introduced by charming idiots—but there they were. And dedicated repertory theaters—such as the Brattle in Cambridge, the Surf in San Francisco, the Electric on Portobello Road in London, the Thalia in New York—were springing up. There were film festivals to showcase the new work: the New York Film Festival began in 1963, at Lincoln Center, led by Amos Vogel and Richard Roud, who had also been an inspiring figure at the London Film Festival, begun in 1956.
One of the regular courses in the new discipline of “film studies” was “Film and the Novel.” It was the obvious escape route for jaded literature teachers, just as Hollywood had appealed to novelists who felt celebrity and money were passing them by. From Joe Gillis to Gore Vidal, the writers tell the best Hollywood stories and have the most mixed motives. As early as 1926, Aldous Huxley wrote to a friend who had gone to Hollywood:
A good subject to talk about, cinematography. But is it a good medium to work in? I say no, because you can’t do it by yourself. You depend on Jews with money, on “art directors,” on little bitches with curly hair and teeth, on young men who recommend skin foods in the advertisements, on photographers. Without their cooperation your ideas can’t become actual. You are at their mercy. What a disgust and humiliation!
Later on Huxley yielded: he took $1500 a week and easy sexual liaisons in Hollywood, and he worked on Madame Curie (1943; uncredited) and Pride and Prejudice (1940): “One tries to do one’s best for Jane Austen; but actually the very fact of transforming the book into a picture must necessarily alter its whole quality in a profound way.”
Many writers have been diverted by the movies and television. That opportunity, “going Hollywood,” led to famous crack-ups, like that of Scott Fitzgerald, who died in Los Angeles in December 1940 before he had made up his mind over the balance of condemnation and envy in his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Monroe Stahr, the central character in that book, is a Thalberg figure, and Fitzgerald had known Thalberg, and complained at how the young boss had treated him.
I don’t think William Faulkner was ever heard complaining—though, in private letters, after a stint in Hollywood, he would admit to having to get the air of the place out of his lungs. But he went back time and again, and he never seems to have eased his vulnerability by telling himself he was doing great things.
Faulkner tried Hollywood in the early 1930s, as he published Light in August. At Universal, in the summer of 1934 he was on $1,000 a week, working for Howard Hawks and doing a hundred-page treatment on a Blaise Cendrars novel, Sutter’s Gold—it sounds like the Eisenstein idea. Why not? Story ideas hang around in Hollywood longer than some marriages or buildings.
At $1,000 a week, Faulkner seemed “hot.” Paramount had bought Sanctuary (published in 1931) and turned it into The Story of Temple Drake (with Miriam Hopkins). This was not Sanctuary, but Faulkner had not expected it to be. The association with Hawks is the root of the matter, though it would be hard to think of a more unlikely pairing. They drank together. Hawks was a snob who may have been tickled by the southern gentleman. They both loved flying. Whatever did it, they stuck together. Sutter’s Gold was never made, but Hawks got a studio to buy a Faulkner short story, and he let the novelist work on isolated scenes.
There must have been something like respect between them. But can we imagine Hawks reading his way through The Sound and the Fury (1929), with its run-on stream of consciousness, times flying and memory’s talk colliding with half-glimpsed scenes? Did he ever say to Faulkner, look, put down the book, just tell me the damn story so I can follow it? Someone else might have told Hawks that the stream-of-consciousness stuff was exactly what film could do: cutting disparate elements together, going from past to present, throwing up a glimpse of a little girl’s muddied underwear so you never forget it.
There is a terrible film of The Sound and the Fury, made in 1959, directed by Martin Ritt, with Yul Brynner, Joanne Woodward, Margaret Leighton, Jack Warden as Benjy, and Ethel Waters as Dilsey. Perhaps I’m making this up—it doesn’t sound possible, but I think I saw it, and I suppose it was the result of someone working out what the story of the damn book was. Faulkner has never been done adequately on film. You can sum up the misguided attempts in the notion of Paul Newman as Flem Snopes in The Long, Hot Summer (1958, when it was enough in movies for the South to be sultry, lazy, and remote). There are good moments in Douglas Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels (from Pylon), and for Playhouse 90 on television, in 1958, John Frankenheimer did a version of Old Man that I think was decent.
Faulkner abided, as he might have said, resilient against every blandishment. He adapted his story “Turnabout” into a script and suffered the ridiculous studio imposition that the story needed Joan Crawford (there had been no woman’s role). The film that emerged was Today We Live (1933). Later, Faulkner’s movie salary fell off precipitously as his own economic situation deteriorated. By the early 1940s he was dangerously broke and most of his novels were out of print. So he worked for Hawks at Warners for $400 a week (he said he would have taken $100), and all he got for credits were Air Force, To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep. We don’t really know what he did, except that he wrote John Ridgely’s death scene in Air Force and the scene where the crew, in midair, hears Roosevelt explaining Pearl Harbor on the radio. Faulkner admitted that on To Have and Have Not, Hawks came up with most of the business. Jules Furthman was on the picture, too, lifting things Slim Hawks said for the Bacall part. Films like that weren’t written. They were gathered here and there. But the money kept Faulkner going; it was a kind of grant.
He must have been appreciated on the set, and people realized he was Howard’s man. But Howard loved fast talk, sexual innuendo, and farcical undertones in perilous places. Perhaps Faulkner enjoyed such scenes; he never passed an opinion. Nor did he exhibit one sign of being educate
d by the movies in seeing how a narrative could move once you realized what film editing was. In that respect, he wrote in a different world from, say, Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, Patrick Hamilton, or Ernest Hemingway. Read this:
We stood against the tall zinc bar and did not talk and looked at each other. The waiter came and said the taxi was outside. Brett pressed my hand hard. I gave the waiter a franc and we went out. “Where should I tell him?” I asked.
The Big Screen Page 45