* [Salon.com column, August 8, 2007.]
16
THE DECLINE OF FILM CRITICISM*
Film criticism, at its height from the late 1950s to the early ’70s, has obviously totally lost its cultural centrality, with the overall decline in the quality of films and with the massive growth of pre-release publicity campaigns geared to television. By the time a movie actually opens, we’ve been inundated in so many advance clips that we hardly need a reviewer to tell us whether the movie is worth seeing or not. How stupid the studios are to destroy their films’ best surprises, particularly the funny one-liners that lose their impact in theaters because we’ve heard them dozens of times already in ads.
Parker Tyler, an audacious gay aesthete, was my favorite film critic and the one most influential on my practice. Second was the unfailingly perceptive Pauline Kael, whose tart, lively, colloquial style I thought exactly right for a mass form like the movies. However, I became somewhat disillusioned with Kael because of her dismissive attitude toward the decadent European films I loved (La Dolce Vita, Last Year at Marienbad, etc.). Third was Andrew Sarris, whose acute columns during the high period of The Village Voice celebrated the attention to physical beauty and staging of cinematic stylists like Claude Chabrol.
Like Parker Tyler, I am primarily a myth-critic and pagan cultist—something which cannot be said of the sensible, pragmatic Kael, who never indulges in feverish Tyler-Paglia gay mysticism. Kael and I do resemble each other in our snappy humor and very modern, very American voices. That punchy, scrappy, take-no-prisoners tone of mine long predates my introduction to Kael (which came in graduate school via her published collections of reviews; The New Yorker wasn’t part of my world) and descends first from Dorothy Parker, whose famous put-downs I adored as an adolescent, and second from Ann Landers (“Wake up and smell the coffee!”), whose advice column was a fixture of my family newspaper in Syracuse.
Ann Landers has never gotten the credit she deserves for creating a radically outspoken female persona during the drowsily domestic and ethnically repressive postwar period. Landers is, of course, the patron saint and august foremother of “Ask Camille.”
* [In response to a reader question about film criticism, “Ask Camille,” Salon.com (www.salon1999.com), December 9, 1997. “Ask Camille” revived the “agony aunt” format of Paglia’s advice column in Spy magazine, which announced her debut on the February 1993 cover depicting Hillary Clinton as a busty, beaming dominatrix enthroned in the Oval Office.]
17
MOVIE MUSIC*
Movie soundtracks are my hymns and oratorios, which I listen to in a state of religious ecstasy. They have been a primary inspiration to me throughout my career as a writer, and I have often played them as I was writing my books. I long to reproduce in my prose their evocativeness, sweep, and sensory impact.
I grew up in the 1950s when Hollywood was turning out wide-screen Technicolor epics to compete with the threat of television. Hard to imagine now, movies were still not taken seriously. European art films would gradually win critical stature, but it took decades for Hollywood productions to be accepted as their equals.
While I always appreciated a score’s telepathic portrayal of the characters’ inner state—their gusts of joy or impulses of desire and fear—it was the grandiose and operatic scores that most enraptured me. The first soundtrack I ever owned was a vinyl recording of Max Steiner’s Gone with the Wind, which I listened to endlessly as a teenager. What I heard in its variation on nineteenth-century orchestral music was the very sound of history itself, whose radical changes Steiner, born to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna during the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had witnessed and experienced in his own time. For me, Gone with the Wind extended the dark vision of the competing forces in Western culture that I also heard in Brahms’ four symphonies, which would be crucial in forming the system of thought in my books.
Among movies released during my teenage years, I adored Miklos Rosza’s score for Ben-Hur, which conveys the arrogance and majesty of imperial Rome, implacable in its assertions yet vulnerable to the soft invasion of Christianity. Rosza presents compassion and caritas as spiritually feminizing, canceling out Rome’s rigid claims to worldly power. And he subtly interweaves European with Near Eastern tonalities, projecting a clash of cultures that lingers in our headlines today.
A similar symbolic use of gender can be detected in the ravishingly beautiful score for The Egyptian, composed by Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann. This obscure 1954 film, which I discovered on late-night TV, follows the wanderings and travails of an Egyptian doctor. He is caught up in an extraordinary moment in history, when the pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti are establishing monotheism in the face of a stubbornly conservative priesthood and military. The tragedy of the naïvely innocent Akhenaten, whose new city would be destroyed and his name blotted out for 3,000 years, is caught by the music, which suggests mystical aspiration shadowed by doom. The exalted “Hymn to Aton” is particularly eloquent in expressing an idea—that of one god—whose time had not yet come.
Another score phenomenally capturing the sound of history itself was Maurice Jarre’s soundtrack for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. This 1962 film had a stunning effect on my generation, who had been raised in a political vacuum in the U.S. It opened up a vast geography of complex, roiling ethnicities as the Ottoman Empire was being carved up by imperialistic powers after World War One. The movie was a primer in cold Realpolitik, the chess-like manipulations and ethical ambiguities in political decision-making.
The thrilling overture of Lawrence of Arabia still makes my hair stand on end. Those thunderous Bedouin drums, played on timpani, are pure, masculine, and harshly ascetic, representing Arabia’s entrenched ancient tribalism. The drums are followed by a Steiner-like romanticism, as we hear T. E. Lawrence’s attraction to the expansiveness and isolation of the desert. Prince Feisal, played by Alec Guinness, dryly remarks to Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence that he is another of these “desert-loving” Englishmen. What we hear in that famous gorgeous theme, therefore, is Lawrence’s own quest for identity, his self-purgation and self-punishment, along with his well-intentioned misunderstanding of the very peoples he tried to help.
A sense of exhilarating open space as well as the hurtling movement of history is also conveyed by Bronislau Kaper in his score for the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian. Here is the exhilarating sound of the Bounty sailing toward Tahiti, where one practically sees the three-masted ship gloriously skimming across the sea under an open sky. And then there is Kaper’s Tahitian love song, which is hauntingly beautiful—despite the confused Hollywood exoticism betrayed by a touch of Brazilian samba.
The film scores of Bronislau Kaper, born in 1902 in Warsaw, are currently unheralded and warrant revival. For example, Kaper’s soundtrack for Butterfield 8 created the entire sophisticated urban milieu through which Elizabeth Taylor as a high-priced Manhattan call girl moved. Released during a suffocatingly puritanical period in the U.S., Butterfield 8 had a tremendous impact on me and helped form my later libertarian theories about sex. Kaper’s elegant piano bar music deftly captures the glittering yet empty world so supplely traversed by the film’s jaded heroine.
A similar atmosphere of feline sexual sophistication was created by John Dankworth in his marvelously atmospheric scores for a series of films that imprinted the fabulous image of Mod London on the minds of my sheltered generation in the U.S.—notably The Servant, Darling, and Accident. Dankworth’s score for Joseph Losey’s Accident mirrors the film’s mercurial conflation of moral ambiguities, so oblique and ironic, so delicate and sensuous.
The reputation of film composer Bernard Herrmann has steadily risen with that of Alfred Hitchcock, who was once dismissed as a purveyor of potboiler murder mysteries but who was hailed as an auteur by the cheeky young directors of the French New Wave. Her
rmann’s unstable world of existential angst is now universally admired. His overture for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, as conflated with Saul Bass’ dynamic title design, can in my view stand alone as a major work of modern art—a minimalist scrum of horizontals and verticals as the angled wall of a glass-skinned office tower comes into focus. Herrmann wrote an impudent and slightly deranged fandango, combined with great bolts of embattled chords in the avant-garde style of Stravinsky and Bartók. It captures the turmoil of urban life, as the mirrored wall dissolves into real people, work slaves scurrying to survive in a grid imposed by faceless powers.
Sexual passion drives Jules Dassin’s Phaedra, a neglected 1962 film that is one of the most compelling modernizations of a classical myth ever made. The proud Greek kings have become modern Greek shipping magnates, ruthlessly ruling the world. Melina Mercouri plays Euripides’ Phaedra, obsessed with her adoptive son Hippolytus, played by Anthony Perkins fresh from his matricidal role in Psycho. Mikis Theodorakis’ cascading score conveys the madness and propulsiveness of Fate or Necessity, from which Phaedra cannot escape. The music erupts like an inner storm whipped by Furies. Later, the main theme is quietly restated with traditional Greek folk instruments, to heartbreakingly elegiac effect.
Movie music descends from often underrated nineteenth-century program music like Rimsky-Korsakov’s enchanting Scheherazade. But I would argue that film music is a visionary mode, like Pindar’s odes to the radiant divinity of victorious Greek athletes. I believe that soundtracks, heard apart from the films themselves, trigger an area of the mind that is otherwise inaccessible except in dreaming—a place where sound and image fuse in a primitive form of communication that preceded the development of language. Movie music has the power to seize and transport us to another dimension, where pictures flash and the movie never ends.
* [“The Essay: Sound of Cinema,” broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on October 2, 2013. Recorded at WHYY public broadcasting studios on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. This is the original script, as approved by the BBC. At the recording session, several of the final tracks had to be dropped for reasons of time.]
18
HOMER ON FILM:
A VOYAGE THROUGH THE ODYSSEY, ULYSSES, HELEN OF TROY, AND CONTEMPT *
The May 1997 NBC television miniseries of The Odyssey, a production of Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope in association with Hallmark Entertainment, should give courage to the faint of heart in the culture wars. The canon lives!
The Odyssey’s executive producer, Robert Halmi, Sr., 73, who worked in the Hungarian Resistance during World War Two, is an author and photographer as well as producer of nearly 200 feature films and television dramas, such as Svengali (1983), The Josephine Baker Story (1991), Lonesome Dove (1987), and Gulliver’s Travels (1996). The popular and critical success of Gulliver’s Travels—the miniseries drew over thirty million viewers nightly and won five Emmys—led to NBC’s quick approval of Halmi’s proposal to do The Odyssey as a two-part, four-hour telecast. With evangelical fervor, Halmi has now devoted himself to bringing the classics to a mass audience: his productions of Dickens’ David Copperfield, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Dante’s Inferno are either nearing completion or in planning.
Andrei Konchalovsky, the director of The Odyssey, was born in Russia and was trained as a classical pianist and then as a filmmaker. Lured to Hollywood after his epic, Siberiade, won the Special Jury Prize at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, he has directed a variety of middling films, of which the best known is Runaway Train (1985). Konchalovsky has a reputation for Russian emotional intensity and benevolent despotism on the set. For this project, however, his control may not have extended to casting, since producer Halmi, a whirlwind impresario in the old-fashioned studio-mogul style, likes to handpick his principal actors.
Though reliable figures are hazy, NBC’s Odyssey apparently cost $32 million, more than any miniseries in television history. Much of the budget was consumed by logistics: the four-month shooting schedule required equipment and basic supplies to be flown and trucked into remote areas of Turkey without roads. There were 2,000 local extras and the massive props normally commissioned only for epic movies: a sixty-foot wooden Trojan Horse on wheels; two full-scale, twenty-oar Greek ships costing nearly a quarter of a million dollars; and a water tank longer than a football field erected on a Maltese beach for Odysseus’ scenes at sea. Special effects were also costly. London’s Framestore designed the computerized graphics, which created storms, caverns, gods, and the Greek army and war fleet, consisting of mechanically multiplied images of soldiers and ships. The Creature Shop (the Muppet factory now run by the late Jim Henson’s son, Brian) built the monstrous Scylla; Laocoön’s deadly sea serpent; and the one-eyed Cyclops’ giant head, worn by a real-life sumo wrestler, Reid Asato.
How did The Odyssey fare? Media reviews ranged from lukewarm to enthusiastic. Part one (Sunday, May 18) drew 28,770,000 viewers and part two, aired the next night, 26,320,000 (these are technically “homes” tuned in, estimated by an A. C. Nielsen media rating); both ranked among the top three programs of their weeks. Many literary scholars and classicists will certainly raise serious objections to the production’s historical accuracy, not to mention the fidelity of the teleplay, written by Konchalovsky and Christopher Solimine, to the original poem. However, in a technological age of declining literacy, popular culture is crucial to sustaining the vitality of great literature and art (which have been systematically undermined by post-structuralists, postmodernists, New Historicists, Stalinist feminists, and the rest of that crew). Market saturation by the NBC publicity machine in the month before the broadcast did enormous good for the imperilled field of classical studies. Tie-in paperback special editions of The Odyssey were stacked among mass-market bestsellers near cash registers, and eye-catching posters of a fierce, sword-wielding Armand Assante as Odysseus rolled by on the side of city buses.
Film versions of novels, plays, and narrative poems often disappoint because the director and screenwriter have failed to translate word-bound ideas into simple visual form. Plot must be condensed and scenes economically structured: good screenplays look rather skeletal on the page. Character and conflict are more quickly revealed by film because of its basic tools of close-up and soundtrack, which register subtle emotion and create mood. Movies that remain too tied to their literary originals, or that slight the camera’s gift for showing space, end up seeming preachy, tedious, and claustrophobic.
Successful movies of great books are rare. Anna Karenina (1948), starring a beautifully controlled Vivien Leigh, shows what is possible in the respectful re-creation of a vanished, hierarchical society. Wuthering Heights (1939), on the other hand, the Laurence Olivier–Merle Oberon vehicle often cited as a peak of Hollywood film-making, sentimentalizes and sanitizes Emily Brontë’s unsettling novel. The recent feature films of Jane Austen’s novels, including a slack, coy Sense and Sensibility (1995) starring Emma Thompson, have similarly been vastly overpraised. In contrast, the six-part British television series of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1995), produced by the A&E network in conjunction with the BBC, is extraordinary work of the highest quality, in terms of both history and psychology. Generally, the best films-from-novels, like Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Godfather (1972, 1974), have been based on popular blockbuster bestsellers rather than revered canonical texts.
Already designed for performance, plays make the transition to film much more easily than novels. Shakespeare’s brash, volatile, rule-breaking style, which led to his disrepute among neoclassical critics, is exactly what makes his plays good movie material, first persuasively demonstrated by the Laurence Olivier Hamlet (1948). Classic films, directed by Elia Kazan and Mike Nichols respectively, have been made of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Four favorite films of mine, which illustrate the importance of goo
d casting, direction, and editing, were based on hit stage comedies: The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), and Auntie Mame (1956).
Pagan antiquity is an ideal subject for Hollywood spectacle, at its zenith during the widescreen CinemaScope years of the 1950s, when the retrenching film industry was trying to compete with the new medium of television. My great faith in Hollywood comes from the fact that I grew up with masterpieces like The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and even Cleopatra (1963), whose outstanding military and political content has been overshadowed by the production’s financial crises and personnel scandals, not to mention the screenplay’s heavy-breathing, one-dimensional treatment of the lead role, played by a sumptuous Elizabeth Taylor.
Attempts to film Homer have been surprisingly few, considering the number of movies based on the Bible, such as Samson and Delilah (1949) and Salome (1953), or on Greek mythology, notably the series of fancifully embroidered Hercules movies starring Steve Reeves and his beefcake imitators that were made in Italy from the late 1950s through the 1960s. Again, plays have proved more manageable. In the 1970s, an exhilarating new age of film adaptations of ancient drama seemed to be dawning: Pier Paolo Pasolini cast Maria Callas in his dust-choked but electrifying Medea (1970), and Michael Cacoyannis, who had already directed Electra (1961), released a searing, all-star production of The Trojan Women (1971), followed by Iphigenia (1977). But with the overall waning of European art film in the 1980s, such experiments have gradually ceased.
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