I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Reading all this exaltation of the “documentary” approach, you get the impression that cinema theorists think that Griffith shot The Birth of a Nation while the battles were raging, that Eisenstein was making newsreels, and that Rossellini and Buñuel were simply camera witnesses to scenes of extraordinary brutality. Ironically, the greatest director of all time to work with documentary material — the one great example Kracauer might point to — Leni Riefenstahl, whose Triumph of the Will and Olympiad are film masterpieces of a documentary nature if anything is, is not mentioned in Theory of Film, The Redemption of Physical Reality. Mightn’t we infer that politics has something to do with Kracauer’s “reality”?

  I should like to see motion picture art brought back into the world of the other arts (which it has never left, except in film theory) and see movies judged by the same kind of standards that are used in other arts, not by the attempt to erect a “reality” standard. Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go. The “reality” standard leads Kracauer into this kind of criticism: “. . . Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is essentially a miracle play, yet the medieval beliefs and superstitions it features are questioned throughout by the inquisitive mind of the knight and the outright scepticism of his squire. Both characters manifest a down-to-earth attitude. And their secular doubts result in confrontations which in a measure acclimatise the film to the medium.” I would say that when a film theorist, whose book is being used as a text in many film courses, must look for “secular doubts” and “confrontations” in order to find cinematic qualities in a work, that he has sacrificed much of the art of the motion picture to his theory, and that, in his attempt to separate motion picture from other arts, he has sacrificed the most elementary responsiveness towards work in any medium — the ability to perceive a movie or a poem or an opera or a painting in something like its totality, to respond to its qualities, and to see it in relation to the artist’s work as a whole. He seems overdue for secular doubts.

  Obviously English is not Kracauer’s native language, and it seems cruel and unfair to protest his usage of it. But how can we judge what he’s saying when he sets up terms and classifications (like “mental reality”) that seem to mean something for him that they could hardly mean to anyone else? Are we perhaps being more generous to his ideas than we would be if we could decipher them?

  What good are Kracauer’s terms if no one else can apply them? How can anyone tell what fits his scheme? It’s so arbitrary, it’s like a catechism to which he owns the only set of correct answers. Who could guess that Rosebud, the sled of Citizen Kane, is one of the “symbols true to the medium”? What about the battle on the ice in Nevsky? (A great game for a bookmaker — most of us would lose our shirts.) It turns out that “It is nothing but an excrescence on the body of an intrigue imposed upon the medium.” This man Kracauer is really one up on us. He’s full of surprises: when he calls something “a veritable tour de force” this is a term of opprobrium: it means it isn’t cinematic. If certain novels (The Grapes of Wrath) become “remarkable films” and others (Madame Bovary in the Jean Renoir version) “can hardly be called genuine cinema,” what would be your guess as to the reason? Would you ever hit on “a difference which is in the adapted novels themselves”? “First, Steinbeck’s novel deals in human groups rather than individuals . . . Through his very emphasis on collective misery, collective fears and hopes, Steinbeck meets the cinema more than halfway. Second, his novel exposes the predicament of the migratory farm workers, thus revealing and stigmatising abuses in our society. This too falls in line with the peculiar potentialities of film.” Not only wouldn’t I ever guess — but to go back a step, I remember Valentine Tessier at the opera and other scenes in Renoir’s Madame Bovary (“all the traits of a theatrical film”) with great pleasure, and I remember The Grapes of Wrath (“a classic of the screen”) as a blur of embarrassing sentimental pseudo-biblical pseudo-documentary, a perfect representation of what Bertrand Russell called “the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed.”

  How does Kracauer react to verbal comedy? To Preston Sturges, or On Approval or Kind Hearts and Coronets or, going back, to Sacha Guitry? Your guess is as good as mine, because verbal comedy doesn’t really fit into his ideas of cinema and he doesn’t bother with it. He refers to the Preston Sturges comedies as “borderline cases” — I assume he means on the border of his (i.e., the medium’s) acceptance.

  Could we ever have guessed that the avant-garde experiments would have to be justified by their beneficial results? “Nor should it be forgotten that, like Buñuel, many an avant-garde artist became realistic-minded and outward-bound; Joris Ivens and Cavalcanti, for instance, turned to social documentary.”

  How can we make clear to Kracauer that “the snow-covered courtyard” in Le Sang d’un Poète — “a stagy fantasy” and “uncinematic effect” for him — might mean more to us than all his rippling leaves? The rippling leaves are admired and then, more often than not, forgotten; Cocteau’s images reverberate in our memories. And what does he single out to attack in Un Chien Andalou (“a hybrid”) but the “small street crowd seen from far above” which is not “integrated into contexts suggestive of camera-reality.” Buñuel and Dali “availed themselves of the camera in a literary rather than genuinely cinematic interest.” That “small street crowd seen from far above” is one of the most startling and disturbing images in films; I, at least, have forgotten most of those street crowd scenes he thinks it should resemble.

  What we actually respond to or remember from a film may be almost totally unrelated to Kracauer’s definitions. (You can’t exactly say he has standards — his standards are concealed as definitions of what a movie is. It’s a timid way out: you never have to defend your choices; the medium has made them for you.) For example, although Kracauer uses René Clair to bolster his arguments against what he calls “surrealistic imagery,” the only part of Clair’s Porte des Lilas I cared for was the little set-piece of the children acting out a crime as the adults read a newspaper account of it — an almost surrealist little ballet with no connection to the rest of the film. The only sequence I recall from Rickshaw Man is the distant view of an Englishman’s little dance of rage as he’s kept waiting in his rickshaw. Aparajito was beautiful, but it is all hazy in memory except for that sudden ecstasy of the child reciting poetry.

  In film after film, what we recall may be a gesture or a bit of dialogue, a suggestion, an imaginative moment of acting, even the use of a prop. Suddenly something — almost anything — may bring a movie to life. It is art and imagination that bring the medium to life; not as Kracauer would have it, the recording of “reality.” I can’t remember much of the streets and crowds and the lifelike milieu even from the neo-realist films — who does? But who can forget the cry of the boy at the end of Shoeshine, or the face of Umberto D, or Anna Magnani’s death in Open City? I would suggest these experiences are very similar to the experiences we have in the theater. But shouldn’t we take our bits and pieces of human revelation wherever we find them? There isn’t so much to be had that we need to worry about whether what we get from a movie is only possible in “cinema” or whether we could have received a similar impression, or even the total conception, in a novel or in the theater.

  Does every movie have to re-establish the existence of the outside world? Surely we can take something for granted when we step from the street into the movie house. Kracauer seems to think we go into the movie house to see the street we have left. The indeterminate flow of life is precisely what we are leaving — we go to see a distillation.

  How can so many of the aspects of film — the very qualities that draw us to the medium — be improper to it? And the movies that suggest directions, hopes, possibilities? How is it that he has so little interest in the visual and emotional excitements of a Futurist experiment like Menilmontant? (What does he think of Menilmontant — one of the dazzling masterpieces of the screen? It narrates “fictitious incidents embed
ded in poetised actuality.” Is that supposed to be bad or good? I rather think, bad.)

  After 300 pages Kracauer triumphantly reaches “The Redemption of Physical Reality” and when he finally presents the proof of the pudding, it turns out to be — a pudding. “In order to make us experience physical reality, films must show what they picture. This requirement is so little self-evident that it raises the issue of the medium’s relation to the traditional arts.” And so on into the night. We’ve covered all that heavily trod old ground from Nietzsche to Comte to Whitehead, and Spengler to Toynbee and Durkheim. Kracauer must think we read books on the movies to get our knowledge of history and philosophy.

  How is it that the “medium” stands so square for liberal, middle-class social consciousness? And how is it that in a period when even a college freshman has heard something about how our perspectives affect our notions of “reality,” Kracauer goes on writing about his view of “unfortunate social conditions” as “reality”? Films are not made by cameras, though many of them look as if they were, just as a lot of dialogue sounds as if it were written by typewriters.

  Art is the greatest game, the supreme entertainment, because you discover the game as you play it. There is only one rule, as we learned in Orphée: Astonish us! In all art we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond a new way. Why should pedants be allowed to spoil the game?

  There are men whose concept of love is so boring and nagging that you decide if that’s what love is, you don’t want it, you want something else. That’s how I feel about Kracauer’s “cinema.” I want something else.

  [1962]

  Circles and Squares

  Joys and Sarris

  . . . the first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value. . . . The second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. . . . The third and ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material. . . .

  Sometimes a great deal of corn must be husked to yield a few kernels of internal meaning. I recently saw Every Night at Eight, one of the many maddeningly routine films Raoul Walsh has directed in his long career. This 1935 effort featured George Raft, Alice Faye, Frances Langford and Patsy Kelly in one of those familiar plots about radio shows of the period. The film keeps moving along in the pleasantly unpretentious manner one would expect of Walsh until one incongruously intense scene with George Raft thrashing about in his sleep, revealing his inner fears in mumbling dream talk. The girl he loves comes into the room in the midst of his unconscious avowals of feeling, and listens sympathetically. This unusual scene was later amplified in High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. The point is that one of the screen’s most virile directors employed an essentially feminine narrative device to dramatize the emotional vulnerability of his heroes. If I had not been aware of Walsh in Every Night at Eight, the crucial link to High Sierra would have passed unnoticed. Such are the joys of the auteur theory.

  — Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture, Winter 1962–1963.

  Perhaps a little more corn should be husked; perhaps, for example, we can husk away the word “internal” (is “internal meaning” any different from “meaning”?). We might ask why the link is “crucial”? Is it because the device was “incongruously intense” in Every Night at Eight and so demonstrated a try for something deeper on Walsh’s part? But if his merit is his “pleasantly unpretentious manner” (which is to say, I suppose, that, recognizing the limitations of the script, he wasn’t trying to do much) then the incongruous device was probably a misconceived attempt that disturbed the manner — like a bad playwright interrupting a comedy scene because he cannot resist the opportunity to tug at your heartstrings. We might also ask why this narrative device is “essentially feminine”: is it more feminine than masculine to be asleep, or to talk in one’s sleep, or to reveal feelings? Or, possibly, does Sarris regard the device as feminine because the listening woman becomes a sympathetic figure and emotional understanding is, in this “virile” context, assumed to be essentially feminine? Perhaps only if one accepts the narrow notions of virility so common in our action films can this sequence be seen as “essentially feminine,” and it is amusing that a critic can both support these clichés of the male world and be so happy when they are violated.

  This is how we might quibble with a different kind of critic but we would never get anywhere with Sarris if we tried to examine what he is saying sentence by sentence.

  So let us ask, what is the meaning of the passage? Sarris has noticed that in High Sierra (not a very good movie) Raoul Walsh repeated an uninteresting and obvious device that he had earlier used in a worse movie. And for some inexplicable reason, Sarris concludes that he would not have had this joy of discovery without the auteur theory.

  But in every art form, critics traditionally notice and point out the way the artists borrow from themselves (as well as from others) and how the same devices, techniques, and themes reappear in their work. This is obvious in listening to music, seeing plays, reading novels, watching actors; we take it for granted that this is how we perceive the development or the decline of an artist (and it may be necessary to point out to auteur critics that repetition without development is decline). When you see Hitchcock’s Saboteur there is no doubt that he drew heavily and clumsily from The 39 Steps, and when you see North by Northwest you can see that he is once again toying with the ingredients of The 39 Steps — and apparently having a good time with them. Would Sarris not notice the repetition in the Walsh films without the auteur theory? Or shall we take the more cynical view that without some commitment to Walsh as an auteur, he probably wouldn’t be spending his time looking at these movies?

  If we may be permitted a literary analogy, we can visualize Sarris researching in the archives of the Saturday Evening Post, tracing the development of Clarence Budington Kelland, who, by the application of something like the auteur theory, would emerge as a much more important writer than Dostoyevsky; for in Kelland’s case Sarris’s three circles, the three premises of the auteur theory, have been consistently congruent. Kelland is technically competent (even “pleasantly unpretentious”), no writer has a more “distinguishable personality,” and if “interior meaning” is what can be extrapolated from, say Hatari! or Advise and Consent or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? then surely Kelland’s stories with their attempts to force a bit of character and humor into the familiar plot outlines are loaded with it. Poor misguided Dostoyevsky, too full of what he has to say to bother with “technical competence,” tackling important themes in each work (surely the worst crime in the auteur book) and with his almost incredible unity of personality and material leaving you nothing to extrapolate from, he’ll never make it. If the editors of Movie ranked authors the way they do directors, Dostoyevsky would probably be in that almost untouchable category of the “ambitious.”

  It should be pointed out that Sarris’s defense of the auteur theory is based not only on aesthetics but on a rather odd pragmatic statement: “Thus to argue against the auteur theory in America is to assume that we have anyone of Bazin’s sensibility and dedication to provide an alternative, and we simply don’t.” Which I take to mean that the auteur theory is necessary in the absence of a critic who wouldn’t need it. This is a new approach to aesthetics, and I hope Sarris’s humility does not camouflage his double-edged argument. If his aesthetics is based on expediency, then it may be expedient to point out that it takes extraordinary intelligence and discrimination and taste to use any theory in the arts, and that without those qualities, a theory becomes a rigid formula (which is indeed what is happening among auteur critics). The greatness of critics like Bazin in France and Agee in America may have something to
do with their using their full range of intelligence and intuition, rather than relying on formulas. Criticism is an art, not a science, and a critic who follows rules will fail in one of his most important functions: perceiving what is original and important in new work and helping others to see.

  The Outer Circle

  . . . the first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value.

  This seems less the premise of a theory than a commonplace of judgment, as Sarris himself indicates when he paraphrases it as, “A great director has to be at least a good director.” But this commonplace, though it sounds reasonable and basic, is a shaky premise: sometimes the greatest artists in a medium bypass or violate the simple technical competence that is so necessary for hacks. For example, it is doubtful if Antonioni could handle a routine directorial assignment of the type at which John Sturges is so proficient (Escape from Fort Bravo or Bad Day at Black Rock), but surely Antonioni’s L’Avventura is the work of a great director. And the greatness of a director like Cocteau has nothing to do with mere technical competence: his greatness is in being able to achieve his own personal expression and style. And just as there were writers like Melville or Dreiser who triumphed over various kinds of technical incompetence, and who were, as artists, incomparably greater than the facile technicians of their day, a new great film director may appear whose very greatness is in his struggling toward grandeur or in massive accumulation of detail. An artist who is not a good technician can indeed create new standards, because standards of technical competence are based on comparisons with work already done.