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Untimely Meditations: |
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The
idea for a British Film Institute Film
Classics series is something that Nietzsche might have called an untimely meditation. As series editor
Edward Buscombe explained to Noel King (Metro, Spring 1993), each volume
accompanies a film that has made it onto a royal list of three hundred and
sixty masterpieces drawn up by the National Film Archive in Britain. The grand
plan for these classics is that they will screen in pristine prints, one a day,
year after year until the end of the world, at the Museum of the Moving Image.
At the rate of eight slim books a year, the publishing part of this project is
thus due to reach completion in the year 2037. (1)
Such visionary folly in the face of all future winds of change reminds me of Raymond Bellour’s warning about a past era of structuralist film theory and its great dream of classifying, codifying all cinema: “Only the imaginary realm of science believes that one always insists on finishing – in a limited period – what one has begun”. (2) So the BFI Classics series steels itself against the future (including what may be a rocky institutional future for the BFI itself, based on its rocky past). Maybe against the present, too: for who on earth would want to bet their professional reputation as film teacher, critic or archivist right now on formulating a universal list of the all-time greatest films? (3)
The
idea of a canon in all artistic fields has never been more under fire than it
is at the moment, and for good reasons, because the damn things are (amongst
other sins) always so elitist and constrictive. Not to mention Euro– and
Anglo-centric. Not to mention aesthetically constipated: some people get so
high and mighty about the notion of artistic masterpieces when formulating such
lists, but what Cocteau said in 1923 is still apt: “A masterpiece can never
look like a masterpiece. It must necessarily be incomplete and full of defects,
since it is the triumph of its errors and the consecration of its faults that
make it a masterpiece”. (4)
In
the NFA’s complete list of 360 titles, there are predictable classic picks, of
course: Citizen Kane, Singin’ in the Rain, Greed, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz. Some of the choices seem
like slightly off-beat representations of a particular auteur: The Big Heat rather than Metropolis for Lang, Rocco and his Brothers instead of The Leopard for Visconti, Double Indemnity rather than Sunset Boulevard for Wilder. (Or do some
sacred directors get more than one film, I wonder?) (5) There are, commendably,
downright eccentric canonical choices, even in the first twelve unveiled here:
hands up anyone who knows offhand the director, year and nationality of Went the Day Well? (Answer:
Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942, UK.) So we may yet
see Dog Star Man, The 5000 Fingers of Dr T, The Travelling Players and Gloria in this canon.
The
books function as enthusiastic introductions to, appreciations of the given
film. The only exception here to the general rule is Jonathan Rosenbaum’s volume
on Greed, which is essentially a
guide through what he calls the various, layered, often convoluted texts of
Stroheim’s mangled masterpiece: the original novel, Stroheim’s filmed version
(or what can be imagined of it), the MGM cut, and the vast historical legacy it
has generated. For Rosenbaum to finally offer an appreciative account of the
film as we now have it would run horribly counter to his essentially historical
purpose; all the same, I miss his usual critical flair and his passionate
response to Stroheim (for which, see his entry in Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary).
Half-way
through the handsome pile of these books, I had a good idea of the editorial
brief which Buscombe must have handed his
contributors – a brief which, interestingly, is a canny compromise between
critical methods old and new. First, the film itself: a good sense of its
narrative movement, its interlocking components of style, its themes, its key
scenes and great moments. Then something on the industrial context of the film’s
production – when, how, for how much money – and also how it was received in
its time, and since. On a larger level, some sense of the social context from
which the film emerges, and to which it speaks.
Old
fashioned auteurism really only figures insofar as
the director’s creativity is sought and valorised on
this one film; the rest of his or her oeuvre doesn’t enter the picture (and
this is refreshing). Synoptic outlines of relevant genres aren’t allowed to
cloud matters much either. All up, the only volume which really manages to
perfectly balance all the aspects of the brief (as I have hypothesised it) is Buscombe’s own essay on Ford’s Stagecoach – and what a terrific,
all-inclusive job-of-work it is.
For
a series that started from the basis of a highly untimely meditation, the
results are extraordinarily good. Almost half the crop are absolutely top class
works: apart from Buscombe, I’d cite Laura Mulvey on Citizen
Kane, Peter Wollen on Singin’ in the Rain, Sam Rohdie on Rocco and his Brothers, and – the big
surprise – Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz. J. Hoberman on 42nd
Street, Colin McArthur on The Big
Heat, and the Rosenbaum volume are not far behind.
Buscombe has done some clever editorial thinking
about pairing films with writer, striving to include specialists and
enthusiasts who are not strictly cinema scholars. So we have Melvyn Bragg, TV
arts presenter, on Bergman’s The Seventh Seal; documentary filmmaker Taylor Downing on Riefenstahl’s Olympia; and, forthcoming, Marina Warner
on Vigo’s L'Atalante. There is still room in this colloquium for a few
sturdy pros (and a blowhard or two) from the very old schools of criticism:
Penelope Houston (ex-Sight and Sound editor) on Went the Day Well? and Richard Schickel (senior Time reviewer) on Double Indemnity.
I
feel like an intellectual snob delivering this verdict, but I have to say that
I found this second, non-academic bunch of contributions well below those
praised above. Downing, for instance, lists the smallest empirical fact anyone
could ever want to know about the staging and filming of Olympia – he filmed two Olympic Games himself, so he has a feel for
the terrain. But his introductory promise to be critical and analytical about
the myriad political questions intersecting in the film come to virtually
nothing.
The
Houston and Schickel books are informative and
smartly written, but resolutely stolid and unimaginative when it comes to
actually giving an account of the movies. A whole generation
of post-Lacanian critics are currently settling
scores with film theory’s psychoanalytic fix; Schickel,
by contrast, is blissfully unaware that anyone ever read the story of a
homosexual Oedipus in the plot of Double
Indemnity. And Bragg’s volume is pure arthouse-dinner
party-blah, the kind of discourse you expect see illustrated with pretty
pictures next weekend on a state-sponsored TV channel.
Rushdie’s
book, though, is a winner. I confess to never having read any Rushdie; but this
combination of an essay (“A Short Text About Magic”)
and a fiction (“At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers”) converted me immediately.
This is, in fact, ficto-criticism at its best, for Rusdhie has a marvellous way of
making all the current verities of multicultural, post-colonial theory into
living, dancing, urgent obsessions. Rushdie gives us The Wizard of Oz as first discovered by a child steeped in Hindi
movies; as he works his way through (some of) the film, we learn how other,
subsequent cultures, contexts, concerns have shaped his very particular
perception. According to Buscombe in Metro, this amazing book has been
overlooked by the literary set in the UK, and here as well, I suspect; that’s
what you still get, it seems, for writing something that is cleanly neither
fiction nor criticism.
I
have called this series untimely. But if, bravely, it does not respond
dutifully to the most current critical agenda, it is timely in another, deeper
sense: it is about looking back to the history of criticism, about returning to
and fulfilling originary projects long left fallow, about
renewing old acquaintances and revitalising old
obsessions, in a way that ties them, quietly but surely, into present day
debates. This impulse is particularly strong in three of the volumes.
“The
bleak cycle has begun once more”: these words ended the chapter on Fritz Lang,
and the discussion of The Big Heat,
in Colin McArthur’s 1972 book Underworld
USA. They come around again, twenty years later, as the final line of
McArthur’s contribution to this series. So it’s not only the cycle of violence
and retribution in Lang’s film which possess McArthur; but also the cycle that
he has lived through as a commentator on film, passing from the heyday of
auteur, mise en scène and genre studies, through the
upheavals of film theory, and then back again, but differently. McArthur is a
very generous critic: he stays true to the complicated, ambivalent politics of
all these shifts in the British scene. He’s inclusive, too, as a good teacher
should be, willing even to apply the popular wisdom offered by current scriptwriting
manuals to Lang’s movie.
Two
aspects of Peter Wollen’s writing throughout the
1970s and ‘80s have occasionally irritated me greatly. One is his penchant for
maddeningly casual, sweepingly synoptic lists of names, movements and works, as
if we all not only knew them, but also agreed on their relative cultural
significance. (Rough pastiche: “History has taught us that the upper hand of
Modernism was held by Surrealism over Bolshevism, art brut over musique concrète, Coney Island over the Bauhaus, and Berkeley
[Busby and Bishop] over Ray [Nicholas and Satyajit]”.)
The other tic is his breathless, Utopian invocation at the close of many
articles of the amazing new thing about to overwhelm us – new art, new
technology, new criticism, new world – usually accompanied by a great haste to
move on from whichever critical method he has just expounded.
However,
in his recent, brilliant collection of essays Raiding the Icebox and in his volume here on Singin’ in the Rain, Wollen has both explained
in depth his perception of 20th century modernist history, and revisited some
of the ideas at the origin of his own critical practice. It is fascinating to
re-read his 1969 Signs and Meanings in
the Cinema now and realise how much of Wollen’s future work is actually signposted there –
everything from a history of “the machine, the mass, urbanism and Americanism”
to an appreciation of the aesthetic of the musical as galvanised by Kelly and Donen.
Wollen here integrates a cultural history of filmed
dance with a superb sense of the heterogeneous make-up of this particular
classic. He analyses the most famous sequence of the film superbly, with a
synthetic insight that clearly comes from dabbling in both theory and practice.
And he follows a number of fascinating, hitherto obscured historical tangents
leading out from the film – particularly the matter of Kelly’s left wing
associations and his position in the McCarthyist hysteria.
Laura Mulvey’s book on Citizen
Kane is the tour de force of the
series so far, and unquestionably her finest critical work to date. Her
research has re-oriented itself in the past six years away from the focus on
visual pleasure and the gaze to which many condemn her. In recent articles on Notorious, Jean-Luc Godard and the psychic
structures of fetishism, Mulvey has explored epistemophilia – the hunger for knowledge – and how a
woman’s curiosity in fiction often seizes upon the mysterious and treacherous
rebus of masculine fantasies.
Mulvey achieves in this book what I would have
thought impossible: she makes Citizen
Kane seem like a film you have never truly seen before, and must
immediately see and study again. She brings out, as no other commentator ever
has, the kinship of Welles’ baroque style and his galloping narrative to the
logic of the unconscious. She explores something so obvious in the film, yet
scarcely grasped until now: the absolute separation of male and female spheres
of experience, and the way in which, in a vain attempt to bridge this abyss,
Kane’s grooming of Susan conforms scarily to the Freudian phantasm of
fetishism. And finally, Mulvey makes a bold
definition of the social context informing the film – relating it in complex
ways to the politics of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
If
another analysis of Citizen Kane seems like the ultimate in untimely meditations, Laura Mulvey’s book shows us that ‘the classics’ can never be simply be done away with,
precisely because there is something in them that continues to hold us, that
demands perpetual unravelling. This historical
insight is the best idea to emerge from the BFI Film Classics series, and it
does so in an unforced, poetic manner. To paraphrase Wollen on Godard: it seems that the road to enlightenment is still one that runs
through a maze, an eternal return over old ground, no matter how clearly the
signposts are lettered. And what pleasure there can be in these eternal
returns.
1.
Future-Historic Note 27 years shy of that deadline: this entire grand plan was
eventually disassembled abandoned by the BFI in one of its many institutional
‘reformations’ – although the Classics series, with a different editorial policy, continues at Palgrave Macmillan.
2. Raymond Bellour,
“To Segment/To Analyze (on Gigi)”, in The
Analysis of Film (Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 195.
3.
The media and Internet mania around the 2012 Sight and Sound poll certainly shows a renewed bet on canon power!
4.
Peter Wollen, “L’Éternal Retour”, in Raymond Bellour & Mary Lea Bandy (eds), Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974-1991 (New York: Museum of Modern
Art), p. 187.
5.
Subsequently, Metropolis was included
in the series, authored by Thomas Elsaesser in 2000
and revised in 2012.
© Adrian Martin November 1993 |
