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Essays (book reviews) |
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Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film |
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There
was something missing from Peter Wollen’s previous collection of essays, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on
Twentieth-Century Culture (Verso, 1993). A sharply perceptive tour through
the connecting roads of modernism, it dealt in fresh ways with great, familiar
figures and movements: Breton and surrealism, Pollock and abstract
expressionism, Debord and Situationism, Diaghilev and dance, Warhol and Pop.
But when it reached the ‘60s, the narrative broke down. The book’s final
chapters, on the project of Komar & Melamid and ‘tourist art’, were an
anticlimax. Where were the heroic figures of cinema’s new waves, like Jean-Luc Godard and Fassbinder, to carry Wollen’s densely argued account from the 1960s through
to the ‘80s?
In
a sense, Paris Hollywood is that
missing piece from the history traced in Raiding
the Icebox. Godard is here, and Hollywood, and Blade Runner. So are some grand cultural themes and obsessions that
Wollen has often addressed: architecture, speed, criminality, time, technology.
It
soon becomes clear why Wollen has saved these particular film essays up for
their own book. For, beyond adding up to a cultural history, they are also,
gently, his own, personal history: the critic who began writing for New Left Review in the early ‘60s,
played a major part in the cinema studies revolution in the late ‘60s and early
‘70s, branched into film writing (for Antonioni) and film making (with Laura Mulvey) during the ‘70s, curated art exhibitions in the ‘80s and ‘90s – ‘from
cultist to critic to theorist’, as he puts it.
Wollen’s
life as a commentator and creator begins, mythically, in Paris – at the first
public screenings of À bout de souffle in 1960 – and eventually arrives at Hollywood, or at least UCLA. In between,
film culture moves from the last gasp of innocent auteurism to the theoretical
ecstasies and agonies of semiology, and finally to the multi-media flux of
which Cultural Studies hopes to make sense.
Wollen
has been a remarkably consistent thinker. From the start – for example in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) – he oriented himself towards aesthetic theory on the one hand, and cultural
history on the other. The long view which this orientation allowed him provided
an anchor during the years in which intellectual fashions and aesthetic tastes
came and went with brutal rapidity in the academy and beyond. Wollen is not one
of those academic careerists for whom the avant-garde or psychoanalytic feminism
were In until pop culture and empiricist historicism
muscled them out. He has always pursued his interests across a vast range of
cinema – in Paris Hollywood, from
William Burroughs and Viking Eggeling to spy stories and sci fi – and never reneged his debts to formative figures like Freud, Brecht,
Eisenstein and Breton. And he has stayed aloof from certain fads, whether for
Barthes and Kristeva in the ‘60s or the current predilection for Deleuze and
Virilio. One can regret that Wollen has never quite left the Cahiers-formed cocoon of his youth –
Hitchcock and Hawks are still the touchstones, John Boorman is ‘only
incidentally modernist’ (Point Blank,
incidentally modernist?), Positif scarcely rates a mention – but one can also admire the faithfulness to principles,
and the ceaseless deepening of reflection upon them.
Wollen’s
tone as a writer is very particular, and it has led his critics down the
decades into some rude ad hominem remarks. For Robin Wood in 1975, ‘Wollen’s writing customarily suggests great haste,
as if he can only function in a flurry of excitement’ – but that excitement,
combined with ‘the air of authority and assurance, and the assumption of
impersonality, in fact combine to impose his text as definitive’. Raymond
Durgnat complained in 1982 that Wollen ‘flits from one reference to another’ in
a ‘name-salad’ that ‘can only arouse a thousand complex issues which [he] has
no possibility of properly outlining, let alone solving’. More violently, but
along the same lines, T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith remarked in 1997
that Wollen’s ‘Michael Ignatieff authoritativeness is breathtaking’, while P.
Adams Sitney charged in 1982 that the ‘name-dropping authority he bestows upon
himself is grotesque’.
What,
in Wollen’s work, invites such rude, or at least unkind, remarks – which I, too, have committed to print in the past? A
sudden, otherwise unamplified passage from a 1968 talk reprinted in Readings and Writings: Semiotic
Counter-Strategies (Verso, 1982) suffices to give the breathlessly egghead
flavour of his early writing:
Thus Lenz, the Storm and Stress
dramatist, like Eisenstein, admired the grotesque, the Commedia dell’Arte and
caricature: of course, this grotesque strain meets with the Longinian sublime
pre-eminently in Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of the Romantics, that is, of
Garrick.
The
turning point for me as a reader of Wollen was his fine 1992 book on Singin’ in the Rain, one of the first
entries in the BFI Classics series. By this stage his style of address had
become less haughty, more elegant; the rhizome of connections between names,
movements and contexts was more patiently and generously set out. Wollen is a
remarkable historian, as Paris Hollywood also shows. The depth of his research has come to support the early intuitions
that he has always stuck to and worked at within the realm of aesthetic theory:
cinema as the inheritor of drives towards ‘composite’ form and narrative
‘cartilage’ (from Russian montage to the Hollywood musical), and the ideal of
the art work as that realm of ‘mixed codes’ which multi-media culture has made
the norm.
One
wonders why ‘London’ does not insert itself between Paris and Hollywood in the
title. For one of the most fascinating aspects of this text
is Wollen’s règlement de comptes with
his British cultural roots – a localist engagement strongly present in his life
and career (especially in his independent filmmaking), but not always evident
or reflected upon in the high-flying cosmopolitanism of his writing. In
this, Wollen embodies a typical intellectual dilemma: an embrace of exotic
traditions abroad coupled with reticence, embarrassment even, over the products
and sensibility of home. But the provocative essays here on the ‘Anglo-Austrian
entanglement’ in crime fiction, and a speculative history of British cinema in
the post ‘60s modernist era, bring Wollen firmly back home.
Wollen’s
way of approaching individual films – such as, here, Rules of the Game – is intriguing. He does not really read movies
hermeneutically, or break them down analytically (a brilliant passage in Singin’ in the Rain notwithstanding). He
approaches them historically, building up and surrounding them with their
contexts: in Renoir’s case, for example, that includes not only ‘Munich, the
failure of the General Strike and the collapse of the Popular Front’, but also
those twin avatars of modernism: radio and aviation. Neither a fetishist of
‘close reading’ nor an imposer of external, materialist grids, Wollen achieves
a rare synthesis of close-up detail and Olympian distance in Paris Hollywood.
In
an early ‘80s moment, Wollen, like many of his comrades, grappled with the not
easily reconcilable twin worlds of fiction and criticism. His solution was to
try his hand at both, and eventually to reach a provisional synthesis in the
practice of the essay form: sometimes fragmented or aphoristic, a collage of
notes, thoughts and sensations. Paris
Hollywood contains Wollen’s best work in this vein: twenty-four instances
of the mismatch in cinema, for
instance, and a splendid ‘Alphabet of Cinema’, first written as a tribute to
the legacy of Serge Daney, which here serves as an introductory map for all the
interests and encounters of the book – from Aristotle to Zorn’s Lemma, film festivals to digitality, Citizen Kane to cinephilia.
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