by old movies from the 1930s and ‘40s that were becoming available at home on the late show. A good deal of my cinema education came from product that was dumped onto TV and interspersed with commercials. Today we have Turner Classic Movies on cable TV and DVD or Blu-ray offerings that greatly enlarge the common viewer’s knowledge of film history. But it remains unclear whether the business model for such things will survive in a world of streaming. As Dave Kehr noted in his New York Times video review column of December 2, 2012, “The major studios . . . have cut their full-scale releases of library titles to a minimum,” and “Any time a pre-2000 title makes it out of the vault is a cause for rejoicing.”
It is difficult to be positive about the changing mediascape without also being concerned about it. A wider range of movies is shown theatrically in the United States than ever before, but most independent and foreign films are seen in only a few big-city venues. Low-end digital technology has been used to superb effect by Pedro Costa, David Lynch, and Jean-Luc Godard, but the new cameras and digital editing equipment have also spawned hoards of lazily shot, slapped-together movies. Cinephilia is as alive as ever, but it no longer produces the kind of impassioned intellectual debate that went on in big-circulation newspapers and little magazines during the 1960s and ‘70s. Old films originally thought to have a short commercial lifespan are still reasonably valuable commodities; intelligent critical commentary on movies can be found in several places on the Internet; “orphan” movies and nontheatrical 16mm pictures are being digitally preserved; and, thanks to remediation, today’s students of cinema have much greater access to cinema. Nevertheless, more films have been lost than preserved, more films continue to be lost, and the potential death of the flexible film strip is leading to what Manohla Dargis has called “deep ontological and phenomenological shifts that are transforming a medium” (New York Times, September 9, 2012).
To my mind, just how transformative these shifts will turn out to be remains to be seen. Several critics and theorists, among them J. Hoberman, have argued that the death of traditional photography marks the end of André Bazin’s ideas about cinematic realism. The digital, this argument maintains, so greatly increases the tendency toward animation and so vividly creates virtual reality that it destroys our faith in the possibility of an indexical relationship between image and world and our faith in the difference between truth and fiction. But digital special effects aren’t always as invisible as they try to be, and truth and fiction have long been intertwined. From the time of Georges Méliès the cinema has been associated with optical illusions. Citizen Kane (one of Bazin’s touchstones of realism) is so filled with optical printing, lens distortions, black-art settings, painted backgrounds, and other visual tricks that it looks as if it aspired to the condition of an animated cartoon. A more neorealist film such as Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), now available as a Criterion DVD, gains charm and emotional power from nonprofessionals in minor roles and subtly romantic location photography by Erwin Hiller of the bombed-out town center of Canterbury, which the Nazis had nearly destroyed in 1942; it’s fascinating as documentary record, but it also contains visual tricks that most viewers probably haven’t noticed, including art director Alfred Junge’s remarkably convincing re-creation of the interiors of Canterbury Cathedral.
Photography is neither inherently deceitful nor inherently indexical, and the same can be said of digital video. One of the infinitely precious attributes of photography is its ability to preserve traces of history or moments of long-ago time: the early motion pictures of Queen Victoria in a parade and of ordinary workers exiting the Lumière factory transcend art and are arguably more significant than art. But there’s no reason why some of the amateur videos on YouTube won’t someday have a roughly similar effect. Motion pictures that tell stories have always depended upon a dialectical tension between visual realism and visual magic. Digital technology has vastly increased animation in big-budget Hollywood movies, but it has also made it easier for contemporary directors to create documentaries and neo-neorealist cinema.
The loss of the film strip nevertheless raises a problem for preservationists, because DVDs and Blu-ray Discs are said to be more unstable than film. If we want to save the past, the preferred way of storing it is on celluloid. (Ironically, there is now also a need to preserve VHS, because many movies in library archives can’t be seen in other forms.) For this and other reasons, I doubt that the old media will go away completely; indeed, many young filmmakers today are experimenting with 8mm and 16mm. We should keep in mind Raymond Williams’s argument that any given historical moment is compounded of dominant, residual, and emergent forms of culture—an argument that applies not only to technology but also to ideas. Around 1960, for example, the idea of the postmodern (with which the following book is sometimes concerned) was emergent in Western industrial society; it soon became a dominant idea in the world of art and architecture, but now it is becoming a residual or period term like any other. Modernism (equally important to this book), which is associated with formally innovative, relatively difficult art in conflicted dialogue with industrial modernity, has a much longer residual life-span. With some qualification, we can speak of post–World-War II neorealism and the 1960s European art cinema of directors like Bergman, Antonioni, and Resnais as a recrudescence of the modernist impulse often associated with earlier directors like Eisenstein and Welles. As I try to suggest toward the end of this volume, a modernist spirit also animates what is nowadays called “world cinema,” a phenomenon connecting Asian, Latin American, African, and Iranian films by such directors as Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abderrahmane Sissako, Abbas Kiarostami, and the late Raúl Ruiz. No matter what technology these artists use—usually it’s digital—they’ve established continuities with the past and made this a remarkable time for cinema.
In contrast, most of the films I discuss in this book belong to a dead cinema—dead not only because it was produced by an old technology but also because the institutional, economic, and cultural conditions that determined it are things of the past. But as long as we can still see older films in a good form of remediation, the past isn’t dead. Classic Hollywood films may not have the same significance or meanings for us as when they were originally shown (no matter how glamorized and studio-bound they are, they give us intriguing documentary evidence of a different America). Nevertheless, they’re important achievements in the history of a still-living art and are worthy of ongoing criticism and theory.
Somewhat like film, my career as a writer about cinema is entering a late, perhaps last, phase, and the essays assembled here are chosen to reflect my chief interests over the span of that career. Most of them were published originally in academic journals or anthologies, but I have also written several new pieces especially for this volume. All the previously published essays have been rewritten, some in minor ways and others substantially, to correct errors, take note of subsequent research, and reflect changes in my thinking. I’ve avoided reprinting material from the books I’ve authored, although the piece on Cabin in the Sky, to which I’ve added a few things, closely resembles what became a chapter in The Films of Vincente Minnelli (1993), and occasional paragraphs or pages elsewhere are derived from arguments in my books on other film topics.
The collection has three parts. The first consists of essays on general or theoretical issues and the second of case studies. An overriding concern with value judgment should be apparent throughout, and certain topics recur: authorship; adaptation; acting; modernism and postmodernism; observations on the relation between style and politics; and commentary on such figures as Hitchcock, Hawks, Minnelli, Welles, Huston, Kubrick, and other figures associated with classic Hollywood. The third and final section, consisting of mostly new material, is a defense of criticism and film reviewing in an era when print journalism is facing a death similar to film, and when the academy seems to be losing interest in questions of aesthetics, taste, or evaluation. It contains essays on four American journalistic critics who quickened my early interest in film and expanded my knowledge of film history. Appended to these is a sample of my work as a critic/reviewer between 2009 and 2011, when I wrote an annual “Films of the Year” roundup in Film Quarterly. During those years I was particularly interested in the aforementioned “world cinema” and in what some people have called “slow cinema,” which I would argue accounts for some of the most significant motion pictures in the past decade.
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