approach to cinema. I’ve always been passionately interested in movies but never studied them in school. I majored in English and French at Louisiana State University, which was still under the influence of the New Criticism, and in English at the University of Wisconsin, where the department was organized by a “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” version of literary history. Much of my writing about film tends to be inflected by literary training and an early interest in literary modernism. Equally important, my university years coincided with the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. I became thoroughly politicized and was faced with the problem of how to reconcile my aestheticism with my politics. As a result, there’s a sometimes subdued, sometimes explicit political quality to most of my writing, expressed in two ways: an overarching concern with the relationship between politics and culture, and a belief that formal analysis isn’t enough; to slightly revise a remark by Lionel Trilling, I’m always asking what the text and perhaps the maker of the text wants, whether or not it is aware of it.
While in graduate school I was drawn to Madison’s vibrant, mostly off-campus or ad hoc film culture, and from the moment I began a professional career I felt an urge to write about movies rather than literature. Discussion of cinema was spreading among public intellectuals and academics, and the cinema itself seemed to be undergoing a kind of revolution. I had already read Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema and everything I could find by Raymond Durgnat and Robin Wood. And, like every academic cinephile, I was affected by waves of ideas about film from a variety of theoretical or politically activist sources, including feminism, structuralism, semiotics, and everything associated with European High Theory (which, despite its radicalism, drew mostly from a French tradition critical and philosophical aesthetics). But I didn’t jump from one paradigm to another. The ideas that shape my work tend to coexist, sometimes conflicting, sometimes interacting, overlaying one another like a palimpsest. The latest of these ideas grew out of academic cultural studies, which freed me from the sometimes puritanical doctrines of High Theory and fed my interest in the relations between “high,” “popular,” and “mass” art (terms I regard as discursive constructions rather than hard-and-fast categories). Even so, I’ve resisted what I see as a tendency in cultural studies toward populism, presentism, and relativism. Most of my work has been about classic Hollywood, and I’ve been more interested in films and critics than in audiences. I also have an ambivalent attitude toward the movie industry, a feeling of both fascination and anxiety.
Visual images have long been capable of provoking fascination and anxiety because of their power to shape beliefs and mass opinion: the Old Testament God forbade graven images, Protestant iconoclasts denounced the elaborate paintings and statuary in Catholic churches, and Marx and Engels compared bourgeois ideology to an upside-down picture at the back of a camera obscura. In the twentieth century, the “magic” of movies created both a sense of wonder and concomitant fears that dark forces are influencing the ignorant, complacent masses. Literacy rates actually rose during the first great age of cinema, at the moment when reformers and censors were condemning the medium’s evils; but another concern emerged because moving imagery was increasingly controlled by big business and government. Among intellectuals, this issue became especially evident during the U.S. economic boom of the 1950s, when I was still a child and when television began to displace the already powerful forces of classic Hollywood. Much of what was produced in those years by movies, radio, television, and Henry Luce’s slick magazines filled with photography was created by a factory system whose product was designed to appeal to as many social classes or class fractions as possible. Capital intensive and organized by complex divisions of labor, it was rationalized as entertainment and/or instruction rather than as art; by its nature, it tended to devalue originality and individuality, and it was usually supervised by committees and boards of executives.
The high modernists and the avant-garde constituted an aesthetic modernity in conflict with these developments. Of course, high modernism and the avant-garde sometimes blended with what Miriam Hansen has called “vernacular modernism”: see Busby Berkeley’s “Lullaby of Broadway” number in Gold Diggers of 1935, which is a breathtaking fusion of modern art, show-biz glamour, and pure cinema. There was nevertheless an inevitable tension between the movie industry and individual modern artists, nicely expressed by Orson Welles: “I love the movies, but don’t get me wrong. I hate Hollywood.”
I believe that the United States has by far the richest film history in the world, but from the end of World War II until the 1970s the most significant artistic movements in cinema—Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, the German New Cinema, the Brazilian cinema of poverty, the Los Angeles school of black filmmakers, and the various “third world” cinemas—were developed more or less in reaction against dominant forms of U.S. mass culture. Despite the familiar argument that postmodernism has ended the tension between high and low or resistant pop, this tension remains. Andy Warhol may have become a fashion celebrity, but his films were never commercial rivals of Hollywood, and his art shared with the old avant-garde a use of mechanical reproduction to shock and unsettle the values of established museums. Late-twentieth-century novelists such as Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Roberto Bolaño will never be adapted into movies, at least not in ways that closely resemble their fiction.
For these reasons, there’s a paradox in my writing, which originates in a longstanding and deep love of both classic Hollywood and high modernism. Exciting movies continue to appear today, sometimes even as blockbusters, but in my view and that of many others, the most consistently good mainstream cinematic entertainment produced in the United States is found in long-form or series cable TV. The contemporary marketplace is fragmented, under the control of corporations yet more niche oriented, less “massified” than it once was. Hollywood’s money-making hits have bloated budgets, saturation booking, and inescapable ad campaigns aimed at a young, mostly male demographic; and Hollywood’s Academy Award contenders, aimed at an older audience and scheduled for December release, are seldom of great consequence. Nevertheless, in the year and a half in which I was completing this book, I saw a number of fine English-language pictures, among them Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, Richard Linklater’s Bernie and Before Midnight, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, and Robert Zemeckis’s Flight. The pictures I saw from other parts of the world were even better: Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Kid with a Bike, Kléber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. I would conclude from this exactly what could have been said at several points in the history of the art form: A certain kind of cinema is dead. Long live cinema.
PART I
Issues
Authorship, Auteurism, and Cultural Politics
The periods of human history prepare their prospective representatives; they seek them out, shape them, bring them to light, and through them make themselves known.
ERICH AUERBACH, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Motion pictures and television are often described as collaborative media, but their modes of production are nearly always hierarchical, involving a mixture of industrialized, theatrical, and artisanal practices that give some people authority over others. Depending upon the circumstances under which particular films are made, anyone who functions in a creative job might, at least potentially, be viewed as an author. We obviously don’t need to know who the author or authors were in order to enjoy a movie, but the term could be applied with more or less justification and qualification to certain writers (Anita Loos, Raymond Chandler), photographers (John Alton, Gordon Willis), composers (Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann), choreographers (Busby Berkeley, Michael Kidd), stars (the Marx Brothers, Bette Davis), and producers (David Selznick, Darryl Zanuck). For the most part, however, film authorship is associated with directors. Names such as D. W. Griffith and F. W. Murnau have been fundamental to the establishment of movies as “respectable” art, and some histories of film are organized around them, just as literary history is organized
