Speaking From His Island

Vinterberg on Bergman:

“At film school, we did a Bergman course where we saw his first 12 films. Then, later on, I saw Fanny and Alexander and some of the more popular ones. I could tell this was a film-maker who was fantastically precise, with deep psychology, and that he was giving me insight into human beings I hadn't seen before. Some of those close-ups of those beautiful Swedish actresses have just stayed with me. He created female characters you fell in love with instantly and exposed their burning inner life in a way I have not seen before or since.

After I made Festen, I called him. He was very, very lively, speaking from his island. I was expecting to hear from a more bitter man. He said he would do no more work and now he would find the time to sit in a corner in his house and read some of those marvellous books he never got to read. He told me Festen was a masterpiece, which I was very happy about, but he talked about how silly and stupid Dogme was. We invited him once to do a Dogme film, but he didn't want to do it. I tried to explain why Dogme wasn't silly, but I very quickly gave in. He wasn't going to change his opinion, no matter what I said. I've only talked to him on one occasion. It was so uplifting. If I can feel like he does at that age, life isn't that bad.”

Though Bergman’s my favourite director I’m not sure I agree with him that Dogme was “silly”. I’m sure he knew how self-mockingly Puritan were its strictures about film-making. And he must have recognized in it the same back-to-basics aspiration that drove a Truffaut or a Godard. There’s something in the low-tech beauty of a film like Through a Glass Darkly that actually shares much in common with Dogme. But I’ll forgive him for the comment. And I’ll forgive him for his latest (and last?) film, Saraband, which is somewhat disappointing. But even Bergman’s bad films are good.

Comments

[Matt]

I don't understand why some people are repulsed because they are "bourgeois," the couples in his stories. Have they not seen "Shame?"

The difference between Bergman and Godard: Bergman loved his actors? Whereas Godard's are just content to wallow in their alienation?

[Old Darwinian]

Fanny and Alexander is some of the most ponderous and futile hours set on film. Some pretty sets, nice colors and cinematography. Wow. There are hints of teutonic sadism and a few glimpses of swedish tramps being doggy-humped, with Bergmann's usual pseudo-Dostoyevsky pompousities. Yawn. And The Seventh Seal has always been the fave of the wannabe euro-trash litterateur {like Young Hegelian} who thinks Death playing chess is some profound original metaphor. OK compared to most Ho-wood pulp Bergmann's not bad; compared to say Citizen Kane or Treasure of Sierra Madre, he's sort of like some Lutheran minister trying to offer up a slightly absurd sermon compared to like Orson Welles' Shakespearean grandeur or Huston's noir elegance.

[Knave]

I have not seen many of his films, but there is one scene in Wild Strawberries that is powerful: the old man's dream in the city of his death when the clock stops and everything becomes an expressionist nightmare montage. The plots--at least of the Seventh Seal, the Magician and Fanny and Alexander--seem stilted if nearly non-existent and the movies more about photography and light than any sort of narrative. The more expressionist elements in Seventh Seal are a bit unsettling and not so bad, if trite to anyone who may have finished say a Kafka story. The Knave character always seemed more authentic than the Knight or the gypsy-actors. There are wonderful stagings: the Knight at the sea with Death and the horse etc--but a bit like illustrations for some nordic myth. Maybe film could not do what this man wanted it to do for him (Edvard Munch maybe painted Bergmann's dreams 80 years ago anyway), tho I would rather gaze at his sketches than at any sort of Woody Allens pastiche. Bergmann manga seems too static and staged; it lacks a jazzy Fellini-esque movement and realism, whether that realism is cartoon like or noir. Herr Bergmann would have been better as a philosopher or minister methinks.

Delete it if this offends you, puto

[...............]

Given a choice, I'd prefer to watch Fantasia or read Chandler or PK Dick or gaze at Crepax and R Crumb, to 3 hours of Bergmann's nordic gloom (or Allen's neurotic yuks, or Tarentino pulp vulgarites, or Timmy Burton's silly little Poeish electro-marionette shows, or Lucas space opera, etc. etc.).

Yet maybe Bergmann is a case study for the exploitative nature of all cinema. Neither painters nor novelists, Director-auteurs are great scavengers, taking bits of painterly inspiration here and some literary themes there. The Director-auteur is not only artist-writer though but sort of critic and philosopher as well: he provides us with images from the tradition of Great Art (or at least suggestions of it) and his selection is meant to imply that this is the Real, the authentic, the hip. The real auteur does not concede his power to actors and the narrative; to do so reduces him merely to another stage director or theatre hack.

The auteur is by necessity a megalomaniac, from which various parallels of course might be drawn (corporate baron, dictator), and in some sense, the cinema completes the evisceration of fine art painting that photography had initiated. The auteur and his crew of technicians, powered by finance, will recreate, if need be, Rembrandt lighting, or an expresssionist-like scenario, or even soft-porn cartoons as in Fellini, but it's makeshift, provisional, perhaps the simulacra (if the simulacra had any real means of being adequately defined). Yet the auteur generally does not need the years of life drawing and painting study nor the apprenticeship and grammar study of the belle-lettrist; he is instead a predator on those who have undergone such studies. Indeed, ho-wood people--actors, directors, producers-- all fancy themselves as sort of hanging out with if not supervising the great artists and novelists, blithely unaware of their parasitical if not whore-like nature.

[YH]

Actually, Jason, The Seventh Seal is my least favourite of his films. And Bergman better as a pastor? But that's just the joke - I'd recommend his autobiography, Magic Lantern, on this.

[YH]

btw.
London Marx-Hegel Reading group

Programme for 2005-2006

We will continue to look at the Marx Early Writings volume we have been
reading this year. The (provisional) programme is set out below. We will
meet fortnightly over the three terms at 6.00 pm on Wednesdays, at City
University. I will announce the room shortly.

Please note that the programme, apart from the first two sessions, on the
Jewish Question, is provisional, as I have received detailed and thoughtful
suggestions (a) to include some of the omitted material, especially the
third letter to Ruge, (b) to do the Notes on Mill after the Paris
Manuscripts, and (c) to divide up the final section of the Paris Manuscripts
differently. Let’s decide on that at the first meeting.

We agreed last term to hold seminars on alternate weeks when there is no
reading group meeting, but I have been too busy to make any arrangements.
Apologies for that. Please volunteer, and/or let me have suggestions. I
have a paper on the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, which I
presented a fortnight ago in Exeter. I think that will do for one – but we
need a few more.

Text

Karl Marx (1975) Early Writings. Lucio Colletti (Introduction), Rodney
Livingstone (Translator), Gregor Benton (Translator). The Pelican Marx
Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin/New Left Review. Paperback. The 1992
paperback Penguin Classics edition has the same pagination.

Term 1

1 5 October The Jewish Question pp 211 - 227 (top) (16 pp)
2 19 October The Jewish Question pp 227 (top) - 241 (15 pp)
3 2 November Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.
Introduction pp 243 – 257 (15 pp)
4 16 November Excepts from James Mill pp 259 - 278 (20 pp)
5 30 November Paris Mss - Preface, and Wages of Labour pp 279 -
295 (top) (16 pp)

Term 2

6 Paris Mss - Profit of Capital pp 295 - 309 (16 pp)
7 Paris Mss - Rent of Land pp 309 - 322 (13 pp)
8 Paris Mss - Estranged Labour pp 322 - 334 (12 pp)
9 Paris Mss - The Relationship of Private Property pp 334 - 341 (7
pp), and
Private Property and Labour pp 341 - 345 (4 pp)
10 Paris Mss - Private Property and Communism pp 345 - 358 (13 pp)

Term 3

11 Paris Mss - Need, Production and Division of Labour pp 358 - 375 (17
pp), and Money pp 375 - 379 (5 pp)
12 Paris Mss - Critique of Hegel's Dialectic pp 379 - 386 (bottom) (7
pp)
13 Paris Mss - Critique of Hegel's Dialectic pp 386 (bottom) - 400 (14
pp)
14 Introduction by Lucio Colletti, Parts I and II pp 7-28 (21 pp)
15 Introduction by Lucio Colletti, Parts III and IV pp 28-56 (28 pp)

Contact

Andy Denis ( a.denis@... )
Senior Lecturer in Political Economy, City University, London,
URL: http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/andy.denis

[jason]

"the same back-to-basics aspiration"

The primitiveness of european filmmaking may be what keeps modern Americans from idolizing Bergmann, Truffaut, Godard etc.. Any suburban kid in the USA in the last 30 years or so was brought up on Hollywood spectacles, science fiction, cop shows, rock & roll, porn, TV, cartoons, Disney, etc. Forced to watch some Bergmann or Truffaut, if he is astute and interested enough to read the subtitles, he sees plainly dressed european actors in various interiors or city locales engaged in serious conversation. Dull: reminds him of novels and literary garbage he never read. And the euro-cinematography also reinforces the impression of dullness, stasis, gravity. Maybe there's some sexual hints, but he's used to real smut. Where's a car chase? Shoot-outs? Where are the tough guys, the gear, or mobsters and their molls or cops or creepy perps. Instead there are grimy French or Italian streets with bicycles and bread shops, cafes, tramps, workers, etc. which may remind him of cheaper areas of any US city.

That's not to say that european realism or the angst-ridden product of Bergmann might not be beneficial for the yankee consumer, but it's not something he's ever been conditioned to accept or understand, just like he's generally has never read Zola, or even Fitzgerald. Fellini's camera moves enough and his flicks have snazzy-jazzy soundtracks and some sexay chicks so Americans might sort of follow that, tho I doubt most US suburbanites make it through all of La Dolce Vita without nodding. But the hip suburbanite can watch say Terry Gilliam's Brazil in sort of a dazed horror or laugh at the pop-kafkaesque miseries of David Lynch's Wild At Heart, or perhaps Blade Runner, or Stone's NBK: those types of kaliediscopic dystopias and freak shows are his home and his mind.

[Matt]

I have to agree with Jason here; in some sense it takes a grown-up American to appreciate Bergman, and even that is quite rare.

[jason]

Yes mature Americans are a rarity, but were they suitably mature I don't think they are getting the goods so to speak with a Bergmann or Truffaut. Perhaps The Last Metro is decent realist filmmaking. I found it offensive and smelly like most French movies, though it impressed me with the verisimilitude as the film snobs say. It was like reading say Sartre's No Exit or Nausea: you may not enjoy it but it's there, ugly and sort of unavoidable, and should be dealt with before tossing it away. Where is Bergmann's The Last Metro? Where is Bergmann's WWII story? He seems to be living in like 1890, if not 1390.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

The majority of these comments are just startling. I've seen all of Bergman's major films except, for some reason, 'The Seventh Seal,' and I've thought most of them were profound and some, like 'The Virgin Spring,' are startlingly beautiful. You don't have to be 'film studies-y' to love these films. Then the trilogy with 'Through a Glass Darkly,' 'Winter Light,' and 'The Silence,' the first with Harriet Anderson probably the most moving . And the charm of the earlier Bergman in 'Smiles of a Summer Night' is completely infectious. Anything with Ingrid Thulin in it, especially in 'Wild Strawberries' with Bibi Anderson as a child; or tormented in 'Cries and Whispers.' Still, for me there is no Bergman quite like 'the Virgin Spring.'

But here is where YH and I do part company, and he has already condemned elsewhere Hollywood as the mere 'dream factory' of cliche. (This is quite as absurd as some of these comments such as 'smelly' applied to French film--the very idea of Catherine Deneuve and 'Racine' in a film by Truffaut being smelly boggles the mind. And the serialized formal perfection of Resnais/Robbe-Grillet's 'Last Year at Marienbad,' which does take some labour-intensive probing, and is probably the all-time favourite at being dismissed as the 'pretentious French art film': the dismissors loss.) But I don't have any respect whatsoever for Adorno's silly and humourless put-down of the 'light popular cinema,' which is no more and no less tiresome than his attempt to compartmentalize jazz so he could live with it, I guess. The poetics of Hollywood is often found in fragments of Hollywood film when one looks at them now, because the happy ending was most often required during the early days. And there may even be a qualitative superiority of Hollywood to the rest of film based purely on quantitative production of meaningful cinema--what wasn't in Griffith's 'Broken Blossoms' or 'Intolerance' or 'Legend of the Happy Valley' was then in some other places, like the way Garbo was in a lot of fine films, as 'Camille' and 'Grand Hotel,' but even when they weren't, as 'Romance' and 'As You Desire Me,' she was a phenomenon who could transform trash unlike anyone else. Other examples are endless.

It's not nearly always just the fucking director. And Garbo's 'glamorous' American films are far more important than what she did with Pabst, before she'd got the goddess mask on yet. Then there are all sorts of people who love the way Pabst used the Midwestern Louise Brooks as Lulu--here we have a prostitute with all the fashionable clothes of the most highly paid call girl, and not even a whiff of lewdness to betray her profession; something way beyond the 'tart with the heart of gold', more like a retarded child all of sudden never realizing she's a whore: There's not a thing convincing about her performance, and what is left is the beautiful black and white of Pabst. And it's pointless to pretend that Gary Cooper and Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe are not poetic cinema. There isn't anything more poetic than Marilyn Monroe singing 'Runnin' Wild' in 'Some Like It Hot' or Judy Holliday singing in a silly chorine's voice along with a tape recorder because she's bored with Broderick Crawford having the corrupt senator and his wife over, or Robert Mitchum swaggering through almost anything. There are all sorts of things Europeans can't automatically read into Hollywood, because it isn't theirs (except when they truly became part of it) the way the other Arts first were. And Hollywood has always been about inaccessibility, which is a thing poetic in itself.

Bergman's book 'The Magic Lantern' is of some interest, but there is that moment of incredible pettiness, when he exults in the most sadistic possible way at how he discovers how 'her [Garbo's] mouth was ugly.' His descriptions of difficulties working with Ingrid Bergman are more objective, but his joy at finding something wrong with Garbo's face was quite, shall we say, 'American',in that sense that the
American public loves to love its idols and then throw them to the dogs with perhaps even greater relish than it loved them.

And is 'The Blue Angel' more poetic since German and with Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in a tragedy than was 'Morocco', merely American with Dietrich and Gary Cooper? I don't think so. There were certain things you couldn't do in America even in that comparatively free period before the Hays Office more or less decided they'd already let Mae West get away with too much blue attitude, but these were about different culture, and both pictures are well-possessed of the reality of cinema. Of course, 'The Blue Angel' is surely the better film, but not necessarily more poetic on all levels.

[jason]

"There are all sorts of things Europeans can't automatically read into Hollywood, because it isn't theirs (except when they truly became part of it) the way the other Arts first were."

That was sort of my point. Movies are, like the jazz of Ellington or Basie, quintessentially American. Perhaps Eisenstein and DW Griffiths and Rene Claire are somehow sympatico--but I really don't think those early Garbo or Tallulah Bankhead--Mae West Babylon things are worthy of being classified as art. While respecting a few more cogent sections of The Culture Industry I would agree Adorno mostly missed out on the poetics of American art, including Ho-wood movies. The european auteurs never seemed to have grasped the gritty beauty of noir, as in say Key Largo or the Maltese Falcon, or the yankee splendor of Citizen Kane. Or so it seems to me. The euro-films that work for me are not the ponderous Ibsen via existentialism-like things that Bergmann or Truffaut or Godard do, but more bizarre if not outright surrealist works: Bunuel or Fellini. And Mlle. Deneuve is rather gorgeous but the Last Metro was still a bit odorous. That's the parisian school, iddn't it? I'd rather watch Un Chien Andalou than 400 Blows any day.

[jason]

Yet Adorno was mostly right really, in viewing cinema as the height of bourgeois if not societal delusion. I think the beauty of early films like Kane or the Maltese Falcon, or Cagney is ironic and mostly unintended; they are meaningful for the style and cinematography (and nothing moves like a decent Bogart movie) or for what they hint at, then for any decipherable message (tho Kane's theme/message is quite decipherable and still relevant if perhaps shifted to say the barons of the IT biz). The great American flicks are sort of Bleakness and Bitterness Incorporated, perhaps too Hemingway-like for the current type of snooty college liberals, but with a certain dignity and directness that much european film and literature lacks. Apart from a few tastes of that noir realism, there's not much worth watching except maybe animation or experimentation (IMAX films from Apollo missions--yay). It seems most everything cinematic turns to kitsch or bombast, or instead to a Scorcese or Stone-like primitive naturalism, which can be tolerated only in small doses. But Im one for showing Stone's NBK to high school kids. ATTENTION STUNDENTS: Mandatory Attendance at today's screening of Natural Born Killers at 3:00 pm.

btw was Garbo dyke? Post any pics/links, and maybe I share a Kenneth Anger story or two.

[Amie]

I've never quite understood Bergman, and it is quite a while since I've seen any of his films -- did not feel compelled to see Saraband. Duras says somewhere that one cannot like both Bergaman and Dreyer, and I happen to like Dreyer quite a bit.
Matt, do you really think Godard "wallows in the alienation of his characters"?
Jason, the european auteurs did not get the "gritty beauty of noir"? If it were not for those euro 'auteurs', noir might well have passed unperceived. incidentally, there are more 'american noir auteurs' in print in french than in 'american.'

[jason]

Arnie--The auteur is the Director so how is he in print? You mean tje American noir writers, Hammett, Chandler etc. Where do you get such information.

Yet since we are discussing things cinematic do any movies--euro, yankee, otherwise-- match say newsreels of WWII battles or concentration camps or Nam footage? What movies show bodies being bulldozed into mass graves or the firestorms of Hiroshima or Tokyo. For that matter an al jazeera beheading on video: that's not the simulacra. Have you ever seen a women really fucked hard by a stallion or big dog? Erotic, yes, but in some sense far more strange and interesting than Bergmann's montages. Especially when they have like smeared some female horse estrus on her pussy and put her in a stable: Mr. Ed comes in in a rush and stuffs 14 inches of cock into her and she is moaning. C'est magnifique.

[Amie]

Jason, if you find "seeing" the last scene that you describe "magnifique", I fear you must lead a rather dull and sheltered life. It's quite old hat, the coupling of (wo)man and animal.
Anyway, you might want to check out "Salo". You might get a kick out of it. Now, if you'll pardon me, it's Saturday night and I have 'exciting' things to do. Good night.

[jason]

Beast with a gal is a rather ancient theme: wasn't it Pasiphae, King Midas' wife, who put herself in a wooden box so she could be f-ed by a bull, later giving birth to the Minotaur? The greeks sure were somethin'.

I'll paseo on Pasolini, though I have read a decent amount of De Sade's Justine and other works (which provided some of P.'s inspiration), and it's sort of amusing and stimulating here and there, the violence and sadism more intense than the endless buggery and f-ing. I do admire the Marquis' skills as a, um, seamstress however...I have seen the original Caligula, the one in which the Penthouse paysano-pimp refused to inform his stars (McDowell and O'Toole, etc.) their performances were being grafted next to scenes of hardcore polysexual orgies. Probably a bit tame for you though, and cluttered with too many femmes. And Fellini's Casanova! Sutherland in an amusing role.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

Garbo was bisexual (Dietrich too), with a 2-year tryst early on with John Gilbert; they were great in 'Queen Christina.'
Mostly not too interested in men though. Anyway, when Bergman got so excited about her 'ugly mouth' she was already in her late 70's, for chrissake. He was just enjoying being hateful. Best think about that book was the photograph of his family house, which is a fantasy.

Agree about 'Key Largo', 'Little Caesar,' 'Citizen Kane,' 'Maltese Falcon,' etc., and the movement of a good Bogart movie, but I think Mitchum's 'Farewell My Lovely', though late, was more the quintessential Marlowe than Bogart or maybe even Powell (who surprised everybody with that one). Bogart very good in other things, as with B. Davis in 'Dark Victory.' Definitely think 'noir' is far more effective cinematically in American form. We had a 'British noir' thing about 10 years ago at Film Forum here in New York, but I don't remember the films very well, they were good but not sinister enough. There's a New York noir, as well, but 'L.A. Noir' is the only one that truly distinguishes itself and is easily the greatest, because the city itself feels like that. Obviously that's what Chandler saw to write in his books (till he got very old), because it's palpable in the city. This is very apparent in a masterpiece like 'Chinatown' and 'Double Indemnity' can't be improved upon. Background music always has something sinister in it, languorous and all LA noir is unashamedly romantic. Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' is probably a late example, maybe the last great one of the genre--it's got the essence of it, even though the skewed business drives a lot of people crazy.

What I'm really talking about is the whole sweep of the films from the silents through the 50's when television started influencing too much of what Hollywood started doing, thereby reducing it to this cheap thing (not all of it, of course). Although it's a matter of opinion, I'm sure, i.e., I do think many of those early films are not 'Babylon' are, rather, I don't care if they are, I think that that Babylon is part of the true Hollywood poetics--and that even if you can't see them as individual works or art, they do form a whole poetics in their incredible inventiveness, vitality, imagination, etc.--and that without them (excluding Talullah, who is important as a stage actress, but none whatever in films, her voice in 'Lifeboat' is just an old queen's dream) the complete poetics of American cinema is not there. Same with Gable, Gardner, Stanwyck, both Hepburns, Jean Harlow, Lubitsch, von Sternberg, Cukor, Billy Wilder, ad infinitum. Even mediocrities like Crawford and Robert Taylor and Stanley Kramer and Jerry Wald were a part of all this, not even going into such great monsters as Mayer, Cohen, Selznick, etc. Many of these things wouldn't be art on the stage, but in movies material becomes something else. Otherwise, you're still stuck with defining film art with old standards, usually European, which apply some of the time, but not most of the time, because Hollywood ended up making the laws about this itself, paying no attention to the academy anywhere, paying no attention to Duhamel or Benjamin in their carefully considered condescensions. Hollywood was way too abundant for such dried-up perceptions as those.

There's also great British cinema, including in the 60's with incredible works like 'Room at the Top' and good ones like 'Darling' and before that 'the Importance of Being Earnest'. Finally got around to David Lean's original 'Oliver' this week; well, there's nothing better than that. But everybody talks about movies, and maybe the most interesting sociological thing about them is that Americans in particular love to bandy about their opinions on movies more than anything else, myself no exception. I think it's good. What I wish is that film had not dissolved into a kind of television like I think it has.

Will not ever be able to agree about French film being malodorous. Even like about half of Godard, especially things like 'Pierrot le Fou' and 'Contempt.'

There isn't anything greater than Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault in 'Children of Paradise'. All of Carne's films are perfection. And there's 'Sundays and Cybele', one of the saddest poetic tales ever put on film. I like 'The Last Metro' a lot, and Truffaut in general (especially 'Jules et Jim) but Mlle. Deneuve can be found in 2 Bunuel works as well--'Belle de Jour' and 'Tristana.' And I think even people who don't care for Bergman usually would find something in 'The Virgin Spring' and 'Smiles of a Summer Night,' but if there's an antipathy, they are not going to care about 'Hour of the Wolf' or 'Persona.' It's true there's going to be no Bergman 'La Dolce Vita' or 'Nights of Cabiria' or '8 1/2,' but Sweden is not that much like Rome, so the loose jazziness somebody talked about wouldn't have anything to do with what goes on up there.

'Salo' is actually an interesting film, and Valentin Cortese is very funny in the coprophagy scene. As for hardcore zoophilia, I think that's mostly a barnyard exploitative thing. There were some Danish ones in peep shows in Times Square before Giuliani sterilized the joint.

[jason]

I would tend to agree with your assessment that Mitchum's Phillip Marlow surpasses Bogart's portrayal or other actors' attempts. The version of Farewell, My Lovely to which you refer I caught some time ago on one of those horrid LA TV stations: KTLA, KCOP or whatever. It was not bad, but I m not so sure they captured Chandler's ritzier scenes set on the Westside, or the gambling ships; and they seemed to give it too much of a cliched, Spillane-like feel--lots of noir alto sax, the downtown motels etc. Chandler's works are in ways not far from a Fitzgerald-style of writing, and I think most movies miss that ritzy, jazzy side of Chandler. I should rent the vid.

What euro directors do movies like that? Perhaps flicks with that Droillet slob.

Marlow is a big guy; 190 lbs, 6 ft. or so and he knows how to handle himself. Bogart was a little guy. Maybe Bogart did a decent Sam Spade but he lacked the swagger and subtle machismo of Marlow; Marlow though is still a gent, eloquent and a ladykiller when need be. He works on chess problems in his spare time--I'm not sure Mitchum catches that gentleman quality exactly.

I plan on renting Lynch's Muholland Drive, but have heard it's sort of incoherent. Blue Velvet is not one of my faves, tho it caused a few chuckles; Wild At Heart worked, but I think Herr Lynch dives into the pop nihilism a bit too readily. (One of movieland's greatest belly-laughs may be brought about by watching DeFoe attempting TS Eliot)

The Zoo manga was just for kix.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

Jason--you might be right that Mitchum doesn't quite get the 'gent part' of Marlowe, but he still does get more of Marlowe than anybody else. But the ritzy Chandler you're talking about is somewhat made up for by gorgeous Charlotte Rampling as Velma, especially when her husband leaves the room--which is really well-done sumptuous Beverly Hills stuff--and she says 'Let's dispense with the polite drinking.' So definitely worth a re-watch. I don't know--I think the colour actually brings out some of the imagery that was in the novel--and there are surprises like when still-unknown Sylvester Stallone comes out, and that big jail dyke that slaps up somebody, also Sylvia Myles does an amazing booze-floozie; I've heard complaints they tried too hard to re-create the period. In the Dick Powell version, Claire Trevor was much more trampish herself, but very effective, too, I thought. Also good is 'Mulholland Falls' from 1995 with Nolte and Melanie Griffith. This was a critical and box office flop, but has the right feel, and then-unknown Jennifer Connelly is an amazing bombshell in sequined bosom. Even John Malkovich is in it.

Agree about 'Wild at Heart', especially when Diane Ladd weaves around at the beginning, going 'I want to...FUCK' over and over. I like 'Blue Velvet' though, it's hilarious, especially the fat whores that Dean Stockwell keeps, and says 'just get the glasses, dah-ling'.

'Rififi'is probably the best European noir I've seen, that's marvelous. Anything with Eddie Constantine is going to have something in it.

Wow, we're off-topic, probably shouldn't push it too much further without being even ruder.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

(I think I got the 2 Rififi's confused. Constantine was not in Dassin's 1955 one, which is the heist one, and really good. I think I was remembering Constantine in Godard's 'Alphaville.' Great tough face.)

[jason]

Stallone does the thug well, and Charlotte Ramping is (or wuz) a hottie. It's been years so I will rent it again. Velma has got to be one of Chandler's scarier creations eh. I would agree the color works; Chandler is nothing if not colorful in a subdued, chromatic fashion.

Another flavor of noir I find quite gratifying is that produced by Jim Thompson, whose tawdry potboilers were the basis for The Grifters and After Dark, My Sweet, the later with Jason Patrick as one of the most bittersweet and brutal of drifters, and some hot actress whose name I can't recall; also has Bruce Dern as a great loser-small time perp who tries to set up Patric. Who can forget Annette Benning in The Grifters, shimmering, nude, apres-race track: "I got a head for business and a body for sin." Yeah, Thompson's prose and scenes are not nearly as posh as Chandler or Hammett but in some sense he captures a lot of the reality of LA, or Vegas or Phoenix and the sort of hyper-ambitious bunko types trying to scam their way to the top in the miserable heat and barren, drab desert.

The Getaway is also another Thompson thanatopic mini-epic, a bit craven and perverse and cracker-like for euro-snobs but still sort of cool in a way.

James Ellroy is a modern noir writer I admire--LA Confidential not a bad treatment of his tome--but he seems to provoke real negative responses when I mention him. He of course is WAY over the top, obscene if not blasphemous, sort of like Burroughs meets Walter Winchell via Hammett coming off of a 3-day drunk in some Harlem brothel. The Black Dahlia, LA Con., White Jazz--that IS LA in the 50s and 60s, man, with the LAPD still busting heads, brothas rolling out of SC, pachucos from the eastside, corrupt attorneys with show biz ties and plenty of hot little vamps cuddling up in little Studio City hideaways. Jimmy is role-model material. He recently was fired from his Esquire editing gig (I believe) probably for irritating some dyke or newbie reporter.

Where are the euros who could create such pulp wonders, now that Truffaut and Fellini are gone. Maybe the Le Femme Nikita guy.

[YH]

Well you've all been taking a thread for a walk while I was away! Patrick, thanks for your interesting thoughts. I do feel though that the position I set out in one post on The Weblog way back when has been taken as an article of faith, when what I was condemning was only a certain Hollywood product that has the "hypodermic" effect Adorno writes of. Not that only Hollywood produces such films, but it must take a large share of the blame. I wasn't by any means intending to conflate Hollywood and American film per se (sloppy writing on my part if this was the result). All the films you list are of course ample counter-evidence for any such conflation. More generally this thread demonstrates that the opposition European / American film isn't going to anyone very far. But then I never posited it in the first place. It's interesting how what Kant called a 'judgement of taste' gets taken as a 'judgement of beauty'. I think Kant realised the typical dynamics of conversations on art.

[YH]

Amie, I'm not sure I agree with Duras' point, as I like both directors. She must be suggesting there's some real incompatibility between their work. Off the top of my head I can see a humour in Bergman that isn't (to my mind) there in Dreyer, when both approach similar Protestant themes, but... I'd like to know more about why she says this.

[jason]

The comments did veer off, sort of like some tequila-crazed vato in his Impala on I-5, from your initial post, yet there is perhaps a subtext here. Bergmann's oeuvre, I assume, would meet your definition if not criteria of fine art, maybe from a Kantian or Marxist perspective. I beg to differ. It is, I assert, noir writers such as Chandler or Hammett, or movies like Key Largo or Citizen Kane or even The Grifters or Bugsy, rather than the euro-fine-art films, which are more in line with an authentic political aesthetic. Perhaps Adorno or the parisian aesthetes would disagree given the commercial nature of Hollywood filmmaking and American publishing. I doubt Adorno cared for say the Maltese Falcon. Yet I think that the verisimilitude of noir, both in writing and in film, is generally of much higher and more specific quality than nearly any other writing or film; there is perhaps evidence of a somewhat existentialist and fatalist code--again I think not so far from say Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms (though one might say it was a type of Stoicism to some degree as well, and in the tradition of Stendhal and Dostoyevsky) in better noir but the code itself is mocked and overturned--the whore with a heart of gold etc sometimes are whores with no hearts at all.

I think one could call it materialist, though not necessarily marxist; or if marxist--and Hammett it might be recalled, did side with the Reds in the 30s and 40s--still willing to acknowledge that the proletariat and losers are as capable of as much violence and perversions as are the bourgeois. Crime of course is the essential theme of noir, and it is in noir writing and film where the psychology and mechanics of the criminal are explored (as are the forces of Justice, his contrary, though not contradictory force). The academics still pretty much dismiss all this as merely genre fiction, but obviously the criminal and urban context of the noir flick or book presents opportunities for a marxist or a Nietzschean-naturalist type of analysis as much as any high-art novel or art film ala Bergmann.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

YH--it looks like that it took about 9 months for us to begin to clarify a misunderstanding, obviously we've had a baby! Many couples have used it to save their marriages, and I hope we give ours something other than 'a broken home.' Seriously, I think it's pretty good to be able to concentrate on the Internet like this has turned out to be, because things too often evaporate and new things are then started, which get shorter and shorter each time. I do think that, unfortunately, the trash of Hollywood, while indisputably trash, was part of the phenomenon that made Hollywood able to produce its great film. I don't think 'American film' and 'Hollywood film' can be separated except in individual films--of course some of the greatest American film has been and is independent of Hollywood (now much more than before); but Hollywood is the essential birthplace of great American film, and where the largest amount of it unquestionably has traditionally come from, which you tacitly agree to by noting the films I cite.

I think I know what kind of film therefore does fit the 'hypodermic effect' you and Adorno and Jason speak of--things like Doris Day/Rock Hudson films that don't even have redeeming fragments, and are meant to be sterilized of literally anything of substance (I actually recall when I first read Adorno on this, I immediately thought of Doris Day's horrible 'eternal-virgin' pictures, such a come-down from at least a couple of the silly musicals she had done, which would at least have their moments here and there.) That's something of importance to me: I think fragments of works of art make a bad work worthwhile even though that doesn't mean it can compare to a sustained masterpiece, but people like Adorno (even more frequent among musicologists who are not musicians) have always this problem of being unable to give much credence to anything but the 9th Symphony or the B Minor Mass, etc., I find this extremely irritating. As if all films could be as great as 'Les Enfants du Paradis.' And sometimes an actor's or director's 'best film' doesn't have his/her best moments, this always needs to be taken into account. By now, the hypodermic effect is not something I could argue with, as what does not come under that description from Hollywood is the exception rather than the rule, e.g., I was very surprised Forster was able to do his Douglas Sirk homage 'Far From Heaven' in 2002. I couldn't believe how good it was, and that it even seemed to produce something that might be termed 'Connecticut Noir' (!) , and especially with all that 50's Elmer Bernstein music in the background.

And thanks for letting us 'veer off, sort of like some tequila-crazed vato in his Impala on I-5,' as that's almost a description of the sensation of good noir as Jason and I were discussing.

Jason--definitely agree with everything you say about the importance of noir as up there with anything 'art' or 'European', etc., I doubt Adorno could understand these either, seeing only escape in them. Polanski definitely has made the bridge between them in both his work and his life.

Velma is indeed a very scary creature, and one of the reasons 'Farewell My Lovely' is one of the best of the small number of novels. I'm fairly sure he worked her out in an earlier short story called 'Lady in Liquor', which has got to be one of the greatest titles I know. Like Jim Thompson, too, his book 'The Alcoholics' is very amusing, because the supervisors will give booze to the alcoholics when enough pressure is applied.

Also, I've read 4 or 5 of the James Ellroy books, and agree they are the real thing--he even had the gall to write obscenely about Lana Turner while she was still alive (like, when referring to Stomp's obsession with her, he wrote 'must have a snatch like chinchilla'. I was surprised she didn't sue, as she had little else to do). I don't like the film treatment of 'LA Confidential', though, and think Ellroy said he did like it because of commercial reasons. Here's why: the script was written in such a way that any new plot lines that were developed weren't really new, they took pieces of other plot and subplot lines that were already in the novel but then crudely stuck in different places where they don't fit. And that all-important smut racket was barely even alluded to in the movie. This strange and skilled connoisseur-porno so carefully described by Ellroy was taken out, not out of censorship fear (guessing) but because they didn't know how to do it. I might have liked the film if I hadn't read the book. Basinger is definitely one of the few authentic modern babes for this sort of thing. Agree about the other Ellroys too, especially 'White Jazz' with all those peculiar conversations about hot-sheet motels while in them.

Also 'Kiss Me Deadly' can't be surpassed with Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, and Cloris Leachman running out into the highway at the beginning (her first picture.) There were several others that were filmed around the old Bunker Hill before it had been essentially obliterated.

Still think you'd like the 1955 Jules Dassin 'Rififi' even though Eddie Constantine is in the one from 1959. There's real French crime, although not quite as romanticized as crime gets in America (I don't know if that's why we have so much of it.)