In The Company Of Glenn

A question for John Podhoretz (answered, pretty much—see update)

The personally affable but frequently wrong conservative columnist John Podhoretz is glad that Ingmar Bergman is dead. Well, not quite, but he is glad that the filmmaking and critical stance he believes Bergman represents is dead. If Bergman wasn't John's cup of tea, that's fine, but I have to take issue with some of his broader pronouncements, e.g. that Bergman was the ideal filmmaker for critics who "wanted the movies...to mimic the forbidding demands and even more forbidding themes of high modern art," critics who were "embarassed by the movies," "offended" by the medium's "unseriousness," its "capacity to entertain without offering anything elevating at the same time."

My issue being: just who were/are these critics? They couldn't be the same critics who elevated master entertainer Howard Hawks to the pantheon of directors, could they? I mean, sure, Robin Wood did a reappraisal of Persona in his recent book Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, but that same book also contains an appreciation of Leo McCarey that, among other things, reveals Wood's affection for Laurel and Hardy. Then there's Peter Woolen, author of Signs and Meanings in Cinema, the bane of many an NYU undergrad who thought that some variant of "Film Appreciation" would be an easy "A" course. Of course, Woolen's also the author of a very appreciative monograph on Singin' in The Rain. Laura Mulvey? Christian Metz? All these critics appreciated popular/populist cinema. Sure, they found stuff in it that a lot of its consumers wouldn't even look for, but they admired it.

I can think of maybe one critic who kinda-sorta-coulda fit Podhoretz's description: the mandarin-and-proud-of-it John Simon, at one point in time New York's self-appointed high priest of Bergman. But I don't think even he was as strident as what Podhoretz describes.

(To digress for a moment: Highbrows really can't get a break from some corners. If they disdain popular culture, they're buzzkills. If they engage it, they're being patronizing, or acting in bad faith, or picking the wrong pop culture artifacts to praise. Why, even this week in the New York Review of Books Elliot Weinberger looks down his nose at Susan Sontag's enthusiasm for the Supremes, a combo Mr. Weinberger cites as an example of Sontag's "less-than-groovy" pop culture references. Not to put too fine a point on it—or heaven forfend, come off as vulgar—but who is this douchebag, anyway?)

Is/was Simon your guy? 'Cause if so, you should have said so. One citation of one critic would have...well, it wouldn't have quite sufficed, but it at least would have put a bit of terra firma under your argument.

UPDATE: An interested party e-mailed me and cited Dwight McDonald, Stanley Kauffman, Simon, and "every non-auteurist semiotician of film who wrote for Sight and Sound in the years I was reading it." Dwight McDonald: OF COURSE. The anti-Manny Farber. I should have guessed. I myself checked out on Kauffman around the time he panned Bullitt. I guessed Simon. As for Sight and Sound back in the day, well, the magazine did reject Mr. Robin Wood's first spec submission to it, an essay on Psycho: "Penelope Houston...informed me in a very courteous letter that I had failed to grasp that the film was intended as a joke." While I reserve the right to completely disagree with Mr. Podhoretz in his estimation of Bergman, this is pretty much the terra I was seeking. As for why it wasn't established in the piece as printed, well, let's say it was for reasons that every Grub Street denizen is painfully familiar with, and leave it at that.

FURTHER UPDATE: "Reasonable conservative" blogger Jon Swift examines John P.'s aesthetic preferences and founds a new school of film criticism here.

Antonioni and 'alienation'

There has to be a better word than the frequently invoked "alienation" to describe what Michelangelo Antonioni depicted onscreen. "Alienation" has taken on a slightly puling tinge, and it's always been entirely clinical. As much as Antonioni's films bemoaned the state of man in the modern world, they never were whiny about it. And as precise a picture-maker as Antonioni was, he was never clinical or antiseptic.

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912-2007

It appears God has it in for venerable European directors this week.

More later. The above image is from L'Eclisse.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ingmar Bergman

I: Pessimist.

As in, you can't possibly win against this guy.

II: Qualified Optimist.

On the other hand, the final image of The Seventh Seal is not of that guy, Death, leading his victims in a dance, but rather of this healthy new family making its way toward a new life.

Stupid people and their stupid refusal to see good movies.

Last weekend both Jeffrey Wells and the L.A. Times' Kenneth Turan weighed in on the sleeper hit status of the terrific film Once, and concluded that at this point it was too much sleeper and not enough hit, and that this boded ill for the future of smart, character-driven, putatively accessbile indies. Turan, while rueful, takes a his usual measured tone, while Wells gets worked up and invokes Jose Ferrer in Lawrence of Arabia: "I am surrounded by cattle."

I feel these gentlemen's pain and yet...I shrug. I'm too old to make myself crazy over other people's lack of discernment, curiosity, what have you. When I find myself working up a fine froth, I invariably remember the classic comic by Drew and Josh Allen Friedman, "Marnin Rosenberg in Bad Luck With Women," in which the titular hero surveys the shallow, vulgar female clientele at a Great Neck singles bar and is righteously appalled...

Copyright: Drew Friedman

Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007

Has there ever been a filmmaker more written about, more argued about, more frequesntly parodied than Ingmar Bergman, who died at age 89 on Monday? I don't think so. More than just a moviemaker, he was in a sense a living emblem of the popular ascendency of the international art film from the late '50s all the way through the '70s. (More than just a moviemaker, he was an incredibly distinguished man of the theater as well.) Despite the narrow characterizations that some attach to it, the body of work he leaves behind is remarkably varied; if so much of it is preoccupied with death and sex (and/or love, or, really, the ways the two co-mingle), what of it? Yeats said those were the only two subjects worthy of a poet's consideration, and, yes, Bergman was a poet too.

I'll have more to say later. In the meantime, the above image is the dance of death from 1957's The Seventh Seal; and below is a passage from Bergman's remarkable autobiography, The Magic Lantern, in which he describes an early Christmas, at which he traded his brother a hundred tin soldiers to get possession of a most coveted object: a cinematograph. The next morning he set up the film projecting machine in a nursery wardrobe:

...[I] placed the cinematograph on a sugar crate, lit the parrafin lamp and directed the beam of light on to the whitewashed wall. Then I loaded the film.

A picture of a meadow appeared on the wall. Asleep in the meadow was a young woman apparently wearing national costume. Then I turned the handle! It is impossible to describe this. I can't find word to express my excitement. But at any time I can recall the smell of the hot metal, the scent of mothballs and dust in the wardrobe, the feel of the crank against my hand. I can see the trembling rectangle on the wall.

I turned the handle and the girl woke up, sat up, slowly got up, stretched her arms out, swung round and disappeared to the giht. If I went on turning, she would again lie there, then make exactly the same movements all over again.

She was moving.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Catch Us If You Can'

The downbeat flipside to Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, released less than a year after the Beatles-starring picture, John Boorman’s 1965 Catch Us If You Can (the director’s feature debut) sees the Dave Clark Five—at the time the Beatles’ most formidable rivals in what we in the States called the British Invasion—trying to get away from it all in the dry chill of a British winter.

Are you gradually losing the will to live, but not quite ready to end it all yet?

This, a rumination on The Simpsons Movie by one Jonah Goldberg, ought to do the trick.

Michael Cieply, spoiler king

I get a lot out of Michael Cieply's reporting on Hollywood in the New York Times, but I have to say maybe he gives too much in today's front-page story headlined "With Real Bullets Still Flying, Hollywood Brings The War Home." In the first four grafs, he gives away virtually the entire plotline of Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Edah (which I gave some initial thoughts on here), including—spoiler alert, sort of—the picture's near-ruinous punchline. I know that punchline, and many of the other film's particulars, are likely to be hotly debated soon after the picture opens. But the picture doesn't open for another two months. And while Edah is based on true events, part of what ought to make the picture fairly engrossing for those not familiar with the real-life case is how well Haggis handles the whodunnit aspect of the story. All that's out the window once you read Cieply. I'll guess that Paul Haggis is one mightily pissed-off filmmaker today.

I understand that Cieply cites these specifics in order to bolster his overall characterization of the type of Iraq war movies coming out of Hollywood today. But I think he could have been substantially subtler and still made his points. Maybe's he taking his cue from Nathan Lee's self-serving spoiler-justification op-ed from last week.

A few words for Lindsay Lohan

Dear Ms. Lohan,

not to put too fine a point on it, but when the police find the cocaine in your pocket, that pretty much—you'll excuse the phrase—blows your plausible deniability.

Also, I see that some of the less charitable observers of your case—their ardor perhaps fueled by images of your gyrations on a stripper pole in your latest film— are suggesting, what with your potential uninsurability and all, that your only recourse w/r/t your damaged career is porn. (Scroll down to comments if you link—Mr. Wells himself is too much of a gentleman to say such a thing.) While I myself don't believe that's the case, and certainly cannot in good conscience advocate such a move, I would strongly suggest, should you decide to go that route, that you not become a "contract girl." My understanding is that, as attractive as it might look at first, it's kind of a raw deal. Also, accept remuneration in cold hard cash only. There's a legendary story (and this is merely one "for instance") of an adult video producer who compensated some of his "talent" with new automobiles; not to long thereafter, the recipients of his largesse discovered that only the down payments had been made on the vehicles. Forewarned is forearmed, I'm sure you know.

And now I will return to giving you your privacy, which I see you appreciate.

Best of luck,

GK

Updated below.