This is a film review weblog. It is different than a filmblog generally, in that it only infrequently engages in the discussion of culture "surrounding" cinema but not "within" cinema; as a rule (though not a binding rule), there are not to be found topics pertaining to film production, cinephilia (including the appreciation of specific individuals, as actors or directors), or secondary issues inspired by film, unless those topics are brought up in specific relation to a film being reviewed.
Reviews vs. Criticism
The distinction between reviewing and critiquing a film is a subtle, but easily understood one. A "review" is an evaluative description of a film's content, aiming to suggest whether it's worth watching or not. Criticism is not concerned with the merits of a film, but seeks to analyse how it functions; describing that the effect of a film comes about as a result of X or Y, but not claiming that the effect is worthwhile or not. Reviewing is shallow and nasty-minded; it is significantly easier than criticism, but much less valuable. Because the blogger of Antagony & Ecstasy is generally lazy, this blog traffics almost entirely in reviewing, although at times formal criticism is brought in to shore up the integrity of those reviews.
Why Criticism?
We live in a perpetual era of the Death of the Film Critic. Going back at least 50 years, you can readily find evidence that serious critics are always about to be knocked on their ass, that these hotshot kids are ruining everything, et cetera ad nauseam, emphasis on the "nausea". I flatter myself that it's not simply because I'm part of that sprawling mess that is the Film Blogosphere that I hold internet criticism in esteem; though it is true that most online writing is dreadful and worse than useless (I am convinced that I become irrevocably stupider every time I accidentally take a long look at an IMDb message board), the best of the best bloggers and other online film writers have a freedom of subject, voice, and format that cannot and has never been matched. The sheer volume of film writing on the internet ensures that some of it must be truly wonderful; 90% of everything is shit, they say, and 90% of a whole hell of a lot of film chatter is a whole hell of a lot of shit. But 10% of a whole hell of a lot of film chatter, by extension, is still a rich and varied and marvelously illuminating 10%
I have not, though, begun to touch the question, Why criticism? For that is the other part of the years-long Death of the Film Critic. Why, oh why, should anyone bother to write analyses of movies, when Transformers: Your Pyramid A Splode can be hated by critics and reviewers with an intensity and unanimity that borders on the dogmatic, but still breeze past $400 million domestically, and be received by the population at large with something akin to undemanding enjoyment? Firstly, because not all movies are Transformers. And even if they were, it is true what food critic Anton Ego says in the 2007 Pixar film Ratatouille: "We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read". Is it ever!
The joy of being bitchy aside, criticism at its best is not about telling people what to think, which seems to be the misconception inherent in the argument, "if critics don't agree with regular people, the critics are just out of touch and stupid and useless". At the risk of sounding tautological, criticism is the art of thinking critically; thinking at all, that is. The best review or analysis is not necessarily the one that you agree with on the most points; it is the one that presents a work of art in a new light, provoking new ways of thinking about what it is and why it does or doesn't work. It is about taking an object you thought you understood, and saying, "Yes, but what if we twist it just a little bit this way..." It is, when all is going perfectly, about challenging the direct way of appreciating (or failing to appreciate) a movie, and finding new and productive avenues of thought.
No work of art is above, or beneath, thoughtful consideration. Properly applied, a great work of criticism can cause anyone to have a profound and meaningful intellectual reaction to anything. Even Transformers.
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What Is Art?There is no more loaded question in criticism. "Art", the word, is often held to have a value judgment attached to it; that which is "artistic" is typically contrasted with that which is "commercial"; "artists" are those who have a Statement to make. Bollocks, but well-intentioned bollocks.
The question pops up rather often in certain spheres, as to whether video games are "art"? I find this perplexing, and I sometimes wonder about asking - "Do video games come out of the ground, like crabgrass? Did primitive man stumble upon them, extruding naturally out of cracks in granite walls? No. Then they are manufactured - they are created by human means? Yes. Then in what way are they not art?" For my tendency is to take the word "art" at its face value: that which is created through artifice. I understand that this is probably reductive and even useless, in a certain degree.
And, in a different degree, wholly useful. If all things are "art", then all things can be subjected to "artistic criticism". This is important. Too often, serious and intellectually probing people look at art on the fringes of respectability - my first thought is of those poor, orphaned slasher films from the 1980s - and by saying, "this is not art", thereby obviate themselves of any duty to consider those forms as anything but junk. I find this, if not reprehensibly irresponsible, at least damned lazy. To take up the example of slasher films: they remain an incredibly important element of culture for a generation of moviegoers. Though I may adore Hiroshima mon amour and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles with abandon, I understand it to be stating a matter of simple fact that more people in the world have seen Friday the 13th than will ever even hear of Alain Resnais or Chantal Akerman. Clearly, this does not mean that Friday the 13th is more "valuable" than Jeanne Dielman, though I am certain that people exist who, upon seeing both films, would judge it so. But, given the great many people who have seen Friday the 13th, where is the intellectual dignity in saying, "it's crap", and being done with it? Anything that has become an iconic part of popular culture is therefore inherently worthy of exploration if not automatic respect. It may indeed be the case that a close, rigorous study of Friday the 13th will in fact agree with the serious critic's disregard: "upon careful study and close reading of every shot and narrative beat, we have concluded that it's crap". Yet by conducting that close reading, it's possible that, even in the act of designating the film crap, we may find that it tells us something important about the culture and era which made it so successful and iconic. If we simply throw it out with the bathwater, on the grounds that it isn't "artistic", we also throw out the possibility of ever finding out.
What Does Art Do?
"All art is quite useless" Oscar Wilde famously averred in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, and while it is impossible to tell to what degree he was being sincere, and to what degree he was making a point, he was dead right. If we pull back to a far enough remove, art has no purpose: it contributes in no material way to the function of human beings, which is to live long enough to create other human beings (the religiously-inclined might argue that the purpose of human beings is to pay homage to the Divine, in which case some art, though hardly all of it, does have a use). Pulling back even further, human beings have no purpose: the universe would keep purring along quite sufficiently without any organic life in it at all, as indeed it did for billions of years.
Thankfully, we do not live our lives according to an unyielding sense of utility. We are thinking, feeling creatures, aware of not only our own emotions and thoughts, but the emotions and thoughts of other human beings, and this perhaps makes us unique among animals on this planet.
We are imbued with an aesthetic sense, finding beauty in things that would exist whether we were there to find them beautiful or not; a sunset's colors are a matter of physics, not design, and yet who among us denies that no human designer could improve upon them? Yet our aesthetic sense is not content to find things beautiful in nature, and drives us to create things of our own - to find ways of expressing ideas and concepts, embellished by our skill. The knowledge that one must eat is is utilitarian; telling another person, "eat this" is utilitarian in its own way as well (as all language, unembellished, is utilitarian). To have dinner at a candlelit restaurant in Paris, late in the evening; that is art.
The temptation to poetry is maddeningly difficult to avoid in describing art (clearly). "Art is what ennobles the soul", "Art holds a mirror to humanity", and so on. These are beautiful and incomplete ways of describing art. I tend towards the most broadly function definition of "art" myself; broad to a degree where it's obvious to the point of uselessness. But it is the one that has served me well for quite some time now, and I think it's worth sharing:
The purpose of art is to provoke an emotional or intellectual response in the individual receiving it.
I have separated that out for emphasis, which serves perhaps only to make it seem a great deal more feeble and self-evident. But there you have it. Art provokes a response. "Triggers" may have been a less loaded word than "provokes", but I suspect it's also less precise. A Jackson Pollock painting certainly provokes, but I cannot with a straight face say it "triggers", as though it's the stimulus inside a Skinner box.
All art, whether a French movie about the miserable life of 19th Century communists, a Dane Cook comedy, a sonata, a Cubist painting, or a deck of playing cards with nude pictures, provokes a response - not the same response in all individuals, and not necessarily the response that the artist or artists intended. But always a response of some kind, for even boredom and indifference are a type of response.
At its noblest, art does not merely provoke a response, tearing across the human psyche like a whirlwind, going this way and that; it provokes a particular intellectual or emotional state that the viewer/reader/listener was not in the moment before. It creates a way of feeling or a way of thinking that the audience was not engaged in; ideally, it creates a feeling or thought that the audience could not access without the art to provide a frame for that experience.
The essence of art, then, is to be transportive. By nature, we can experience only what is possible, emotionally and intellectually, within the relative limited sphere of our own experience. Through art, we can experience (though only by proxy) anything which can be conceived of by human ingenuity.
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Cinema as Art Form
Composer Richard Wagner formulated a theory for the ideal kind of art, which he referred to by the name Gesamtkunstwerk. I've heard of a few different translations for that word, but they all come down to roughly, "A work of art that combines all possible artistic forms". For Wagner, this meant the musical dramas he spent so many long hours creating, a synthesis of music, acting, theater, and design. A quarter of a century after Wagner's death, Sergei Diaghilev founded the Ballets Russes, a ballet company that subscribed to much the same philosophy as Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk: design, music, theater, dance, all of them given equal importance in the creation of wildly ambitious modernist performance pieces.
For the first couple of decades of its existence, cinema was disregarded as a fancy lightshow, empty of any real meaning. It was only in the teens, shortly after the creation of the feature-length motion picture, and slightly before D.W. Griffith (primarily) invented a sophisticated new model of continuity editing with The Birth of a Nation, that Italian scholar Ricciotto Canudo declared cinema to be the "seventh art". This was a reference to the customary description, following Hegel, of six fine arts:
-Architecture
-Sculpture
-Painting
-Music
-Poetry
-Dance
It was also Canudo who first observed that cinema is not merely the newest of the fine arts, it is the only fine art to unite the others into one body - a Gesamtkunstwerk that would have driven Wagner or Diaghilev into a jealous frenzy.
There are two senses in which we can think of cinema as the ultimate "unifying" art form: the one that leaps to mind, especially in the sound era, is that cinema combines specific elements of the other forms. From architecture and sculpture comes the production design; from painting, the manipulation of light and the strategic position of objects in the frame; from music, the score and arguably the entire soundscape, built up according to principles of harmony or disharmony; poetry uses structure in a similar way, uses metaphor and symbolism in a similar manner, and different forms of editing can be thought of, not unreasonably, as equivalents to the poetic tools ellipses and enjambments; dance, of course, is the art of positioning the human body, and what is a film without carefully-choreographed human movement? This line of reasoning holds even truer if we consider the two most obvious fine arts that were ignored by Hegel, then Canudo: narrative prose and drama - conventionally, cinema is often held to be little more than a type of drama, although the most interesting filmmakers throughout history have always managed to transcend that idea.
In the early 1910s, however, this (illuminating and accurate) comparison of cinema to the other fine art forms would not have been first on anyone's mind; what Canudo meant is almost certainly that film, uniquely among all artistic disciplines, combines the methods and effects of the visual arts (architecture, sculpture, painting) with rhythm and duration (characteristic of music, poetry, and dance). In the 1920s, French critics argued that of all the other arts, cinema was the closest to music, for this reason - this was, remember, before the dedicated soundtrack.
At its essential core, cinema combines two things: specific imagery and duration. It is, in fact, the only durational visual art that exists, probably the only one that can. We are directed to look at one particular image, for an exact period of time, and we look at images in a certain order. This can of course be mucked around with by a home viewer with a remote control, and certain trailblazing artists have worked that interactivity into their work - to a certain degree, this is what video games are. But, without disputing the idea that giving the viewer greater control over the duration and order of imagery can be a stroke of aesthetic genius, I find that I can't rightly credit such a work of art as "cinema" - it's no accident that the same word describes both the art form and the physical location in which that art form is ideally meant to be viewed. One can closely replicate the experience of seeing any given motion picture on a television or computer screen, but it's disingenuous to claim that it's the same experience, ignoring the question of whether one experience is more desirable than the other.
There are two elements which are specifically cinematic; they cannot be replicated in any other medium. One of these is the edit; it is the tool by which cinema primarily attains its rhythm and durational specificity. In no other art form can the artist declare that the audience must first see this image, and after exactly a given number of 24ths of a second, must then see this image. Lev Kuleshov, one of the earliest of all film theorists, argued that the essence of cinema was the transition from one image to the next, and the meaning that creates in the mind of the viewer. He demonstrated this in a famous experiment whose details I will not go into, but it is indispensable knowledge for anyone even vaguely interested in studying the ways that cinema produces meaning.
The second specifically cinematic element is camera movement, which first consisted of only pans and tilts, until Cabiria in 1914 introduced the dolly shot, which finally enabled the camera to movie "into" the mise en scène. Camera movement, more than movement within the frame, is the primary difference between cinema and the other pictorial arts: painting and photography. For camera movement changes our perspective to the content of the image in a special way, emphasising the three-dimensional space in which the content exists (in this it is altogether different from editing, which changes our perspective while emphasising the graphic quality of the content). If there is a true analogue to camera movement, it is not to be found in any other "fine art": it is to be found only in the video game, a form whose visual vocabulary is in so many ways derived from cinema, and even more still in a narrative medium that is typically not conceived to be narrative at all, the theme park ride.
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The Analysis of Cinema
Because cinema is the intersection of many other art forms, it holds that it can be studied according to the rules of any one of those forms, or the combination of more than one of them. In practical terms, this never happens. Thanks largely to the dominance of Hollywood-style narrative continuity filmmaking, generations of filmgoers since the 1920s at least have been acclimated to think of film as a narrative medium with some fancy visual bits going on here and there, and virtually all film criticism since that time has been at least partially narrative criticism, concerning the characterisations, themes, and plot elegance of the film. Indeed, most schools of film theory map precisely onto schools of literary theory; though by far the most common film theory is too general even to be given an "-ism", being more akin to the method of close reading taught to students in high school literature courses.
Analysing film according to its architectural and sculptural elements - its sense of spatial relationships in design, in other words - is effectively dead, although the one potential bright side to the perfection of essentially flawless 3-D effects (a fad that seems to have hit its peak in the first half of 2010) is the re-awakening of the idea that cinema can be about the creation of pure environment - for example, the wildly successful Avatar ultimately defies any other critical frame, though so far, no other film made in that idiom has come remotely close to its achievement, but are content to wallow about in shocking mediocrity, crassly using 3-D as a gaudy way to increase ticket sales while in no way exploiting its architectural possibilities. The study of cinema's rhythmic elements, and the painterly/photographic elements of light and framing, are customarily tossed into one big pot named "formalism", which is held out as the "other kind" of analysis. It's hard for me not to regard it as unfortunate, that when there should be as many kind of "formalisms" as there are narrative theories (and in the '20s, it was so: France, Germany, and the Soviet Union were each well-known for having their own national, mutually incompatible formalism), all critics who discuss anything about a film other than its narrative elements all fall into that catch-all, even though some of us might rather talk about the way light is used than the language of editing effects; or have a greater interest in the film's rhythmic structure than the visual relationship between characters and the sets. All of it is just one "formalism", and even the strictest formalists tend to return that formalism to narrativity - the use of color, the depth of field, the long takes with slow pans all mean X, Y, or Z in relationship to this plot element, that character quirk. This is, of course, a side-effect of the mainstream acceptance that film is of its nature a storytelling medium; there still exist experimental and abstract films, but they are ghettoised to the point of invisibility.
Which is not to say that narrative approaches are inherently valueless; in fact, because of the dominance of narrative in mainstream cinema, they are necessarily valuable. Narrative details can be just as subtle and sophisticated as any formal element, and require the same amount of care to explore and explicate.
The dismaying thing about narrative criticism is how easily it descends into "message-based" discussions of a project - as can formal criticism, for that matter, though much less readily. Analysis that stops at the revelation, "this is what the film is about" is, to my mind, disappointingly shallow; what the film is "about" is where criticism should begin, and the work of the critic should rather be to explain "how" the film is "about" whatever it is telling us. The film ought to express its "about" to anybody who sits down and watches it; critical analysis is teasing out why it does so.
One may well question what value this kind of analysis has; that question comes from a position of ignorance, though that ignorance can doubtlessly be well-intentioned. I have never met a person whose love for any given art form was not increased considerably by their increased awareness of how that form functions; for there is then a double-layer of appreciation, first that of being satisfied with what the art does, second with being impressed by the relative level of skill with which it is done.
The Evaluation of Cinema
The difference between criticism and reviewing, I have stated, is that between saying "here is what this work of art is", and saying "this work of art is good or bad to the following degree". Criticism, though ideologically-based, is essentially objective: you may not agree with the validity of a given critical framework, but having accepted that framework as sound, the conclusions the critic reaches should be inescapable and repeatable. Reviewing, also ideologically based, is almost entirely a matter of taste; for who has exactly the same sense of what is "good" art or "bad" art as another person? I have a friend whose taste in cinema mirrors my own to an almost frightening degree, but when we get to talking about a certain American action filmmaker of the last 20 years, or a particular 1960s French miserabilist, things quickly go wrong.
So it is with reviewing: there can be no such thing as an "objective" film review, and there shouldn't be, because any review of any work of art is going to necessarily describe an emotional state that the reviewer felt in response to the film, that may not remotely match the reader's emotional state. And as I've argued, the purpose of all art (which thus makes it the purpose of film) is to create a response in the individual receiving it - but the nature of that art is and must be subjective.
It should be clear now that pure criticism, under my terms, is not possible; even the strictest criticism will be tinged by the critic's personal response to a given work of art. Which is as it should be; if art were objective, it would not need to exist.
But back to reviewing and evaluating. Having concluded that "quality" is something that cannot be defined in any real sense, it falls upon the reviewer to express his or her reaction to the film, and to explain why he or she felt these things. The second half is the harder part, but much the more important: the difference between "This sucked" and "Because of these reasons, this sucked" is that only the latter provides an opportunity for the reader to reflect upon his or her own thoughts and reactions to a given film, by contrast and comparison with the reviewer's. And if the review is meant to be a consumer guide, the latter example is more useful, for it explains whether the reviewer's tastes in arriving at "This sucked" are applicable to the reader. You can say "this movie sucked", and it tells me nothing about whether or not I will think it sucks; and if the reason you think it sucked is that it diverged too much from a book you love that I've never read, then there is no reason one way or the other for me to assume that I'll agree with you.
Much as criticism can be too heavily "message-based", so can evaluation; the conclusion that "this film is good" or "this film is bad" specifically because "I like what this film has to say" or the opposite. Since good vs. bad judgments are so essentially a matter of liking, this is a hard thing to avoid; but the aesthetics of a thing are not contingent upon its ideology. To take a concrete example: I do not like what Meet Me in St. Louis has to say (heterosexual pair-bonding is the most important thing of all; the tighter-knit the community, the more morally pure), and it's incumbent upon me to say that in the course of a theoretical review of the film - but I like very much how it goes about saying it, and it's also incumbent upon me to say that.
Deciding that you don't like a movie and then making excuses for why is intellectually cowardly; better by far to own up to the apparent contradiction of disliking something but finding what it does to be effective. But I am as guilty of this as anyone; I do not claim special privileges or seek to excuse my past or future behavior.
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Non-narrative Cinema
All that I've said thus far is well and good; but it willfully ignores the oldest branch of cinema, a branch that continues to provide challenging and fascinating work of which virtually every cinephile remains totally ignorant. I refer to non-narrative forms: from the purely abstract and non-representationl to the experimental; from the Lumière brothers' "actualities" to Norman McLaren work in creating art directly on celluloid, without a camera, to Godfrey Reggio's "Qatsi" films, with literally hundreds of other stops here and there along the way, the work of all the Maya Derens and Stan Brakhages and Bruce Conners and God knows how many lesser-known names.
Conceptually, there is no reason that these works cannot be judged according to the same standards of any more "mainstream" film. Depending upon how you define "cinema", in fact, Brakhage's The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes has more in common with Paul Blart: Mall Cop than with Brakhage's Mothlight. After all, the first two were created by photographic means using celluloid running through a camera at 24 frames per second, which is not true of the latter. This may seem like a pedantic definition of "cinema", and to be fair, it runs into some striking issues when we arrive at the modern age of digital cinematography; are we required to maintain that e.g. The Silence of the Lambs and Zodiac represent intractably different art forms, since the first was captured on photosensitive celluloid, while the second is completely digital? Obviously, according to any number of matrices - narrative elements, lighting philosophy, the emotional state created - these two works bear more similarities, by far, than either one does to Paul Blart or Mothlight.
I have gotten away from the topic at hand, which is non-narrative cinema (let us conditionally allow "cinema" as not being dependent on celluloid or the camera). Which, it should be said, is a vague if not misleading phrase: the conventional definition of "non-narrative" is any film which lacks an overt story. But "narrative" has another, altogether different meaning; a narrative, at its most bare, functional level, is a sequence of events placed in a given chronological order. Truly, a stream of abstract shapes, as we see in McLaren and Evelyn Lambert's Begone Dull Care, can hardly be said to have a "chronology" inherent unto itself; yet the human brain is stubbornly eager to assign befores and afters to any experience (it's partially for this reason that general relativity and quantum mechanics are so incredibly difficult to understand, even though they are well-defended scientifically; our minds are built to understand things as having a temporal order, because at the macro level in which we live and die, events tend to occur that way). Indeed, there are some experimental films whose purpose is entirely to examine and deconstruct this universal human habit of putting time constraints on non-linear streams. So even though it is theoretically foolish to describe non-narrative films in terms of their plots, we nevertheless can, and to a certain degree must, think of them in terms of their progression from beginning to end, and what emotional and intellectual effects that progression has on the viewer.
This is all as much to say, there is no reason that the analytical tools which work to explain narrative cinema cannot be satisfactorily used on non-narrative cinema as well, with the obvious exception of analyses related to plot structure.
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Antagony & Ecstasy: Cinema Through the Eyes of a Lone Blogger
Now that I've hopefully explained clearly and thoroughly how I understand the purpose and means of cinema, it's time for the rubber to meet the road. After all, this whole long essay is ultimately meant to explain how this blog functions. Which is to say: everything that I've said just now comes down to one man's opinion. It shouldn't need the saying, but it's the case with any review that people who disagree will get to wondering where the fuck this arrogant schmuck gets off thinking that he has all the answers and can tell everyone else what to think.
Of course that's not the point of reviewing, at least not as it's practiced here. I could easily preface every single review with the sentence, "What follows is strictly the opinion of the author, who acknowledges that other people will have conflicting opinions in certain respects". But I'd really rather not have to do that. It's pathetic to the point of dysfunction.
Still, in case it needs to be said: I do not assume that I have all the answers, nor do I intend to "solve" any film, ever. As I've said, I view the purpose of any critical work as providing a certain angle from which to view a work of art; perhaps a useful one, perhaps not. But certainly, in space of 1000 words and change, no reviewer could possibly address every possible reading of every element of even the most straightforward movie. As I understand my role, it's to discuss the aspects of a given film that interest me, and hope that the reader will be able to interpret that discussion for his or her own needs, whatever those may be. This requires an understanding of my own biases, and it is the explication of those biases which will concern the rest of this essay.
Tim Brayton: What He Likes
I am, as I've said here and there and all around, mostly a formalist. This interest comes from a very specific place in my life: I never set out to be a film reviewer at all, but in fact studied film with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. This is still my long-term goal, but that doesn't matter much, except in terms of explaining that the reason I attend so much to the construction of a given motion picture is essentially pragmatic. I'm less concerned with what effect a film has than with how that effect is generated through editing, lighting, and so on, because one day I hope generate those effects myself. I study films, in other words, that I might be able to do the same some day.
That said, the reason I aim to be a film director and not a poet or a sculptor or whathaveyou, is that I really love movies. So even as my appreciation of film is partially directed by strictly utilitarian motives, it is also directed by a sincere and deep love of the art form in and of itself. The fact that my interests lie primarily in the mechanics of the film does not imply that I only watch movies with a thief's eye, looking to see what works and what doesn't for my own use. Like any other viewer, I still want to be moved: to laughter, to tears, to excitement, to terror. I'm just a bit more aware of why I'm laughing, crying, cheering, or screaming, than a person whose interests are not so rigorously formal would be.
Thus, we get to the nub of the thing: my taste in movies tends towards those that are conspicuously well-crafted, regardless of their thematic or storytelling content; and if I had to choice between a film with a rigorous, crackerjack plot or a film that constantly investigates its own structure, at the expense of any real narrative urgency, I'll always favor the latter. I will also always find more love for a movie that could only ever exist as cinema, even if it is bogged-down with flaws, than a movie that is elegant and essentially perfect, that could just as easily be a novel or stageplay. Best of all, of course, are those rare works that are constantly aware of themselves as cinema, with a rich and compelling thematic layer expressed in terms that cannot be replicated outside of the medium, combining the best of all possibilities in one place. This is the realm of geniuses: Carl Theodor Dryer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Orson Welles, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Auteurism
Auteur theory is a difficult beast; it can be a powerful tool but is easily abused, and I do not pretend that I have not abused it.
On the one hand, we have the question: "Is any work of art primarily valuable because of the individual who created it?", to which the answer is obviously, and simply, no. Jane Campion has not, to date, made a film I have not enjoyed; but this does not mean that Jane Campion's films are valuable because of their Campion-ness. If I found out tomorrow that Campion has a secret alternate identity, and she has in reality directed every film credited to the non-existent Roland Emmerich, I will not therefore suddenly decide that 10,000 BC is a brilliant work.
Nor, of course, does the fact that a work has been written and/or directed by a specific individual answer all points about it. The Coen brothers have a distinctive mentality, as strongly-expressed in all of their works as you will find in any living filmmaker's canon; but to view their films as being entirely and utterly and irreducibly "Coenesque" is intellectually stagnant. A very significant part of what makes their films work, for example, is the cinematography; and for nearly every one of their features since 1991, the cinematographer has been Roger Deakins. The exception is 2008's Burn After Reading, shot by Emmanuel Lubezki. This is not at all an incidental difference; that film has a visual scheme very much unlike the brothers' other work, and to dismiss that difference is profoundly irresponsible. Compare Burn After Reading with other films shot by Lubezki, and the visual similarities are immediately obvious. Does this change the way we respond to Burn After Reading, relative to other movies directed by the Coen brothers? How could it not?
The value of auteur theory, on the other hand, is one of convenience; it is a shortcut, in effect. The Coens, by virtue of writing, directing, producing and editing virtually all of their movies, have a particularly strong hand in guiding the finished product; but we need not look at filmmakers quite so autocratic to see the point. Any director strong-willed enough to have a particular "stamp" is going to tend to direct movies that are in some ways similar to one another; and while this says nothing whatsoever about the value of the movie, it provides an easy place to begin analysis.
One can watch every Steven Spielberg film, and note that specific themes and visual tropes come up in nearly all of them; this does not make any particular Steven Spielberg film "good", but it allows us to quickly understand that a Steven Spielberg film has a high probability of being readable in terms of X and Y, which are not terms we would be able to apply to the films of e.g. Michelangelo Antonioni. Without knowing what Spielberg's next project will be, I can presume that the protagonist will have some kind of issue with an emotionally distant father-figure (or he will be an emotionally distant father-figure himself), there will be many shots that stress the act of looking at something else, it will seek to manipulate my emotions in favor of domesticity and small-c conservatism over radicalism. If I pretended that Spielberg's status as the director of the film was totally unimportant, I'd have to dedicate time and energy to ferreting all of that out. Obviously, the writer of the film, the crew and cast, all dictate to no small degree the manner in which the film functions - and this is something that I will be able to pay more attention to, by having my "Spielberg film" filter in place.
Less thoughtfully, since I know that I have tended to enjoy films directed by Steven Spielberg in the past, I have a better than even chance of enjoying his next project. And if it came to be the case that I had to prioritise my film-viewing, it's not unreasonable to favor the work of a director (or actor, or writer, or cinematographer, or costume designer) whom I typically like, over the work of a director I typically dislike.
A final note: subscribing, more or less, to auteurism, does not in any way mean that I subscribe to the auteur's intention; it is a waste of time to wonder what the artist "meant". The film means what it means independently of the artist's intentions. As far as I use auteur theory, it is as a statistical tool, not as a key to unlocking all the hidden meanings of a piece. There are a few exceptions, most of which specifically involve one filmmaker consciously referencing the work of another, in which ignoring the influence of that filmmaker is being willfully blind; but absent those cases, I couldn't possibly care less what is going on in the director's mind at the time of filming; only what makes it onscreen is important.
Tim Brayton: What He Likes, Resumed
In the interests of time, let me resort to a laundry-list of presumptions:
-A film that is conspicuously constructed is more interesting than one that hides its construction.
-Cinema can mirror reality; it can create absolute unrealities. Neither of these are inherently more valuable than the other. What is good is that whatever universe the film occupies, it takes all pains to establish and perfect that universe for the viewer.
-It is well for a film to take the least possible amount of time to make its point.
-Aesthetic merit is completely divorced from a film's moral perspective or its "message". A horror film that is elegantly composed, well-acted, assembled so that it is genuinely moody and chilling, and structured in a fascinating manner is more artistically valuable than a film which passionately argues in favor of political statement I hold dear, but is clumsy and dull in the process.
-The most fertile period in cinema history is the latter half of the 1920s, when the art had matured enough that the most innovative artists were inventing new vocabularies at an alarming rate. After the coming of sound, a certain set of rules became privileged above all others, and despite periodic movements dedicated to establishing new rules, the essential language of cinema is essentially unchanged from the period just before World War II. This does not mean that movies cannot be made within those rules which are breathtakingly artistic and wonderful. However, it is generally the case that the further into cinema history we go, the less experimentation that we find in mainstream cinema.
-Related to this, Hollywood-style continuity editing, and particularly the shot-reverse shot technique, has a stranglehold on the imagination of mainstream narrative filmmakers.
-All things being equal, "cheap" styles (gangster movies, film noir, horror, etc.) are likelier to produce truly challenging works, as the filmmakers are not so beholden to pleasing the widest possible audience. The more expensive a movie is, the less likely that it will do anything truly original - a general rule, not an absolute.
-"Prestige" filmmaking, by definition, aims not for the lowest-common denominator, but for the most moderate: not mercenary enough to be honest, not brave enough to command our interest. Nothing is more contemptibly dull than a movie made solely to win awards.
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Using Antagony & Ecstasy
I will conclude with a simple outline of the "rules" governing the ratings system of this blog.
First, for any newly-released film there is a binary "I found this worth my time" vs. "I found this a waste of time", expressed by the image of the poster at the top of every review. If it is aligned to the left, I would recommend the film. If it is aligned to the right, I would not.
There is then a rating scale at the end of ever newly-released film, out of 10. This is fairly self-explanatory, but rather than thinking in terms of percentages (by which logic 7/10 would be a "C", and anything below 5/10 an absolute failure), this is approximately the way that I mean for it to be taken:
10/10
Either an effectively flawless masterpiece, or a work so compelling in its execution and the issues it raises that its flaws are of no account. Essential viewing.
9/10
An excellent film, one I think everyone should see; there's room for improvement here and there, but by and large, I have virtually nothing to say against it. Not essential viewing, but it leaves a lot to think about.
8/10
Really good in most respects. The flaws start to show themselves enough that they can't be ignored, and I'd be hard-pressed to claim in earnestness that you "must" see it, but I'd urge you to do so.
7/10
Good all around. Not terribly special; either it's ribboned with small flaws, there's one big flaw, or nothing it does is so terrifically amazing that it got me pumped up. But I rather liked it anyway, and there's at least a chance that I'd buy it on impulse if I saw it on sale, though I probably wouldn't watch it very often.
6/10
The splitting point: it's doing enough right that I probably had a decent time watching it, but I'd really drag my feet about recommending it. It's doing good and bad things in mostly equal measure, but I tend to think more about the good things on the way out. Hardly necessary, but it's a way to waste time.
5/10
Nothing about this film is specifically, unutterably "bad"; but nothing is good, either. If there's one or two moments that I really liked, it would drift up to a 6; one or two that really hurt, it drifts down to a 4. I would have a very hard time explaining why I thought anybody "should" see this.
4/10
Something is wrong. One single major thing, a bunch of tiny things, but something is wrong, and there's not much to offset it. Of all the rankings, this is the one where I'm most unhappy I spent my money on the film.
3/10
We're starting to get into the red zone here. There are a lot of damn problems, but it's at least possible that those problems are rather more amusing in their badness than offensive. Still, there's officially nothing that "works" about the movie, and if one or two things do, they're nowhere near enough.
2/10
Tipping into out-and-out incompetence. Nothing is at all right with the film, but the masochist in me starts to get pretty enthusiastic about how dreadful it all is. Or maybe it's just so painful that I've convinced myself that I'm enthusiastic.
1/10
Truly offensive, odiously bad filmmaking. This is the one where I left with slack-jawed amazement that human beings smart enough to operate a camera could perpetrate... that.
0/10 A very special ranking, reserved for the most unconscionably hideous crimes against the artform of cinema. Watching this kind of movie will very possibly permanently lower the quality of your life.
To be honest, I'm not entirely delighted to use rankings; I like to think that the content of my reviews speaks for itself. But still, a convention is a convention.
However, I specifically don't use either of those rating systems in my classic movie reviews, for those are where I'm trying to dig into the function of the movie a little more than just plain "reviewing" it; if you just have to know, though, I do assign a number and a fresh/rotten for every one of those on my Rotten Tomatoes page.
Lastly, there's an index; it's over to the right, under my fake picture. I have catalogued all of the reviews according to a number of more-or-less useful systems; it's the easiest way to browse or hunt for a particular title.
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Conclusion
So, yeah, that's what I'm thinking about, every time I review a film. Hopefully, this has all been helpful and illuminating; if not, I at least appreciate your patience in making it all the way through. I reserve the right to be a complete hypocrite about any part of this at any time.
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1 comments:
I claim no special knowledge of cinema or filmmaking, but I can't help but feel that such a thoughtful and complete statement should have at least one comment saying so. Thank you for your blog. I enjoy it a lot.
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