No subject

[Steelhead]

Don, RE: Art, Film, and Pynchon

All that is very good, probably quite true, and not being a film historian,
just a frustrated film critic, I can't argue with you at all. But I'd have
to say
that films were certainly being taken seriously as _entertainments_, if not
as "art" from nearly the beginning of the medium. Pudovkin and Eisenstein
were certainly writing "seriously" about film "theory" early on, and the
boys and girls at Ufa were obviously into something that, if it didn't have
pretensions to art, was undoubtedly unlike anything the chumps at the
biergarten had seen at last year's Wagnerfest. In fact, we had first-rate
surrealistic film-making before we had surrealistic novel writing.

Of course, your historical analysis, citing the coincident rise of the
European ART cinema (though the Russians, Germans, and French seem to have
been making damn complex movies about quite serious subjects all along,
despite--or because of-- the wars breaking out around them: perhaps, then,
only the Swedes and Italians were late comers--there must be a doctoral
thesis on the role of the NY Cosa Nostra and the international distribution
rights of Rossollini and Fellini), television, and the art house cinema
(made possible by anti-trust actions against Hollywood), is quite
interesting and deserving of Further study.

But in the long run you only help prove my theory that once movies began
being treated as "art," once they became intellectually routinized, if you
will, something irreplaceable was lost.  I don't know about you, Don, but I
started going to the movies on my own when I was about 13.  Let's assume
Pynchon did the same.  What would he have seen on the screen there in
Oyster Bay Long Island back around 1950 and how do those movies compare to
what was being released in 1970, when you say film had "established itself
as an academic discipline"?

Well, for starters we've got Ray's In a Lonely Place, Huston's Asphalt
Jungle, Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Cromwell's Caged, Ford's Rio Grande and
Wagonmaster, Mankiewickz's All About Eve and No Way Out, Reed's The Third
Man, Lang's House By the River and American Guerilla in the Phillapines,
Hitchock's Strangers on a Train, Renoir's the River, Dassin's Night and the
City, and on and on.  And 1950 wasn't as good a year as '49 or '48.

What do we get in 1970?  The best I can remember are a bunch of
"literature" inspired works like Altman's MASH (far from his best work),
Fellini's Satyricon (visually stunning, intellectually shallow), Russell's
Women in Love (poor Lawrence), The Owl & the Pussycat?, and, the best of
the lot, Bertolucci's Conformist.  Slim Pickings.

I know what your saying about the rise of the method actors and Monty Cliff
and James Dean I can handle. But Brando? Huh? Old mumble-mouth?  That's the
road that gave us Stallone. Give me John Garfield, any day.

BtW, Kane was sabotaged by Hearst critics, and shut out of many theaters because
of the oligarchical/tyranncial nature (Hollander, are you out there
listening?) of the Hollywood film industry at the time--for a first rate
(nonacademic) account of this (and other seamy indescretions of the moguls,
stars, and starlets) pick up Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, which
belongs on every Pynchon lovers shelf right next to Krackuer's From Hitler
to Caliagari and Truffaut's Films in My Life.

Steelhead