Screen Writings

Bert Cardullo

Description

Volume 2 of 'Screen Writings' offers close readings of genre films and acknowledged film classics in an attempt to explore both the aesthetics of genre and the definition of 'classic'.

'Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics' offers close readings of genre films and acknowledged film classics in an attempt to explore both the aesthetics of genre and the definition of  'classic' - as well as the changing perception of so-called classic movies over time. Implicitly theoretical as much as it is unashamedly practical, this book is a model not only of film analysis, but also of the enlightened deployment of cultural studies in the service of cinema study.

List of Illustrations; Introduction: The Film of Value; Part I. Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics; Shooting the City: The Gangster, Manhattanites, and the Movies;Back to the Future, or the Vanguard Meets the Rearguard; Flags and Letters, Men and War; Farce, Dreams, and Desire: Some Like It Hot Re-viewed; Interlude; Switching Genres, or Playing to the Camera, Playing to the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting; On the Road Again: The Road Film and the Two Coppolas; The Coming-of-Age Fim a la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni; Early vs. Later Bergman: Winter Light and Autumn Sonata Revisited; "Everyone Has His Reasons": Words, Images, and La grande illusion in the Cinema of Jean Renoir; A Passage to Tokyo: The Art of Ozu, Remembered; Through the Looking Glass: The American Art Cinema in an Age of Social Change; Bibliography; Index

Sujets

• Cinema
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781843313885
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

SCREEN WRITINGS

SCREEN WRITINGS Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics

Volume II

Bert Cardullo

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2010 by ANTHEM PRESS 7576 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Bert Cardullo 2010

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN13: 978 184331 837 8 (Hbk) ISBN10: 1 84331 837 7 (Hbk)

ISBN13: 978 1 84331 879 8 (eBook) ISBN10: 1 84331 879 2 (eBook)

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Film of Value

Table of Contents

Part I. Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics

1.

2.

3.

4.

Shooting the City: The Gangster, Manhattanites, and the Movies (on Paul Mazursky’sNext Stop, Greenwich Village, Martin Scorsese’sTaxi Driver, John Badham’sSaturday Night Fever, Neil Simon’sThe Goodbye Girl, and Woody AllenManhattan)

Back to the Future, or the Vanguard Meets the Rearguard (on Gus Van Sant’sLast Days, Jun Ichikawa’sTony Takitani, Kim Kiduk’s3Iron, Michel Gondry’sEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Miranda July’sMe and You and Everyone We Know)

Flags and Letters, Men and War (on Clint Eastwood’sFlags of Our Fathersand Letters from Iwo Jima)

Farce, Dreams, and Desire:Some Like It HotReviewed

Interlude

5.

Switching Genres, or Playing to the Camera, Playing to the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting

vii

ix

1

3

23

49

61

71

73

vi

6.

7.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

On the Road Again: The Road Film and the Two Coppolas (on Sophia Coppola’sLost in Translationand Francis Ford Coppola’sThe Rain People)

The ComingofAge Filmà laFellini: The Case ofI vitelloni

Part II. Classification, Reclassification, and Assessment

8.

9.

10.

11.

Early vs. Later Bergman:Winter LightandAutumn SonataRevisited

“Everyone Has His Reasons”: Words, Images, and La grande illusionin the Cinema of Jean Renoir

A Passage to Tokyo: The Art of Ozu, Remembered (onTokyo Story)

Through the Looking Glass: The American Art Cinema in an Age of Social Change

Bibliography of Related Criticism

Index

87

103

113

115

127

149

161

173

177

List of Illustrations

1. Next Stop, Greenwich Village 2. Saturday Night Fever 3. Tony Takitani 4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 5. Flags of Our Fathers 6. Some Like It Hot 7. The Rain People 8. Winter Light 9. La grande illusion 10. Bonnie and Clyde 11. Midnight Cowboy 12. The Graduate

Introduction

The Film of Value

Throughout history, two factors have formed people’s taste in any art, their valuing of it, that is: knowledge of that art and knowledge of life. Obviously this is still true, but the function of taste seems to be altering. As formalist aesthetic canons have come to seem less and less tenable, standards in art and life have become more and more congruent, and as a result the function of taste is increasingly the selection and appraisal of the works that are most valuable to the individual’s very existence. So our means for evaluating films naturally become more and more involved with our means for evaluating experience; aesthetic standards don’t become identical with standards in life but they are certainly related – and, one hopes, somewhat braver. Of course the whole process means that human beings feed on themselves, on their own lives variously rearranged by art, as a source of values. But despite other prevalent beliefs about the past connected with theology and religion, we are coming to see that people have always been the source of their own values. In the century in which this responsibility, this liberation, became increasingly apparent – the twentieth – the intellect of man simultaneously provided a new art form, the film, to make the most of it. That art form is obviously still with us, and now, in the twentyfirst century, more than ever, it seems. And its critics proliferate in number, in part because of what I describe above: the “personal” element involved in the watching of any movie, and the ease nowadays with

x

INTRODUCTION

which, through the Internet, one can communicate that personal response to others. If, as Oscar Wilde once said, “Criticism is the highest form of autobiography” – because only by “intensifying his own personality” could the critic interpret the personality and work of others – then film criticism must be an even higher form. What follows, inScreen Writings, is precisely such “autobiographical” criticism on my part, on what I consider to be some films of value. The book is arranged thematically around the theme of genreand classicism, or, aesthetically speaking, around the questions “What constitutes a oneofakind classic?”, “What creates, or typifies, a genre?”, and “When do the two become the same thing?” – questions, as one might guess, of great personal interest to me. From a glance at the table of contents inScreen Writings, the reader will quickly discover, not only that a number of the films treated are European or Asian, but also that a number of them – including the American ones – are “art films.” I say “including the American ones” because by about 1920, long after American films had cornered the world market, a rough, debatable, but persistent generalization had come into being: America made entertainment movies, while Europe (and later the rest of the world) made art films. Even back then some observers knew that there were great exceptions on both sides of that generalization, particularly the second part. (Everyfilmmaking country makes entertainment movies; they are the major portion of every nation’s industry. But no country’s entertainment movies have had the success of American pictures.) That generalization has become increasingly suspect as it has become increasingly plain that good entertainment films cannot be made by the ungifted; further, that some directors of alpine talent have spent their whole careers making works of entertainment. Nonetheless, for compact purposes here, the terms “entertainment” and “art” can serve to distinguish between those films, however well made and aesthetically rewarding, whose original purpose was to pass the time; and those films, however poorly made and aesthetically pretentious, whose original purpose was the illumination of experience and the extension of consciousness. In this view, the generalization about American and European films has some validity – less than was assumed for decades, still some validity. And that validity has determined the makeup of the collection of pieces inScreen Writings. Which is to say that I write mainly about films made beyond American borders; and the relatively small number of American pictures I do