Reading About Watching

Usually I prefer reading fiction but, being between fiction novels now, I've gone back to the books of movie criticism I got earlier this year. I finished Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation and have continued reading Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies. Tarantino's book was a great companion to the movies he talked about, a charmingly personal tour of '70s cinema. I certainly didn't always agree with him. I can't share his love for Paradise Alley and I was a little surprised he considered Sylvester Stallone's inspiration for the film to be entirely The Dead End Kids. I thought it was at least partially inspired by Night and the City. But his views on Steve McQueen films and on Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse really enhanced my appreciation for them.

Kael's book, largely written in the '50s, is less interesting to me for the insights Kael has into the films she's talking about and more as a specimen of opinion pieces from the era. Of all the books I've read from the '50s, hers is the most directly expressive of conservative opinions and it gives me a clearer impression of how politics were polarised at that time than I've ever had before. This is from her chapter on New Wave British films:

The semidocumentary surface of these films is linked to an ideology which is in its way peculiar to English film critics--the ideology of commitment. If you read Sight and Sound, in which so many films are appraised for the director's degree of commitment to a social point of view (good if left wing, bad if not), you will discover that in this ideology, location shooting, particularly around working-class locations, is, in itself, almost a proof of commitment. In judging works from other countries, the English will overestimate a film like Marty, and they'll suggest that a film that is stylized or that deals with upper-class characters is somehow "evasive"--that it doesn't want to come to terms with the material. This attitude gives the critics an extraordinarily high moral tone.

Imagine what she'd have thought of Jeanne Dielmann getting voted number one on Sight and Sound's greatest films list.

The British films she talks about in the cited chapter include some I admired myself--Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, and Look Back in Anger--and Kael is not entirely negative about them. She seems to have liked Room at the Top best of all. But she makes a good point that realism or focus on working-class characters does not, by themselves, make movies great.

X Sonnet #1746

The mad and restless horses prowl the heath.
The whites of violent eyes demand a light.
Obtrusive fog descends like monster teeth.
Pervasive chill compels the blood to fight.
A giant toe could span a couple trains.
Surrounding forests dropped their leaves of cash.
Cavorting ghosts convened for growing pains.
When life arose, 'twas over barley mash.
Where falling trees arrive at leaves it's late.
The autumn weather's nice for cleaning floors.
But faeries giving birth'll make you wait.
Despite the fact you never cared for bores.
A fleet of ties eclipsed the collar sun.
Across the leggy plain the trousers run.