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- Author: Sam Rohdie x
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This book consists of 50 categories arranged in alphabetical order centred on film modernism. Each category, though autonomous, interacts, intersects, juxtaposes with the others, entering into a dialogue with them and in so doing creates connections, illuminations, associations and rhymes which may not have arisen in a more conventional framework. The categories refer to particular films and directors that raise questions related to modernism, and, inevitably thereby to classicism. The book is more in the way of questions and speculations than answers and conclusions. Its intention is to stimulate not simply by the substance of what is said, but by the way it is said and structured. Most attention is given to the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, João César Monteiro, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nicholas Ray, Alain Resnais, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Orson Welles. The apparent arbitrary order and openness of the book, based as it is on the alphabet is indebted to Jean-Luc Godard’s interrogation of History and of film history especially true in his stunning Histoire(s) du cinema.
Since the 1970s, many academics and teachers have been taking the study of film out of Film Studies by producing curricula and critical literature hostile to notions of artistic endeavour and aesthetic value. Montage simply is the joining together of different elements of film in a variety of ways, between shots, within them, between sequences, within these. This book offers specific experiences of montage. Though there are clusters of experiences and practices that films share in common, each film is specific to itself. The book is led by that specificity towards these clusters and away from them then back to the films once more. Eadwaerd Muybridge's studies of human and animal locomotion consisted of photographed plates that reproduced bodies in movement in a sequence of still photographs he published in 1887. These reproductions, though sequential, were composed of intermittent, discontinuous immobile units, in effect, a linked series of snapshots. The game in
A series of likenesses are posed in the film between unlike things: the delinquent, confused, miserable Ettore, child of the borgate and Christ the Saviour; the whore, Mamma Roma, and the mother of Christ; the present of Italy and the past of Italy (the Renaissance) and further back a classical past at the time of Christ; a film image and a painting; low culture and high culture; the profane and the sacred. The pattern of placing one type of text (painting, literary, musical) against one from another time is familiar in Pasolini’s films. The films, taken as a whole are extended allegories in which a narrative and all it includes of objects, gestures and actions is equated with meanings outside the narrative.
There are two symmetrical spaces in the film and a space between them. The spaces are the other side of each other and the contrary of one another: the interior is closed, social (meetings, eroticism, conversations), the exterior is open and anti-social (private, hostile and misanthropic). Between the two is the bus that he travels in from one space to another. Monteiro plays within this simple structure where things become very complicated. Each space has its own rhythms and music through the editing and the shooting. Monteiro plays upon, as one might play with a poem or a piece of music, with the fixed and the passing, with duration and tempo, with rhymes and counterpoints.
Jean-Luc Godard tends to break up any pattern or configuration he gives shape to in his films or whose shape he happens to encounter or discover as it is being formed or perceived through the lens of the camera or at the editing table. The images and sounds in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98) are mostly fragments from other unities cut out from an original context and, even if recognisable, something new.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s films can be divided roughly into two categories. One operatic: spectacular, melodramatic, colourful, passionate, that takes place in multiple settings often in exteriors and with large casts. Time in these films is historical time, inexorable, moving forward.The other category is chamber music and chamber theatre.
The American cinema is first and foremost an industry producing goods for mass consumption and profit. Filmmakers, like Orson Welles and John Cassavetes, who experimented with new forms of film outside the conventions of Hollywood, were not welcome in Hollywood. Though Hollywood has always supported innovations that its commercial system could make profitable, it has not welcomed innovations with limited appeal to audiences, innovations that went too far.
What is important in the doubling of Bacon’s paintings by Bertolucci in Last Tango is less the specific duplications in his work and their re-creation in film, than a more general practice in Bertolucci’s work at once classical and resistant to classicism. Bertolucci’s narratives turn back on themselves, are enigmatic and elliptical, sometimes obscure, often unresolved, as in Ingmar Bergman’s films, especially Bergman’s Persona where identity and doubling are central as they are in the films of Orson Welles
The make-do, hodge-podge, bricolage quality of his films was not simply a consequence of conditions of production in his non-Hollywood work, but also a quality in his Hollywood productions, one reason his films were unfamiliar to audiences and not successful. Rather than sketchiness, fragmentation, lack of finish and heterogeneity being merely a result of economic difficulties, they were characteristic of Welles’ style.