how come we still talk primarily about directors? - rec.arts.movies.past-films

Message from discussion how come we still talk primarily about directors?

Chris Collins

View profile

More options Jun 13 2004, 8:45 am

Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.past-films, alt.movies, rec.arts.movies.current-films, alt.cult-movies

From: Chris Collins <raisinja...@earthlink.net>

Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 00:45:12 GMT

Local: Sun, Jun 13 2004 8:45 am

Subject: Re: how come we still talk primarily about directors?

  Reply to author
  |
  Forward
  | Print
  | View thread
  | Show original
  | Report this message
  | Find messages by this author
  

In article e18a7727.0406121238.7085c...@posting.google.com, miss guydid at
missguy...@hotmail.com stated:

> Chris Collins <raisinja...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> <news:BCF04EA6.8241%raisinjack9@earthlink.net>...
>> In article 7b98c3ee.0406101718.7e268...@posting.google.com, choral reef at
>> symphonic...@hotmail.com stated:

>>> some people are more partial to 'auteur theory' than others. some
>>> reject it passionately.
>>> yet, all of us still talk of the director as being the primary
>>> artistic force behind movies.

>> The Cahiers crew succeeded in imprinting it on the popular imagination. Or
>> rather the media that has replaced it.

>> What the auteur theory came out of was the sense that film was a processed,
>> impersonal medium with a contrived, stagey air of unreality about it.
>> Imagine the studio system as a conveyor belt, each movie emerging with
>> 'product' stamped on it. What it had in glamour and accessibility and
>> shorthand realism, it lacked in psychological purity. So, they sniffed out
>> what struck them as psychologically pure and canonized it.

> actually, it's the opposite. when cahier crew came up with the theory,
> there were plenty of film artists around, like bergman, mizoguchi,
> renoir, satyajit ray, etc.

Was Bergman well established at the genesis of the idea?

> the cahier crew made the then-outrageous argument that many of those
> conveyer belt movies that came out of hollywood were indeed works of
> auteurs.

Then maybe the Theory was an attempt to confer status on the movies they
spooged themselves over so they could feel less guilty about doing so?

>> The dream of Truffaut especially was to create a cinema as intensely
>> personal, as pure, as the novel. As a form, at its best, the novel gives you
>> a sense of the internal life of the writer to the point of becoming a
>> controlled psychic exorcism with all of his experiences, fears, and desires
>> gushing out, usually between the words. It can feel like the writer is
>> sitting in a room and directly addressing you, offering universal truths
>> without being didactic, and we revere writers who can reach that level. Why
>> can't a movie be the same? Must film be an irreparably schizo medium?
>> What's between the words in Hitchcock?

> i don't think so. that would have closer to what resnais was aiming
> it. or bergman. truffaut wanted film as an artistic outlet; he was
> enamoured with the filmMAKING. he wanted to be liberated thru film,
> for his personality to merge with the rest of the world. he grew up a
> lonely kid hungry for attention and film was his means to connect. he
> didn't so much want to draw people into his world as draw himself out
> into the larger world. 'love on the run' is where personal has become
> totally public: not just truffaut but his movies about himself and his
> thoughts about his movies about himself.

>> At least that's the impression that I get from 'The 400 Blows.' I think
>> Truffaut may have said as much somewhere.

> this is his first, cautious, thoughtful movie. as it was largely
> about his childhood, it tended to be more personal than his later
> films where he was more interested in the outward telling than in
> self-exploration.
> jules and jim is, foremost, personal FILMMAKING and only secondarily a
> personal film.

I've only seen that by Truffaut, so I can't rightly speak of the others. But
wasn't the whole Doinel series essentially autobiographical?

>> And you know how those Frenchies love their 'theories.'

> with truffaut it was less theory than a hammer. it was godard and
> rivette who were the real theoreticians. truffaut was essentially a
> romantic and sentimentalist and he abandoned his theories in practice
> as his career progressed. later, he just wanted to make normal, even
> conventional, films. it was godard who got involved in the meaning of
> cinema and dismantled it into i dunno what during his vertov yrs. and
> rivette is a big mystery to me except secret defense and va savoir.
> among the new wavers, truffaut eventually became the least auteurish.
> he later insisted more on story and characterization than visual style
> or personal expression unlike rohmer who stuck to his moral tale
> format, godard with his intellectual antics, and rivette with his
> incorrigible formalistic austerity.

>> The problem is that film is made with a dark room full of people in mind
>> (you all). Novels are conceived in terms of the reader, an individual (you).
>> Film is experienced collectively, the novel personally. It's public rather
>> than private speech, with about a dozen authors at that! And public speech,
>> for better and worse, can never be as nakedly honest as private speech.
>> People are always more guarded and self-conscious -- rhetorical -- speaking
>> to a crowd, and a crowd has a psychology and set of responses all its own.

> i disagree. it depends on the movie. i'm sure LOR fans experience it
> collectively. but, i don't think anyone gives a damn who thinks what
> in the next seat when watching stuff like faithless or mulholland
> drive. and i never felt as alone as when i saw AI.

On a subconscious level, I think most people perceive and are affected by
how other people are experiencing a film. Laughter or a gasp of surprise is
a reminder that others are responding to the same thing and you match this
against your own responses. People are more likely to "like" something if
those around them are. Don't underestimate the herd instinct.

And directors are aware of this. They get a kick out of how an audience
responds to a film, and they tailor their movies with this in mind. You
can't not do it -- it has to make sense to an audience, and group response
is always a factor in playing to an audience.

There's a lot of psychological gamesmanship involved in it and it's not just
a little bit cynical. (If I were a grad student I might write a paper on how
movies are "fascist" in this regard)

Think of how writers and directors conceive of reaching the audience -- I
don't think it's in terms of "him" or "her" (as with a novel), but rather
"them." Then think about how this affects the project in the conception
stage. It's tailored to group psychology which I think is more the factor in
filmwatching.

> also, cinema offers a world so fully realized that you become totally
> pulled into its reality. it becomes only you and the movie. in a
> stage play, you're always aware of the fellow audiences and the
> actors. watching tv, you are aware of the refrigerator in the other
> room. when reading a book, you stop and go, maybe talk on the phone,
> then return to the book, take a bite out of apple, scratch your crotch
> and look for lice, go to the washroom, look out the window, talk to
> family or friends. it's actually more collective than filmviewing
> unless you're totally concentrated on the reading and few people are.
> most read on buses or at the beach with scantily clad women around and
> how much can you concentrate on words when there's a nice ass going
> by?

The factors you site that pull you out of a book have to do with external
elements. That doesn't affect the structural integrity of the work itself or
make it less believable. The book is still there. In the case of your
attention wandering, that's a failure of either the writer or your attention
span.

You're right that in the cinema you're more quickly engaged and there are
less external distractions. But those distractions that ruin a film are part
and parcel of it -- bad lighting, hammy acting, poor editing, etc. In a
novel, all the failings that make the work itself less believable can be
laid squarely at the foot of the writer. That's simplicity of form. Film is
a complex medium that has so many factors coming in to play that a clarity
of vision on a literary level is damn near impossible. The more parts a
machine has, the more likely to break down. What I sense the auteurists were
trying to do is impose a semblance of order, deliberation, and
analyze-ability (for lack of a better word) on what is by its very nature
organized chaos.

> but when you watch a movie, it's you and the movie. the movie takes
> you far far away and you feel like you're in lala land. you forget the
> world outside, you forget other people in the theatre. in fact, when
> it's over, you feel kinda embarassed that it's just a movie and other
> people experienced the same and are getting up and walking out and
> going to the washroom and going wee and wee while another guy goes
> into a toilet stall and starts flushing to drown out his fart. it's
> when the movie ends and you walk to the car among other people that
> you realize you're back in collective reality. movie takes you away
> from the collective.

You may be right. Maybe it's an idiosyncracy of mine, but I haven't
experienced that level of rapturous involvement at a film showing in a long
time. I assume it's not at every movie that you're completely subsumed in
viewing - certainly you have critical faculties. I wonder what percentage of
any given audience at a particular film achieves that and what share remains
conscious of the artifice.

But I think the psychic significance of sharing an experience with a group
of people remains a factor in level of involvement. I'd posit that people
will become less involved in a movie in which they're sitting in the dark
watching by themselves than with an audience. I sense a connection to the
other people walking out of a theater - we've been subject to the same
experience, or at least simulation of it.

>> The power of film is its mass hypnotic effect, somewhat like Hitler's
>> speeches. It makes us feel part of something larger, and closer to the other
>> people viewing. You're an emotional hostage. Because of that it's probably
>> the most politically powerful medium: think of how much 20th century
>> totalitarianism invested in it.

> not really true. yes, film is powerful but its use by totalitarian
> powers has been overestimated and its impact overrated.
> russian people didn't like eisenstein and few people saw his films. a
> film lecturer once told my class that the most popular filmmaker
> during early soviet era was charlie chaplin. so despite lenin's
> yakking about potential of cinema, it had little to do with bolshevik
> seizure or maintenance of power.
> same with hitler. triumph of the will came after hitler gained power
> and he didn't rely on film to gain or hold power.
> mao and his peasant army took china without cinema and cinema under
> mao was mostly dull propaganda and had little to do with communist
> hold on power.
> ho chi minh and vietcong's resolve to spread communism in vietnam had
> little to do with film. and taliban and khmer rouge banned film and tv
> altogether.
> in fact, film, despite or because of its power, is dangerous to
> totalitarians because of its liberating power, like music.
> totalitarians have been more eager to control film than use it.

If I seemed to be implying that cinema was a successful tool of
totalitarianism that wasn't my intention. The past century has shown that
ultimately all forms of totalitarian manipulation break down. Were you the
one who posted that article about Stalin? He intuited that cinema had the
most power. I doubt that a movie would foment a revolution, but if any
medium can, it's probably the one.

> in fact, the most devastating and farreaching use of film have been in
> capitalist countries where it's all about personal freedom,
> individualism, consumerism, feeding fantasies.
> totalitarians feared cinema just as they feared rock music. i suppose
> a totalitarian can order the creation of pro-commie or pro-fascist
> rock band but what'd be the point, just as it's ridiculous when
> rockers espouse radical dogmatism--the clash's maoism.

Rock & roll is too American, too adolescent, to effectively offer dogma. But
Battleship Potemkin is no less overpowering, at least to me, for its
dogmatic origins. On the other hand, it is offering a liberation fantasy, so
maybe that's how it gets by with what it does.

>> (Television has the same hypnotic power, but stripped of cinema's positive
>> attributes [mythological resonance, connectedness]. It has the same powers
>> of persuasion, but numbs and isolates people beyond the possibility of
>> trying to do anything about it.)

> taliban didn't allow tv but i don't think afghanis were doing anything
> about anything. under mao's china, less than 1% of the people owned
> tv. yet, i don't think the average chinese was all that thoughtful or
> conscientious about politics.
> people want entertainment. they'll get it thru tv, gossiping on the
> phone, playing cards, watching sports, going bowling.

Don't forget usenet discourse.

Reply to author Forward