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Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.past-films, alt.movies, rec.arts.movies.current-films, alt.cult-movies
From: missguy...@hotmail.com (miss guydid)
Date: 12 Jun 2004 13:38:28 -0700
Local: Sun, Jun 13 2004 4:38 am
Subject: Re: how come we still talk primarily about directors?
Chris Collins <raisinja...@earthlink.net> wrote in message <news:BCF04EA6.8241%raisinjack9@earthlink.net>... actually, it's the opposite. when cahier crew came up with the theory, > 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 > The Cahiers crew succeeded in imprinting it on the popular imagination. Or > What the auteur theory came out of was the sense that film was a processed, there were plenty of film artists around, like bergman, mizoguchi, renoir, satyajit ray, etc. 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. > The dream of Truffaut especially was to create a cinema as intensely i don't think so. that would have closer to what resnais was aiming > 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? 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 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. > And you know how those Frenchies love their 'theories.' 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 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. 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? 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. > The power of film is its mass hypnotic effect, somewhat like Hitler's 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. in fact, the most devastating and farreaching use of film have been in > (Television has the same hypnotic power, but stripped of cinema's positive taliban didn't allow tv but i don't think afghanis were doing anything > 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.) 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. You must Sign in before you can post messages.
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