As artists, filmmakers have to make committed and unalterable decisions about the look, feeling, and ultimate meaning of their films. The choices are rather finite in number, but they are much vaster than people of narrow tastes or imagination would imagine. They will have to decide if the focus is one conversation among people and if it will be in groups of two or more. They will have to above all decide in what tone human relations will take place. They will have to decide how crowded the environment will be, what the angle on the environment will be, whether objective or subjective - the latter through point of view editing and shooting. They may even decide for the film to be about environment or landscape more than about people. Or conversely, the focus will be on the people or actors almost exclusively.
One of the many things that gets talked about in 1970s films is the intensity, or so-called shock effect of its depiction of sexual or violent content. As we shall see, however, the issue is not so much of the content of sex or violence but rather of an attitude towards a certain form of dramatic representation. The style of presentation was used for any sort of content and of course sex and violence are natural attention grabbers in human life. The important thing though is to interpret an aesthetics of a certain mode of presentation. The same kind of attention given such shocking and suspenseful scenes was also given to discussions around a kitchen table and as we shall see for rather similar philosophic and aesthetic reasons.
My first example is the truly horrifying torture of the children on a schoolbus by the psychopathic villain played by Andy Robinson in the climax of Dirty Harry (1972, Don Siegel). It seems as if director Don Seigel and the screenwriters relish in showing the hurt of the children and the merciless glee of the psychotic kidnapper, all the more to cause the audience to root for the hero Harry when Harry confronts and finally vanquishes this villain. As if this violence weren't enough, the filmmakers have the bus driver talk of the vulnerable innocence of the children and how wrong it is to treat them that way, as a kind of reaction shot to confirm the moral center during the horror.
Yet showing her reaction shots only makes the pain more unbearable for us in the audience. This is a one of those cases of a filmmaker "going too far".
For decades we have been subjected to reductive readings of this rather complex film, where it has been called a mere thriller or action film and even fascist - the last label from the pen of the never subtle, often tone deaf Pauline Kael. In truth Dirty Harry is a meditation on the nature of justice, ethics and security in a modern America, as complex as any 1970s western by Sam Peckinpah.
Even directors working in a highbrow or artistic style were concerned to explore violence in all of its ugliness and fullness. Italian art film director Pasolini made an entire film, Salo, devoted to a philosophic inquiry into violence. Yet we would be remiss if we understood the goal or intent as being one of mere manipulation of emotion or commercial goals. Both in a Hollywood film and an art film, something else is at work here in addition to emotion or commerce.
A related moment comes to us from a made for t.v. movie "about" the issue of domestic violence called Intimate Strangers, with Dennis Weaver and Sally Struthers. As can be gleamed from my choices of films, I will travel from one category to another, from a so-called art or auteur film, to an action film, to a made for t.v. utilitarian or "relevant" film. (Relevant in the sense of made for social causes or purposes). It is my contention that family features of resemblance trump, in every consideration, questions of genre hierarchies (without forgetting the importance of the psychology of creators). When we experience a film or any other object we are having feelings and undergoing an experience, we don't think to concern ourselves with authorial or commercial intent. What if seemingly disparate kinds of films have a remarkable amount of features in common: a commonality that crosses otherwise divergent styles like tragedy and slapstick, features other than the merely technical ones of tools that were available at the time of creation or production?
In Intimate Strangers (1977 John Llewellyn Moxey), not only have we established, for about the first half hour or so, an ordinary presentation of Dennis Weaver and Sally Struthers in the round, as it were, not all neatly summarized as a villain and victim, but when the husband's violence does first appear and is ratcheted up, it is in marked contrast to all that proceeds, even given the cues and hints in Weaver's behavior. It makes a certain amount of sense but is nevertheless shocking. In one astonishing scene that could not or would not be conceived or shot in today's climate, Weaver throws his wife around the room in the most brutal fashion. It is so horrific it makes Stanley Kubrick's The Shining appear a tame Disney ghost story in comparison. And this was made for network television! Even worse, we are forced to watch the children watch him attack his wife. There is little use of the children as people in their own right throughout the film; they are almost ciphers to create shock and drama. In the flow of the film Weaver goes from a sort of dense and tense jerk to the worst sort of monster. The sound design in this scene of violence is noteworthy in that it has the screams and cries of Sally Struthers pitched at the highest frequency, coupled with the merciless savagery of the sound of Weaver's voice. (As Robert Bresson noted, the auditory imagination might be the most important element in film).
(I will allow the reader time to recover from my mention of Robert Bresson in the context of a made for t.v. drama, though it is not, at least in this one instance, that unlike Au Hasard Balthazar in terms of sound. The question of The Shining in comparison with a made for t.v. drama meant to raise awareness about domestic violence is, well, complicated.)
In the same film we see Weaver and a male coworker, played by Larry Hagman, go and pick up some single women for a one night stand outside of their marriages. While I cannot say that the film exactly approves of this action, it depicts it as a part of married life and in no way tries to tie such action to the awful male behavior inside the home. One of the hallmarks of 1970s filmmaking is its absolute refusal to guide an audience's point of view or to command authorial normativity. In editing and in camera placement, and even in presentation of certain acting styles, an ethic often approaching documentary styled, so-called objectivity is pursued. This is even the case even in non-naturalistic and highly stylized work like Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1975). Indeed, the Larry Hagman character strongly condemns wife battering and is shown as the better husband for having internalized an ethical norm. Yet were it not for Hagman's pushing Weaver so hard, Weaver would have never taken the strange woman to a motel to begin with. Yet, after all of this, at the end, Weaver's humanity shines through alongside his villainy when he cries while looking at his former wife in court.
(I will allow the reader time to recover from my mention of Robert Bresson in the context of a made for t.v. drama, though it is not, at least in this one instance, that unlike Au Hasard Balthazar in terms of sound. The question of The Shining in comparison with a made for t.v. drama meant to raise awareness about domestic violence is, well, complicated.)
In the same film we see Weaver and a male coworker, played by Larry Hagman, go and pick up some single women for a one night stand outside of their marriages. While I cannot say that the film exactly approves of this action, it depicts it as a part of married life and in no way tries to tie such action to the awful male behavior inside the home. One of the hallmarks of 1970s filmmaking is its absolute refusal to guide an audience's point of view or to command authorial normativity. In editing and in camera placement, and even in presentation of certain acting styles, an ethic often approaching documentary styled, so-called objectivity is pursued. This is even the case even in non-naturalistic and highly stylized work like Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1975). Indeed, the Larry Hagman character strongly condemns wife battering and is shown as the better husband for having internalized an ethical norm. Yet were it not for Hagman's pushing Weaver so hard, Weaver would have never taken the strange woman to a motel to begin with. Yet, after all of this, at the end, Weaver's humanity shines through alongside his villainy when he cries while looking at his former wife in court.
I should note the extraordinary complexity of representation of "character" in 1970s visual representation more generally. 1970s movies, more than any before, problematize the notion of a stable or unified presentation of selfhood, and features this complexity even in "lighter" fare like The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976). I
I should note the extraordinary complexity of representation of "character" in 1970s visual representation more generally. 1970s movies, more than any before, problematize the notion of a stable or unified presentation of selfhood, and features this complexity even in "lighter" fare like The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976). The film is so casual and offhanded in its treatment of Walter Matthau's alcoholism: Coach Buttermaker is never corrected, treated or asked to change and his mean, curmudgeonly grumpiness is even played for laughs - like something out of W. C. Fields or Red Skelton. There is a narrative of triumph of sorts, there is good versus evil (and Vic Morrow's villain, like all 70s villains is most evil). But the film just as equally fights against such narrative inevitabilities, all in the interest of getting at the unglamorous truth of someone like Coach Buttermaker. The film is not interested in solving the alcoholism but in getting Matthau and the kids to express certain energies for effect. It is about their performance for us in physical environments. This, in fact, is a form of (comic) stylization, not realism.
One of the consistent aesthetic strategies or stylistic effects in movies like Bad News Bears is to traffic in a kind of celebration of ordinariness; the speech is often harsh and guileless, the attitude toward life is resigned and wised-up, carried as far as is possible in mainstream studio production. What undergirds the effect though, is far from nihilism or cynicism: it is the view that truth and love are reconcilable rather than oppositional (love as necessary illusion or fantasy, for example). There is a respect for human beings - both on screen and in the audience - such that they can take any harsh truth that is thrown at them and be bent towards a love that is truly unconditional.
This gives the films their embarrassing or excessive quality to viewers in a more recent era. One reason for this is the 1970s films are not naturalistic or realistic but a form of stylized excess. It is a mode of presenting passing states of feeling free from the constraints of classical narratological and psychological foundations. The flow of feeling (say, crude, or rude one liners) is prioritized over solid narration. They aim to dramatize or stylize what we'd like to repress or forget. Post 1980s or 90s cinema, on the other hand, has the surface effect of "reality" but a complete lack of stylization. A profound coyness is established that people have come to understand as a kind of "sophistication" or cleverness. All 70s films agree with the Peter Falk character's verdict (which in itself comes more or less directly from John Cassavetes, as well as a reference to a Lenny Bruce bit) in Husbands that "the truth will never kill you but lies will, lies will kill you before cancer in the heart". And this is, finally, the real motivation for the particular representation of children in Bad News Bears, as foul mouthed, argumentative, and insensitive: it not to shock an otherwise naive or square audience but to try and capture what one might actually hear on a little league field in life. Bill Lancaster and Michael Ritchie would have considered it disrespectful towards the audience to pull back on honesty for the sake of preconceived ideals of either narrative or character. Or, in another context, as Hal Ashby pleaded with censorious producers concerning the language in his The Last Detail, "hey, what do you want me to do? That's how these guys talk." But we can't take Ashby at his word, since it is not a question of what is real or actual, but how we in the audience feel as it is represented in the way it is for us on the screen.
In "heavier" fare, like Diary Of A Mad Housewife (1970, Frank and Eleanor Perry), the man played by Frank Langella, with whom the titular figure (Carrie Snodgress) has an affair is not initially sinister, but in turns, seductive, and charming, and an intellect. He is not a mere heavy. (Any more than is the husband a mere chauvinist pig, a complexity also helped by Richard Benjamin's choice of acting style. In playing the husband, he does what he is best known for - an acting style influenced by comedy and farce. Indeed his style and Carrie Snodgress' style work against each other in ways that would be impossible if both actors acted with matched tones. Richard Benjamin's timing is no different than his timing in, say, a slapstick farce like Love At First Bite (Stan Dragoti, 1979). (Compare Benjamin in both films, and this must be done, profitably, back-to-back and you will see what I mean). It is a genius on the Perrys' part to use this contrast in acting precisely in order to make a profound Feminist argument about domestic inequality. Benjamin's broadness of tone makes his overbearing sense of entitlement and self centeredness an alien way to be, and slightly ridiculous. Richard Benjamin's loud and broad singsong lists of requests to his wife creates an alienation effect. We see there is something wrong with a marriage like this. This is only exacerbated by the decision to then immediately switch to Snodgress' interior consciousness. And what does she say to herself? They are the very concerns that motivated the art of this period: a desire that her husband be more authentic, intimate and "real" and come out from under his clothes and character armor.
I should note the extraordinary complexity of representation of "character" in 1970s visual representation more generally. 1970s movies, more than any before, problematize the notion of a stable or unified presentation of selfhood, and features this complexity even in "lighter" fare like The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976). The film is so casual and offhanded in its treatment of Walter Matthau's alcoholism: Coach Buttermaker is never corrected, treated or asked to change and his mean, curmudgeonly grumpiness is even played for laughs - like something out of W. C. Fields or Red Skelton. There is a narrative of triumph of sorts, there is good versus evil (and Vic Morrow's villain, like all 70s villains is most evil). But the film just as equally fights against such narrative inevitabilities, all in the interest of getting at the unglamorous truth of someone like Coach Buttermaker. The film is not interested in solving the alcoholism but in getting Matthau and the kids to express certain energies for effect. It is about their performance for us in physical environments. This, in fact, is a form of (comic) stylization, not realism.
One of the consistent aesthetic strategies or stylistic effects in movies like Bad News Bears is to traffic in a kind of celebration of ordinariness; the speech is often harsh and guileless, the attitude toward life is resigned and wised-up, carried as far as is possible in mainstream studio production. What undergirds the effect though, is far from nihilism or cynicism: it is the view that truth and love are reconcilable rather than oppositional (love as necessary illusion or fantasy, for example). There is a respect for human beings - both on screen and in the audience - such that they can take any harsh truth that is thrown at them and be bent towards a love that is truly unconditional.
This gives the films their embarrassing or excessive quality to viewers in a more recent era. One reason for this is the 1970s films are not naturalistic or realistic but a form of stylized excess. It is a mode of presenting passing states of feeling free from the constraints of classical narratological and psychological foundations. The flow of feeling (say, crude, or rude one liners) is prioritized over solid narration. They aim to dramatize or stylize what we'd like to repress or forget. Post 1980s or 90s cinema, on the other hand, has the surface effect of "reality" but a complete lack of stylization. A profound coyness is established that people have come to understand as a kind of "sophistication" or cleverness. All 70s films agree with the Peter Falk character's verdict (which in itself comes more or less directly from John Cassavetes, as well as a reference to a Lenny Bruce bit) in Husbands that "the truth will never kill you but lies will, lies will kill you before cancer in the heart". And this is, finally, the real motivation for the particular representation of children in Bad News Bears, as foul mouthed, argumentative, and insensitive: it not to shock an otherwise naive or square audience but to try and capture what one might actually hear on a little league field in life. Bill Lancaster and Michael Ritchie would have considered it disrespectful towards the audience to pull back on honesty for the sake of preconceived ideals of either narrative or character. Or, in another context, as Hal Ashby pleaded with censorious producers concerning the language in his The Last Detail, "hey, what do you want me to do? That's how these guys talk." But we can't take Ashby at his word, since it is not a question of what is real or actual, but how we in the audience feel as it is represented in the way it is for us on the screen.
In "heavier" fare, like Diary Of A Mad Housewife (1970, Frank and Eleanor Perry), the man played by Frank Langella, with whom the titular figure (Carrie Snodgress) has an affair is not initially sinister, but in turns, seductive, and charming, and an intellect. He is not a mere heavy. (Any more than is the husband a mere chauvinist pig, a complexity also helped by Richard Benjamin's choice of acting style. In playing the husband, he does what he is best known for - an acting style influenced by comedy and farce. Indeed his style and Carrie Snodgress' style work against each other in ways that would be impossible if both actors acted with matched tones. Richard Benjamin's timing is no different than his timing in, say, a slapstick farce like Love At First Bite (Stan Dragoti, 1979). (Compare Benjamin in both films, and this must be done, profitably, back-to-back and you will see what I mean). It is a genius on the Perrys' part to use this contrast in acting precisely in order to make a profound Feminist argument about domestic inequality. Benjamin's broadness of tone makes his overbearing sense of entitlement and self centeredness an alien way to be, and slightly ridiculous. Richard Benjamin's loud and broad singsong lists of requests to his wife creates an alienation effect. We see there is something wrong with a marriage like this. This is only exacerbated by the decision to then immediately switch to Snodgress' interior consciousness. And what does she say to herself? They are the very concerns that motivated the art of this period: a desire that her husband be more authentic, intimate and "real" and come out from under his clothes and character armor.
And Diary Of A Mad Housewife depicts children in a decidedly unsentimental way, as slightly alien, irritating burdens upon Carrie Snodgress, rather than as cute and as always, already symbols of unspoiled virtue. I don't need to fully analyze just how radical the depiction of childhood is in The Bad News Bears. What is ostensibly a mere kid's sports movie has as its project as can be seen in the trailer above, a view of kids as rude, limited, and mean in the way kids can be. Their idiosyncracies are presented directly. No apologies. No moralizing.
I want to offer a brief suggestion of what is going on in all of this. In the culture of the 1970s, in the world of curious and searching middle class people, there was an ethic of thoroughness, of intense exploration. This was not only in psychology therapies but all aspects of daily life. This thoroughness created a crack in formerly unified, seamless notions of the self. It also created an interest in intense emotional expression as a value in and of itself, a kind of extension of 19th century Romanticism into a world that was 20th century and Modern. It would be impossible for such concerns not to be reflected in the dramatic art of the period. Indeed the art of the 1970s in general is the result. One of the usual ways directors or screenwriters talk about this issue when pressed about it, is to talk of being "Real", or believeable. Both Hal Ashby (director of Shampoo, Harold and Maude, Being There, and The Last Detail, and William Friedkin, (director of The Exorcist, The French Connection, and Sorcerer), spoke of this idea of being as real as possible as the highest aesthetic goal. They had no fear of being thought pretentious or naive: this was a sincere belief for them, certainly as much as (if not more than) box office grosses.
I want to use slightly different formulations here. Instead of Ashby's or Friedkin's formulation I would say that what we have in 1970s cinema is a cinema of immersion, rather than a cinema of condensation. In condensation, one of the hallmarks of a classical style, all of the energies and efforts of scenes or characters are utilized in such a way that the sense of whole and forward momentum are the highest priorities. In immersion, by contrast, the feeling or sense of falling into a moment is given priority, often at the expense of structural wholeness. It just so happens that when the subjects are sex and violence, this is noteworthy because of human emotion in response to these primitive attention grabbers. But 1970s filmmakers would give as much care and attention to a scene of a conversation around the breakfast table as they would a more dramatically riveting scene of violence. (Woman Under The Influence Cassavetes 1974) The effect is to be concerned with the presence of the audience towards or in a moment rather than getting an audience to a particular conclusion or closure. The overriding ethic is one that values revelation as a virtue in its own sake, an ethic that revels in explicit and graphic showing rather than hiding in the interests of good taste or classical decorum.
You might call this a principle of contradiction to otherwise routine perceptions. Serious matters normally given high stakes are here casually observed (one's sex life). Conversely, matters formerly taken for granted are given serious and critical examination (justice and fairness in domestic life). This is the aesthetics of the moment. Moments are like that; they are not arranged to serve a hierarchical telos. They only capture our attention for a time. Sometimes all we can do is follow along and respond and get our meaning from our response.
Discussion of sexuality in 1970s film and art deserves a book onto itself. The films of that time are nothing less than a document of the Sexual Revolution itself as it was unfolding. And I do mean something rather close to an actual document. What is gotten at is not how things as we would like them but rather, as in Lenny Bruce's famous quote, an observation of what is. Suffice to say that, in the dialogue wherein sex is discussed among characters in films of the 1970s, frankness and attention to reality and objectivity is always given priority over good taste, or moral objectivity, to say nothing of contemporary 2000's ethical sensibilities. Hal Ashby's biggest fight with the studio in making The Last Detail (1973) was in defending the language of his sailor characters. They constantly talk of "pussy" as a metonym of women, for example. Ashby's defense was the need to show machismo as it really was, without defending or condemning it outright. "That's how these guys talk," he said. I should note that unlike contemporary fare like The Sopranos, where I believe the cursing is more for show and to stoke up the drama or color, in a film like The Last Detail it is a genuine attempt at a kind of documentation, almost as a color in the overall palette.
In the 1970s the same ethic that lead couples and groups to explore their feelings in communes and newer therapies was the same ethic that believed that a work of art or a film be a document of the times in some way, however small. In this sense the usual contrast between documentation or sociology on the one hand or representation or artistry, on the other, becomes obliterated. Made for t.v. docudramas of the time have the same style and feeling as stylized period pieces! This also accounts for the intense left-wing politics of 1970s films. It is not so much that the films were trying to create revolution or reform but that by immersion in the figures represented on screen, certain political issues necessarily had to be foregrounded.
There certainly was a wildness and, from today's perspective, an irresponsibility in the era's treatment of sexual matters.
The opening of Pretty Maids All In A Row (Roger Vadim, 1971) approaches that of soft-core pornography in its depiction of how the ("typical" straight male) mind can view women. It is important to note that Roger Vadim tries to have it both ways: obviously to create arousal in some of the audience, but also to show that this is also the inner fantasy life of a male adult teenager. The following scene from later in the film would usually be read as a standard male oriented fantasy about a sexy "older" woman. Angie Dickinson is wonderful in this (as is her co-star). The tone here dances among painful and poignant awkwardness, simple eroticism and humor. (The thriller portion of Pretty Maids All In A Row is a different matter altogether).
In the underrated Lifeguard (1976, Daniel Petrie), a group of teenaged boys express interest in a female model's breasts (after openly admitting earlier in the film to masturbating while thinking about the girls at the beach in a frank talk with Sam Elliot's lifeguard) and proceed to sneak behind her to tear off her swimsuit top while she is posing for a photo shoot. Even worse, the boys' invasion is with the apparent encouragement of the lifeguard, who watches with binoculars, enjoying the view and not putting a stop to the boys' attack. Though the boys are relatively "innocent" and harmless, it is still an outrageous scene. Of course such a scenario, especially with such a tone, would be unthinkable in a film today and probably for some good reasons.
At the same time, Sam Elliott's character is one of the great character studies in narrative cinema. He shows great maturity and vulnerability in scenes when he pursues an old high school flame, (Anne Archer), a woman whose intelligence and independence is foregrounded in the film. She too is shown in great complexity. At once a loving mother, and comfortable with her sexuality, highly engaging, very attractive, she nevertheless has more conformist and practical values than does Elliott in spite of her many strengths. Yet the film, in a turn of narrative almost never depicted on screen in a studio film, even in the anti- establishment 1970s, celebrates Rick's decision to abandon an opportunity to sell Porsches to instead continue to work as a lifeguard. The film never condemns the Anne Archer character for being more sympathetic with the lucrative and safe choice of a job as a Porsche dealer. (Indeed, practically everybody in the film wants Rick to have a "grown-up job"). And, except for the flawed scene mentioned above, he is a genuinely classical hero in many respects, a hard worker who manages to be a laid back Californian while at the same time diligent and disciplined, saving lives and soothing egos. Thus, the allegedly immature job that pays little but is just enough for Sam Elliott is the very job that demands greatest emotional intelligence and work.
There is a clear point of view here: the film does celebrate lifeguard Rick's integrity with regard to life choices. Yet nevertheless, the film just as consistently maintains an observational approach, utilizing every opportunity to show us an open view of life on the beach and in this milieu. It presents us lots of stimuli, especially in the styles and wardrobes of the garish high school reunion, and we have to do some work with what we are presented.
More notoriously, however, lifeguard Rick has one night of lovemaking with a sixteen year old girl, a night that the girl initiates against the initially quite strong objections by Sam Elliott. Of course it goes very bad: having taken her virginity she falls, in her own way, in love with him. Interestingly, he confides about the troubled girl's suicide attempt and her obsession with him to Anne Archer. Archer seems to take it in stride as part of life or growing up. The teenage girl, played by Kathleen Quinlan, is depicted with great respect and shown to be lost, alienated, but capable of great progress and promise. The whole situation is dealt with as sensitively as is possible. When such a situation is depicted today it is nearly always depicted as a good and evil melodramatic reality play.
This narration of having a girl who is a fling rather than the main partner becoming needy, clinging or worse and consequently showing the male protagonist's girlfriend to be "understanding" of the crisis is, aside from the age difference, structurally similar to Play Misty For Me (Clint Eastwood/Jo Heims 1971). In both cases what would normally be an issue of jealousy or cheating, is instead treated as an opportunity for mutual understanding or support among the primary couple. Even though one would think this sympathy natural because the third party is mentally impaired in some way, thus making her a threat to the real or primary relationship (the threat being the more essential issue) there are numerous ways this could play out - ways that would vary in social acceptability across time.
Lifeguard has one brief scene consisting of a single conversation between the lifeguard and a flight attendant in bed: the whole scene has a matter of fact frankness about sexuality and life choices that is rare even in today's independent film world. (Lena Dunham's superb Girls on HBO in 2012 is a notable and exemplary exception). In general, films purporting to be about mature and adult themes today are haunted by a fear of and an anxiety about adulthood itself, coupled with a nostalgic attachment to childhood, the latest and most blatant example being Wes Anderson's overrated Moonrise Kingdom (2012).
If you will recall I am something of a phenomenologist in that I think the decisive criteria in interpreting a work of art and in assessing its value is how it feels to experience it in linear time. I believe this experience trumps even the reconstruction or analysis of it at a later date. The experience is the most important part of its design and structure; otherwise we would be content not to have the work of art at all but only a summary or Cliff Notes of it. Todd Berliner captures this sense of a how an audience feels as opposed to the overall deep design or underlying structure of a film in his discussion of Nashville:
"Nashville (1976 Robert Altman) offers another exemplary instance of a seventies narrative intent upon frustrating linear narration through convolution, ambiguity, and disorientation. Many people have told me that they hated the movie until they saw it twice. Indeed much of the time the narrative proceeds as though the audience has already seen the movie. For instance, before we meet Timothy Brown (played by actor Timothy Brown) or hear him sing-that is, before we learn he's a black singer of white-sounding country music - a scene in which Opal (Geraldine Chaplin) mistakes his African-American wife for a member of his entourage makes little sense. Similarly, a joke made by Bill (Allan Nicholls) at the beginning of the movie that politician Hal Phillip Walker 'looks exactly like Connie White' (Bill sees a poster of White, who is a country singer, with a Walker sticker posted on it) will not make full sense until we understand who Connie White is; the movie introduces us to her fifty minutes later. The uncommunicativeness of the film's narration does not function as a classical retardation device, which, in conventional instances, would delay story resolution in order to retain viewers' interes. On the contrary, the narration's uncommunicativeness threatens to alienate viewers by treating their information needs indifferently."
Todd Berliner has undoubtedly written the major book - the most intelligent - on 1970s cinema. He is accurate in following the texts as closely as he does. Yet, after wrestling with his great book for at least a couple of years, I must nevertheless part company with his use of incoherence as a primary way of understanding the texts.
Looked at through the lens of immersion as an opposition to condensation there is nothing incoherent about any of these films. They are both weirder than incoherent and much more ordinary than incoherent. They would only be incoherent if one started from classical presuppositions about linearity in events and stability in selfhood. Yet such notions had been long gone by this time from most of the other arts for at least over half a century, if not more, when counting Proust, James, and Woolf. It was time for movies and other electronic mass media to play catch-up.
Rather, what one can say is that these films operate through an aesthetics that I would call meta-experiential. They take as their very subject the nature of human response to situations rather than assume a natural and universal response as an unquestioned foundation. The conceptual power to make or shape the world and achieve some sort of mastery over it is at the heart of the more classical mode of condensation, best exemplified, perhaps, by a classical master like Alfred Hitchcock. (Interestingly when Hitchcock works in the 1970s, in Frenzy and Family Plot (1976), even he begins to experiment, or more accurately, play with the mode I am describing. The sheer outrageous eccentricity of the family in Family Plot is always threatening to take the film away from its preordained narration. The energies of Bruce Dern, William Devane, Barbara Harris, and Karen Black are 1970s energies of intensity and extremity, to say nothing of the art direction).
1970s films deal with the nature of what it is to experience life as it unfolds, as opposed to life as a classically "tight" craft or construction. They were rather similar to what was happening in the fiction and other arts of the time: all were interested in observing the process of experience whether it be the stream of a mind at work in prose form or a durational performance art work on stage. It is actually in the nature of daily experience to be rather like watching Nashville. This is not because Nashville is more realistic than other films but because Altman is interested in an immersion in a moment or moments. He is simply not interested in summarizing those moments.
This is why it is not a question of reality per se. One can be in the world in an organized or summarized fashion and have it be as real as an immersive fashion: that is what montage is all about, after all. It all depends on how much uncertainty one wants to experience or can tolerate.
It is also inevitable that an interest in immersion will create a certain frankness about sensitive aspects of life like sex. The potential for conflict is greater in immersion. If you place an emphasis on condensation you must filter or edit out things which call attention to themselves.
One of the most talked about aspects of Nashville is the tightness and soundness of its script by Joan Tewksbury. Everyone remarks how all twenty four characters are fully explained in their connections and meaning over the course of the movie, in the sense of a deep structure. But Tewksbury designed her script in a certain linear progression of events and this felt experience is what we come away most remembering about the film. That is, she designed it as Berliner describes it. She knew what she was doing. Thus the film depends as much on its sense of moments as it does on the "reality" that everything is tightly contrived in the end. But we don't really experience an "in the end". Robert Altman even decided to kill off one his main characters at the hands of a lone assassin during the course of production, causing at least one other member of his team to resign in offense and protest. This assassination at the end is one of the most discussed scenes in the film, especially in light of concerns over mass media, celebrity, and random crimes like shooting. But I will not post that ending here, but, given that we are discussing the 1970s, the Keith Carradine song, "I'm easy"!
It takes enormous skill and artistry to create this effect of there not being a construction. If it goes wrong there can be nothing worse. If it goes right, as in John Cassavetes or Robert Altman (as different as these two are from one another) there is nothing more sublime. In this sense, Altman's film is anything but "uncommunicative" or "indifferent". As a work of art, by definition it is designed a certain way to create engaged emotions in the viewer.
You can never get outside of meaning and values. Thus stylistic effects are anything but effects added on, after the fact of the matter. They are meaning itself. And meaning is not primarily an issue of symbolism - in truth it is more a matter of metaphor. Meaning is created in the very process of perceptual relations which are at the heart of all of the arts.
Only at the very end of this great period, when conceptual modes of analysis take over, threatening the perceptual aesthetics I have begun to discuss here, when psychology becomes ossified into a conceptual science, does this immersive mode become less tenable or understandable. If the 1970s were about the limits of explanation; the following decades since have been about the limits of pure experience and the hunger for answers. We have gone from the encounter session to the so-called Reality Show.
"Nashville (1976 Robert Altman) offers another exemplary instance of a seventies narrative intent upon frustrating linear narration through convolution, ambiguity, and disorientation. Many people have told me that they hated the movie until they saw it twice. Indeed much of the time the narrative proceeds as though the audience has already seen the movie. For instance, before we meet Timothy Brown (played by actor Timothy Brown) or hear him sing-that is, before we learn he's a black singer of white-sounding country music - a scene in which Opal (Geraldine Chaplin) mistakes his African-American wife for a member of his entourage makes little sense. Similarly, a joke made by Bill (Allan Nicholls) at the beginning of the movie that politician Hal Phillip Walker 'looks exactly like Connie White' (Bill sees a poster of White, who is a country singer, with a Walker sticker posted on it) will not make full sense until we understand who Connie White is; the movie introduces us to her fifty minutes later. The uncommunicativeness of the film's narration does not function as a classical retardation device, which, in conventional instances, would delay story resolution in order to retain viewers' interes. On the contrary, the narration's uncommunicativeness threatens to alienate viewers by treating their information needs indifferently."
Todd Berliner has undoubtedly written the major book - the most intelligent - on 1970s cinema. He is accurate in following the texts as closely as he does. Yet, after wrestling with his great book for at least a couple of years, I must nevertheless part company with his use of incoherence as a primary way of understanding the texts.
Looked at through the lens of immersion as an opposition to condensation there is nothing incoherent about any of these films. They are both weirder than incoherent and much more ordinary than incoherent. They would only be incoherent if one started from classical presuppositions about linearity in events and stability in selfhood. Yet such notions had been long gone by this time from most of the other arts for at least over half a century, if not more, when counting Proust, James, and Woolf. It was time for movies and other electronic mass media to play catch-up.
Rather, what one can say is that these films operate through an aesthetics that I would call meta-experiential. They take as their very subject the nature of human response to situations rather than assume a natural and universal response as an unquestioned foundation. The conceptual power to make or shape the world and achieve some sort of mastery over it is at the heart of the more classical mode of condensation, best exemplified, perhaps, by a classical master like Alfred Hitchcock. (Interestingly when Hitchcock works in the 1970s, in Frenzy and Family Plot (1976), even he begins to experiment, or more accurately, play with the mode I am describing. The sheer outrageous eccentricity of the family in Family Plot is always threatening to take the film away from its preordained narration. The energies of Bruce Dern, William Devane, Barbara Harris, and Karen Black are 1970s energies of intensity and extremity, to say nothing of the art direction).
1970s films deal with the nature of what it is to experience life as it unfolds, as opposed to life as a classically "tight" craft or construction. They were rather similar to what was happening in the fiction and other arts of the time: all were interested in observing the process of experience whether it be the stream of a mind at work in prose form or a durational performance art work on stage. It is actually in the nature of daily experience to be rather like watching Nashville. This is not because Nashville is more realistic than other films but because Altman is interested in an immersion in a moment or moments. He is simply not interested in summarizing those moments.
This is why it is not a question of reality per se. One can be in the world in an organized or summarized fashion and have it be as real as an immersive fashion: that is what montage is all about, after all. It all depends on how much uncertainty one wants to experience or can tolerate.
It is also inevitable that an interest in immersion will create a certain frankness about sensitive aspects of life like sex. The potential for conflict is greater in immersion. If you place an emphasis on condensation you must filter or edit out things which call attention to themselves.
One of the most talked about aspects of Nashville is the tightness and soundness of its script by Joan Tewksbury. Everyone remarks how all twenty four characters are fully explained in their connections and meaning over the course of the movie, in the sense of a deep structure. But Tewksbury designed her script in a certain linear progression of events and this felt experience is what we come away most remembering about the film. That is, she designed it as Berliner describes it. She knew what she was doing. Thus the film depends as much on its sense of moments as it does on the "reality" that everything is tightly contrived in the end. But we don't really experience an "in the end". Robert Altman even decided to kill off one his main characters at the hands of a lone assassin during the course of production, causing at least one other member of his team to resign in offense and protest. This assassination at the end is one of the most discussed scenes in the film, especially in light of concerns over mass media, celebrity, and random crimes like shooting. But I will not post that ending here, but, given that we are discussing the 1970s, the Keith Carradine song, "I'm easy"!
It takes enormous skill and artistry to create this effect of there not being a construction. If it goes wrong there can be nothing worse. If it goes right, as in John Cassavetes or Robert Altman (as different as these two are from one another) there is nothing more sublime. In this sense, Altman's film is anything but "uncommunicative" or "indifferent". As a work of art, by definition it is designed a certain way to create engaged emotions in the viewer.
You can never get outside of meaning and values. Thus stylistic effects are anything but effects added on, after the fact of the matter. They are meaning itself. And meaning is not primarily an issue of symbolism - in truth it is more a matter of metaphor. Meaning is created in the very process of perceptual relations which are at the heart of all of the arts.
Only at the very end of this great period, when conceptual modes of analysis take over, threatening the perceptual aesthetics I have begun to discuss here, when psychology becomes ossified into a conceptual science, does this immersive mode become less tenable or understandable. If the 1970s were about the limits of explanation; the following decades since have been about the limits of pure experience and the hunger for answers. We have gone from the encounter session to the so-called Reality Show.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete