1970s Film and Visual Culture: A Polemic on Art and the case of "commercial" entertainment

Here is my blunt principle for all the writing I have done and will continue to do on works of art: the absolute gold standard for understanding and evaluating any work of art, from the lowliest commercial advertising illustration to the highest Henry Moore sculpture (or Chantal Akerman movie) is how we feel about its sight and sound, temporally, as we are experiencing it in "real" time. All other considerations i.e., cultural allusiveness, intertextuality, historical context, and retroactive reconstruction and the like, while at times important, are still secondary to the experience of the artwork as it is lived forwards in time. One technical word for my approach is that it is fundamentally phenomenological. Another way of putting it is to say that I am an aesthete as this term is emblematic of this approach.

There is no such thing as realism or realistic art. All art is unrealistic. If you want proof of that think about a musical where people break into perfect, on pitch singing and dancing in the midst of a dramatic scene. People simply do not do this in daily life. (Thankfully, since the results would be decidedly off pitch were it to be common occurrence). If my statement is true, then so-called realistic or naturalistic art is simply another style going by the honorific "realistic", and not more accurate a representation of real life than any other style. What gets called realism is sometimes a good style or a bad one but a style all the same. And, truth be told, all art, even art that is not the best art, contains elements of profound reality and truth that we should recognize.

One of the welcome results of the invention of youtube is that archival visual culture that had been as unavailable as to have been "out of print" for several decades (except in highly controlled and licensed formats as in televised syndication) is being posted by different channels and users. This is doubly important to me. Firstly, for a long period of time, from, say 1982 or so, well into the early 1990s, I was without a working television of my own. This meant the only television I was able to watch was only a few days out of the year at family gatherings.  Secondly, as part of my long running project on the 1970s I have made it a point to see as many productions from the 1970s as is possible and that means, of course, made for t.v. movies. One of the additional things I have done is to watch productions into the middle 1980s, under the working hypothesis that a lot of this material, though 1980s in many respects would hold aesthetic holdovers in sensibility from the 1970s and my hypothesis was confirmed.

I had (re)visited Moxey's Intimate Strangers in an earlier 1970s blog post in a discussion aiming to include the made for t.v. movie herehttp://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/towards-aesthetics-of-1970s-cinema-and.htmlre. I have been fortunate to watch many more productions. I shall start with some general comments on art in general and the historicity of commercial entertainment in particular.

I am a thorough relativist about historical styles. I do not accept any kind of progressivism in art history.  I am not a relativist about quality as quality but I do not believe that the artwork of an earlier, forgotten or discarded period deserves to be treated as such at a later date. It is not the primitive, anachronistic relic of a less evolved era; it is simply an object reflecting an era that is wholly different from our own and in so many complex ways that are ultimately not amenable to any objective evaluation.  Put a little more bluntly, works in the current Golden Age Of Television like The Sopranos, Madmen, True Detective and The Wire are not better or more sophisticated that the ones regarded as their inferior precursors. It is simply that they are made in a style that is accepted and acceptable in our current moment.   One of the important reasons for this verdict of superiority is that these shows are at times superbly done, a large part of which is the stylistic effect of the long "serialized" form itself, above all what this long form means for the craft of acting as well as writing. On that account one could speak of a kind of aesthetic advantage but I still resist the notion of full stop Progress. Part of my  reasoning is what I wrote in another context here:

When a style or a mode becomes really big such that it overshadows all differing contenders, one of the things that happens is that the style in question begins to create around it an image of self evident superiority. This is almost always achieved through the enthusiasm of a large fan base, and I use the formulation of fan base in such a way that it includes both elite tastemakers in large and small media, say, critics, as much as masses of audiences. Elites and masses are united in enthusiasm for the style with the result that it is forgotten that what has occurred is a style at all but rather how a thing is simply supposed to be made, as if it were always thus. This is only compounded when everything gets made more or less the same way, when there is a single, dominant house style. Actually everything is some sort of style or another, all the way down, and for each style there is always a better and worse version on offer. But enthusiasm for any style creates an unconscious forgetting about style as style - instead of a style being seen as but one style among many, the style can be taken for actual reality itself. When this happens there can occur a crisis in representation since people might forget that there is such a thing as a representation and that representation is quite distinct from, say, daily life. I believe we are in such a moment today.

typical print ad for t.v. movies

The works I have been watching are from an era that is not much older than the current one (speaking as we are of thirty years rather than, say, fifty or sixty years) but the sensibility is far from a current one to be sure. But it is a sensibility to be sure, with its own modes of (re)presentation, mainly built around some very emotionally direct and I would say traditional notions of human nature in psychology and behavior. The two features that make them part of a 1970s sensibility is a commitment to bold expression of raw human emotion for its own sake, without the ordinary propriety of classical taste, a focus on asking questions rather than presenting fixed answers - what I have called a non-conceptualized sensibility. All these movies were made under the most compromised of contexts, dependent on the rigors of advertising and the commercial marketplace, and yet, because of all this they reflect rather accurately the era in which they were made; in a sense there was no way they could get away from the limits and conditions of their production and its history.

(OUR TOWN, 1977)

Here is a rather short list of titles representing  some of the kinds of movies I have in mind. These titles reflect my personal preferences rather than any particular canon, though there are a handful of titles on here that have become canonical through critical and public acclaim. The most recent pictures on here are from 1983/'84, - roughly the time that the 70s were all but over and the 80s were emerging as their own independent period.

The titles on here run quite a wide gamut. Some deal with the most serious social problems. One of the most common concerns some kind of substance abuse, often with an explicit and hopeful recovery narrative arc. Others deal with more general  kinds of social oppression, like  domestic violence or poverty. Some, by contrast, are light and witty comedies. But here too there is the emphasis on "getting things out in the open" and the comedy has a kind of frankness about it. These television movies are unified by an emphasis on human emotion, and though all are limited by the rules of television. they nevertheless all possess what I can only call fearlessness and integrity towards their subjects, even as they simultaneously use sensationalistic effects to rivet an audience.  Another common stylistic device is the usage of extensive documentary techniques, in camera placement and lighting, especially location shooting in those works that take place in the present day.  I will not review or comment on the individual films  but I do believe all are worth your time.

          1. A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED WOMAN (ABC Hy Averback, 1978)
           2. DUEL (ABC Steven Spielberg 1971)

3. DAWN PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE RUNAWAY (Randall Kleiser, 1976)

 4. DEATH OF RICHIE (NBC Paul Wendkos 1977)

           5. A CHRISTMAS WITHOUT SNOW (John Korty 1980)
           6. DIARY OF A TEENAGE HITCHHIKER (1979 Ted Post)

7. THE INITIATION OF SARAH (ABC Robert Day 1978)
8. LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE (ABC Harvey Hart 1979)
9. HELTER SKELTER (CBS Tom Gries 1976)
10. GUYANA TRAGEDY: THE STORY OF JIM JONES (CBS William Graham1980)
11. LISTEN TO YOUR HEART (CBS Don Taylor 1983)
12, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN (CBS John Korty 1974)
13. FALLEN ANGEL (CBS Robert Michael Lewis 1981)
14. THE BOY WHO DRANK TOO MUCH (MTM Jerrold Freedman, 1980)
15. MAKE ME AN OFFER (ABC Jerry Paris 1980)
16. COCAINE: ONE MAN'S SEDUCTION (NBC 1983 Paul Wendkos)
17. DEATH CAR ON THE FREEWAY (CBS Hal Needham 1980)
18. LIKE MOM, LIKE ME (CBS Michael Pressman, 1978)
19. THAT CERTAIN SUMMER (ABC Lamont Johnson, 1972)
20. SPECIAL BULLETIN (NBC Edward Zwick 1983
21. THE DAY AFTER (ABC Nicholas Meyer 1983)
22. ELVIS (ABC John Carpenter 1979)
23. A CASE OF RAPE (NBC Boris Sagal 1974)
24. THE BURNING BED (ROBERT GREENWALD 1984)
25. A QUESTION OF LOVE (ABC Jerry Thorpe 1978)
26. OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder (George Schaefer 1977)
27. THE AMAZING COSMIC AWARENESS OF DUFFY MOON (Larry Elikann 1976)
 28. BUT I DON'T WANT TO GET MARRIED (Jerry Paris, 1971)
29. THE ROCKFORD FILES: BACKLASH OF THE HUNTER (NBC Richard Heffron, 1974)
30. GET CHRISTIE LOVE (William Graham 1974)

           31. YOUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE (CBS Steven Hilliard Stern 1979)
          32. HOTLINE (Jerry Jameson 1982)
          33. SYBIL (Daniel Petrie, 1976)
           34. THURSDAY'S GAME (Robert Moore 1974)

35. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS (ABC John Llewellyn Moxey 1972)

36. KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER (ABC John Llewellyn Moxey 1971)

37. GO ASK ALICE (John Korty 1973)

38. INTIMATE STRANGERS (John Llewellyn Moxey 1978) 

39. HUSTLING (Joseph Sargent, 1975
40. THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER OVER THE SEPTIC TANK (Robert Day, 1978)
41. THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE (ABC Randall Kleiser 1976)
42. BRIAN'S SONG (Buzz Kulik 1971)

          43. THE BEST LITTLE GIRL IN THE WORLD (ABC Sam O'Steen 1981)
          44. THE GIRL WITH ESP (Gerald Mayer 1979)
          45. A SENSITIVE, PASSIONATE MAN (John Newland, 1977)
          46. WINNER TAKE ALL (Paul Bogart, 1975)
          47. THE EXECUTION OF PRIVATE SLOVIK (Lamont Johnson 1974)
          48. FRIENDLY FIRE (David Greene 1979)
          49. SARAH T. PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE ALCOHOLIC (Richard Donner, 1975)
          50. SINS OF THE PAST (ABC Peter Hunt 1984)

Thoughts on strong affect in art

STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET (Quine)

BIGGER THAN LIFE (Ray)

I have often said that our crises of society might be more aesthetic in nature than the normal ways they are usually understood when they are referred to as moral, political,  or, frankly, crudely sociological in nature. I was happy that philosopher Daniel Kaufman, on a favorite site with which he is associated, The Electric Agora, called the problem what it is, when he invoked the word and concept philistine.https://theelectricagora.com/2017/12/24/4307/ I wrote a piece in 2000 called The New Philistinism and, as Kaufman wisely clarifies in his piece, the situation has only worsened in the eighteen years since my 2000 piece.

I think the notion of the arts and letters being an essential and special way of understanding is one notion that is unpopular at the moment. People take what they consider the concerns of the real world to be what ultimately matters and if not the real world then the "spiritual" correlate of the real world which comprises of their particular faith and/or religion. But the idea of artificial works of representation being inherently interesting and interesting precisely to the degree to which they can be separated from sociology is an idea that is itself under represented and if thought of at all is immediately rejected. Above all, if the arts and letters are respected they are only respected to the degree with which they are seen to further certain causes in the real world.

I was reminded of this problem when, in taking a break from my usual study of 1970s visual culture, I went back and watched several masterpieces of Hollywood melodrama from the middle fifties through the sixties. One of the things that struck me was the emotional seriousness, the sheer meaningfulness of the mise en scene: the lighting, coloration and composition seemed the equal of any of the masterworks of representational painting. The actors too were doing things of an emotional depth on screen, bespeaking a complete fearlessness with regard to what they were trying to evoke. There is a sense of awe on the screen: awe from the creators in their creation and an attempt to evoke awe in the spectator, a complete lack of jadedness, laziness, or snark. If contemporary people laugh at such films now because they think them dated, politically inconvenient (note I do not say correct) or silly,  I think the fall might reside in those contemporary people rather than in the films. The creators of such films were aesthetes and thought in aesthetic ways. I am thinking of films by people like Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Elia Kazan, Richard Quine, Joshua Logan and Vincent Minnelli, to name just a handful.

PICNIC (Logan)

THE SANDPIPER (Minnelli)

One characteristic of the films I have in mind is their emotional intensity. There is an enormous amount at stake for the characters and, quite in keeping with the nature of how cinema was envisioned by their creators, the films at every moment attempt to express such high stakes in every conceivable way possible with the tools at the time - again another striking similarity to painting. That is, the emotion is a matter of art direction and lighting and wardrobe as much as it is of acting.

Of course one of the reasons why this is the case with these films is that emotion is actually their main subject matter. However much outward action or plot there is in the films, their real theme is human interiority, or consciousness itself. And to make matters more interesting, because many attitudes and behaviors were forbidden for representation on the screen at the time in a literal form, filmmakers had to work extra hard to envision new ways of expression. It is not so much that the films are "Freudian" or "psychological" because, frankly, you who are in the  in the audience will have to feel or undergo something internally simply by experiencing the films - whether you are versed in psychology or not, and maybe even whether you are particularly emotional or not. The films traffic in feelings in something like a raw state - that is, prior to any psychological theories.  Now strong emotion in art is neither inherently good or bad, but it is simply a fact that works of strong emotion can only accomplish certain things that will be impossible if a work were to take a cooler approach. At the end of the day it might be a subjective affair indeed, the objective excellence of the works in question notwithstanding.

What I am talking about, of course, is style, rather than genre. ("The concept of genre is as cold as the tomb": Andrei Tarkovsky) The power is not merely the result of narrative structure or even milieu. To my way of thinking, Rebel Without A Cause, Bigger Than Life, Strangers When We Meet, The Sandpiper and Johnny Guitar have much more in common than not, even though the locales, ages, and periods of the stories couldn't be more dissimilar on the surface. Yet they feel like the same artistic project in that they have found a way to represent characters and their environments on film in such a way that every detail matters and is organized - compositionally - for maximum affect.

JOHNNY GUITAR (Ray)

I think to look at the films in this way is to see that films like these are much closer to opera, dance and ballet than  they are to either the theatre or the novel.  If I am right then we have been wrong all along in trying to fit these films into categories normally associated with psychological realism or novelistic narration.

In fact - and in this way they are really like paintings or arias - the films are more interested in the emotional moment rather than only moving the plot forward.

WRITTEN ON THE WIND (Sirk)

This, then, is one virtue of strong emotion in a work of art like a movie. Strong emotion forces the action to be arrested for a time. It is an experience akin to religious or spiritual worship or contemplation. As we all know when somebody is in a sate of contemplation they aren't generally running around  in the world in extroverted and busy tasks.  (Of course that some spiritual masterworks of art are contemplative by virtue of turning down the dial on emotion, as in Mark Rothko, is a fact that only goes to show that there are, as it were, different kinds of religions.)

You can try to fit the films into such labels as realism but it not where their heart really is. They are radical expressions of states of feeling. The narrative course of the film  or psychological categories (or diagnosis) of the film's characters are actually secondary. What matters is the emotional moment. In this sense these works of art of a staid and conservative Hollywood era are anything but. They are revolutionary in their romanticism, in their stubborn insistence on the virtue of authenticity and truth seeking - values that however overused and problematic they are in word, are as indispensable and inescapable in culture more generally in deed.

A particular, if not peculiar, form of Humanistic education

My previous post was a look backward as I began a big move forward. I should like to go back to the beginning and discuss certain influences. Any kind of artist or critic has to have definite and definitive influences. These form the imaginative center and in practically all cases this is a psychological theme unique to the individual's identity. The world of the arts is the largest mansion conceivable. The doors are many; some of which are dead bolted, still others unabashedly unlocked, and ajar.

One of the things about art objects is that when you interact with them, if you are doing it correctly - and there are more or less correct or incorrect ways of interaction - the more correct mode of interaction will involve repetition, and ultimately be a form of education. Through memorizing the artwork, even if like I was, a child doing the work and not old enough to even comprehend it in its fullness, the art object will become a part of you. As a result, whether you intend this intimacy or not, by "memorizing" the object you will, learn, if only unconsciously, a lot of things about the arts in general since you are learning about certain patterns, or genres, or styles going back many years, centuries, epoch etc., thus learning about some of the oldest antecedents in an indirect fashion.

1967 being the year of my birth, and my father being a Beatles fan, meant that right out of the womb the record player was playing the Sgt Pepper album. If my earliest filmic memory was seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey twice my earliest music memory was the Sgt Pepper album and, simultaneous with this, some Bach recordings. My parents told me that I would ask to hear Day In The Life over and over again, so fascinated I was by it as  composition and the dissonant orchestral sonorities in that crescendo.


Last month  I saw an original pressing of Let It Be at my shirtmakers' shop and my entire body was transported back to four years old or a few years after as I had not looked at the photos on the album cover since them. I remember, as I had always done, staring for great lengths of time at the photos of the musicians. I did this because I had I thought that my looking was a form of magic that would reveal to me how these songs I enjoyed so much were made, doubtless a cognitive error on my part,  but one that revealed a curious hunger in the context of me being quite isolated for long periods of time - isolated not only from the musical instruments in question but also from relationships with others.  I used to fantasize or wonder about how the music was made and the photos of Abbey Road Studios revealed many technical and technological devices and artifacts about which I was curious and had little or no understanding.

Around this time I discovered the Guys And Dolls original soundtrack. Whenever I found a song I really liked I learned how to manipulate the needle, carefully as to not scratch the record, but, more precociously, how to identify by the visual size of the groove formations, which songs were the ones I liked.

For some reason I was obsessed with Fugue For Tinhorns. Here is the same version to which I listened incessantly.

It was the incessant almost rhythm changes styled form and contrapuntal singing I loved so much, as much as the phrasing of the cast singers. Now you could say this is nothing special, simply a round. But you'd be wrong to say that, because Frank Loesser seems to have the perfect ear for just the right melodic sequence to choose.  I was also learning about melody itself from some great ballads on that album, in particular "I'll Know".


A third record was one of the Bach Bradenberg Concertos. This one in particular I would repeat over and over.


The very first Miles Davis I heard was this soundtrack for a Louis Malle film.

This sparked a life long obsession with slow tempos as well as the blues tonalities. Curiously, the next Miles I would hear was not anything from this period, not Kind of Blue, but In A Silent Way. I was really at the mercy of what I could find in record stores and such stores were at the mercy of what was considered worthy of stocking from the past, what was reissued or not, and what was considered a sure or safe sale. Probably the kinds of groves and sounds on In A Silent Way were more popular than anything from the fifties or middle sixties at least in the Tampa, Florida where I spent most of the year,

I was not exposed to very much rock at this time aside from The Beatles. I remained ignorant of much of it. I was intensely interested in rhythm and blues and soul music however. Seeing The Jackson Five at Madison Square Garden might have been the initial stimulus. Then again there were some old Bessie Smith recordings that were in the house. The only exposure I got to rock was what was overheard at public venues or on the radio and I never really followed it in anything like a systematic way.

But you can't really escape rock. I was on this swim team and my coach kept calling me Frampton because my last name rhymed with Frampton. Actually my swim coach himself looked like Peter Frampton. "Hey Frampton do that lap again!" was a constant refrain. Not only would he call me Frampton but he would blare Frampton Comes Alive from loudspeakers and an 8 track coming from his elaborately designed van.

I actually had a girlfriend at this age (which I understand now is not considered age appropriate since I was child, though she was a child as well, a peer), and she was in love with Peter Frampton, and had a huge poster of him in her bedroom. Because I liked her mother's taste in music so much more and considered her, well, simply more attractive than the daughter, I would sort of hang around the mother more and find excuses to leave the daughter's room and go see the mom in the kitchen or living room, and listen to mom talk about Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, and gaze at this mom in her halter top, much to the chagrin of the daughter.

I believe listening to these particular musical styles was inculcating me into their ways and their methods. I think the best things you can have for inspiration by, or memorization of, things that are at least good in quality.

When I wasn't restricted to the basically lone experience of record listening I was enormously blessed to experience live artistic performances. One of the hallmarks of every Summer as a child were the several weeks or even months I would spend in New York City. Now this was a NYC Summer in the 1970s. Because of, among other things, my father's deep love for the theatre, I would see practically every production that was mounted in NYC and I mean everything - from Joseph Papp, to commercial Broadway fare to avant-garde off-Broadway fare as well as both musicals and dramatic plays.

For some reason seeing the original production of Bob Fosse's Chicago made the deepest impression on me. Part of it was Fosse's sensibility which seemed to have some spiritual connection with mine. That is, Fosse, like myself, was an aesthete. Everything for him was a matter of sensual form, no matter the particular content or medium.

A great part of my love for his original production of Chicago resided in two women: Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon as they appeared here. This is the closest thing to a documentation of the two of them as they appeared then as I have been able to find.


I was so taken with Rivera and Verdon that I had a poster of the two of them throughout my childhood over my bed. A video documentation by a cast member - courtesy of Candy Brown - gives you a sense of what the staging felt like:



The erotic in art has always been a matter of censorious contention in many audiences.  This is a pity, for in Fosse we have someone who made the highest art of the erotic, albeit in mass popular forms like movies or musicals. He had no illusions about his subject matter and could be as morally stringent as a Sunday preacher (or Brecht) as in Star 80, Sweet Charity (or for that matter, Chicago) but he was not only a critic or satirist: he was also an unabashed entertainer, interested in the eternal pleasures of life. Work which is interested in such pleasures for their own sake - like the work of Jacque Demy or Radley Metzger - will always have opponents and naysayers of various kinds. But it is all a question of style and not all styles are equally congenial to all populations, subcultures etc.

What do all of the above have in common, aside from their intrinsic excellence? You will note that they are examples of adult culture: that is, they were not specifically designed for a children's audience, and yet I was a child being exposed to such material. Most importantly, all of these works of culture are made by we humans: they are produced, designed, created. They are not simply found falling from the sky or laying on the ground. Things humans create are always set apart from the daily world even as they engage with that same daily world. The designed or created aspect has to do with imagination and representation: two categories that create much misunderstanding as to their ultimate purposes in life. Now imagination and representation have an abstraction from life even as they fully engage with life. They are fictions but have about them much truth and as such are partly nonfictional. It is human to reflect upon life rather than simply survive or suffer this life. I think what I have in mind in this particular post is the cumulative effect of certain reflections and what their uniqueness or aesthetic vastness might mean for a single human life and how it may develop in time.

An immense thank you to Candy Brown for posting her footage on youtube.

Notes Towards an Aesthetics of 1970s Cinema and Culture: Quarrelling with the Law Of NonContradiction

Art and ideas are not one: my immodest reply to John Russell.

This opening of Dog Day Afternoon is not an establishing scene. It relates little to anything that follows in the film. Oh I will grant you that it ends with an establishing shot of the bank that will occupy the action and drama of the film and I grant you that it moves from the outer world of New York towards the more intimate focus of the site of the robbery. Yet while we are watching it we are continuously distracted by all of these disparate and various street and beach scenes. We aren't thinking about action or banks; we are busy watching humanity going about its business. It is this feeling that makes this not an ordinary establishing scene. We are in the moment; it doesn't just serve the story. It is scenes like this that are salient.
 It is in the mode of Robert Frank or Gary Winogrand's documentation. The scenes are rough; they might depress some viewers. Yet there is such a rich attention to our humanity in it. Indeed, I would argue it is as humanistic as Italian Renaissance painting. It is filled with loving attentions. What does it mean? Why is so much time taken to show urban life in this sense? And what do you make of the choice of a loud Elton John song rather than a composed score? (The song is also unrelated to what we see and it is important to note that the melody and harmony offer a very sharp and heartfelt mood, with its quasi Gospel and bluesy chords and direct manner). (Hal Ashby made the loud rock song his trademark in sound design. In him it was a color in his palette. Later Hollywood used it to sell songs or push bands. Here, as in Ashby, it is pure aesthetic accompaniment to create a mood. Here Sidney Lumet is doing something rare in Lumet's oeuvre). What does Lumet's decision to open a film this way make us feel about life or art? How does it affect us?

Critics ask questions such as these far too little. If they did ask them they might start a much needed revolution in criticism.

There are a great many misconceptions concerning the meaning of what it is for we humans to make things that are expressive or more or less representational, things yet nevertheless not of direct or immediate reality and safely classified as "make-believe."

This is an introductory note for what promises to be a full length book that inquires into two related matters in aesthetics; one is a special "window" of opportunity, indeed a golden age of the cinema arts coinciding roughly with the period of what certain revisionist historians have called "The Long 1970s': I ask exactly what made it innovative and special and opposed to the classical and older modern period that came before this long 1970s. The second matter concerns with why this age or short window was destroyed and, notwithstanding vestiges that  are scattered all throughout our current moment, why the conditions are more or less permanently impossible for any continuation or return of that wild and weirdly wonderful and innovative project.

The two questions are most intimately connected because it is a truth that artists and entertainers who make things have beliefs and assumptions and that, if they happen to live in an age like ours, in which things that were previously a matter of partial mystery or naive innocence have become thoroughly picked over and overanalyzed, the newer set of beliefs and assumptions that such (usually scientific) mastery comprises might make impossible artistic quality of certain style or quality. Indeed, as I will argue by the end of the book it might even insure that all of the arts suffer in something like an objective way. Note that  I am not making the sociological statement that works of art are merely written by their culture or can never be timeless. Rather, I am saying that habits and assumptions that artists have or are encouraged to have cause certain works to be possible or impossible and the issue has little if anything to do with finances or budgets, or even political ideologies - the ways this issue normally gets discussed. In focusing on these we have missed something very important indeed.

Yet the paradox of art, and this will be my main thesis, is that, though these ideas and beliefs form the beginning of an artwork, art by its very nature being always, already a perceptual thing must eventually leave behind fixed ideas in its process. (If it is to be anything other than a news report, say.) This means that so-called conceptual art will succeed or fail by the sensory qualities of the work rather than the concept the artist wants to press upon us.  You might say that an artwork, regardless of style or time, communicates ideas in a way rather opposed to discursive or ideational thinking: through our perceptions and the feelings and wisdom that our perceptions, and only our perceptions, can bring.

Indeed I am constantly astonished at how some of the most important matters in visual arts, in this case, cinema or film, are ignored or passed over. In my account I restore certain matters of feeling, mood, texture, even duration, to their rightful place in afield all too long dominated by considerations of classical and modern psychology and narration. I must immediately thank Todd Berliner for starting the discussion of stylistic matters concerning the 1970s. I aim to continue his project and add further considerations.

I will look at works that are high art and rather low. My emphasis is to catalog styles and themes rather than specific authors. I still think there is a truth to authorship in terms of scripts and direction, but I am interested firstly in the aesthetics of an age, because the age with which I am dealing is an aesthetic one, an age as an art work, you might say.

STYLISTIC EFFECTS:

Effects are not trivial in my view. Rather than see them as an alternative to meaning as do the critics Bordwell, Scott Thompson, and Berliner, effect is meaning itself. I am not opposed to meaning - to narration, and psychology per se.  I just don't think it is always the most important matter.

I return constantly to the question of style. More than in any other period of cinema, filmmakers in the 1970s seemed to relish in the sights and sounds of the found and observed environment in which the world actually lived. This is not just because location shooting became equal to and at times largely replaced sets. For my purposes, it matters to me not a whit whether it was dressed or undressed, by the way. At times the design and architecture of the environment was as important an element as the observation of the manners and mores of the time. In this sense the films could be said to be naturalistic or real in their nature; the style of documentary was used all of the time, no matter however constructed the film may have been in other respects. Yet this was a radical realism, so radical that it departs from all earlier realism in assumptions, points of view, etc. Yet it wears the mask of "nitty-gritty" and "rough" realism to trick us in the audience. In no way could any of these films be considered the same in intent or purpose as earlier pictorial or written realism. This is not Zola, Dreiser, or Courbet. Still less is it the committed work of filmmaker John Grierson. Rather, the interest was in finding a poetry out of the ordinary, rather than saving the world the aim is to fully represent it.

It is no accident that John Cassavetes, Jacques Rivette have their scenes go on for as long as they do, it is in part a project of their times and much as themselves. They need to have the scenes go on so a slip or contradiction occurs in the character, thus destabilizing our fix on them. This is either done simultaneously, by the density of the mise en scene or serially by observing human conversation and interaction over long periods. There was an unabashed love for and fascination with the world that was "found." This is even more extraordinary and astonishing given the heavy ugliness of some of the 1970s. I am convinced that the filmmakers were hell bent on preserving the oddness and specialness of the time for future generations and that such interest in documentation is part of their ostensibly fictional project. Some of what was represented would be the last thing over which any camera would normally linger. Yet linger it does, longer and with more attention than at anytime before. It is as if the filmmakers were trying to test their own boundaries of compassion or perceptual attention. It is the point of view of somebody who has just arrived to planet earth and is excited by it.

Rather than objective realism these effects were joined with a kind of Romanticism and at other times a colder structuralism. If there is any word that best describes this style it is the word contradiction. The art, as much as the life of the 1970s aimed to defy the logic of the law of contradiction. Opposing things were always attempted. This single fact accounts for why the films have been so misread by ideological critics who, like the late Robin Wood, can never decide whether the films are Liberal or Conservative. A world fully explored is a world that will eventually resist all labels, types, categories and ideologies. It is not more truthful that other styles; it is simply more full, often exhaustingly so.

Uniquely in the history of art, the films of the 1970s aim to celebrate, mock, attack, satirize, and romanticize and empathize all at once. Most viewers miss one of these characteristics and see only one half. This is the fault of the viewer, because most of the films actually succeed in voicing fully the contradictions. Consider this ending of the film Stay Hungry (Bob Rafelson 1976)

Now it is part of my purpose in this book to try and free us from notions of causality, whether behavioral or emotional, so let us put aside the context or function of this ending. Free your mind of ideas about "spoilers". Note the feeling of this scene.

It appears as if all of these bodybuilders take over the city. They then meet up with a group of colorful and excited African American people in a crowd and trade notes and simply hang out. This is one of the most important moments in 1970s aesthetics: the moment where we are faced with a particular scene full of energy and have to somehow deal with it as an audience. Words like populist don't do it justice. There is a feeling of joy but it is not for any message in particular. The feeling is more important than the function.  The identities of the people they meet are completely irrelevant. What is important is the utterly excessive exuberance. The Southern fiddle music plays in the background. The whole proceeding has a cheap and humble quality: this is working class city. Yet the energy in the scene seems to raise everybody and everything out of their humble budget. or rather it celebrates the polyester bodyshirts and ugly cars. The modesty of budget becomes its own exalted beauty.

Usually critics will analyze this as a nod to Preston Sturges or Capra; they will note the sociology of bodybuilding and fitness in the 1970s. They will talk about how classic Hollywood movies would end with a parade. But they will forget how different this parade is. This scene is not about any of that! It uses that stuff to create certain liberatory energies. What after all was the streaking fad of the period to which this alludes? Why would anybody want to run nude into a crowded public space?

We are not sure where the frame begins or ends. This is, to use a classic critical category, an Open cinema. It has loose boundaries and loose focus. The main point of the plot (prize money, a contest, the survival of a workout gym) is constantly under threat by other stylistic distractions and forces.

 Note that it is having fun with this culture. There is some gentle satire in here, as much as celebration. Does the filmmaker want to endorse fitness or bodybuilding? Does he want to satirize it as another fad of the times? Really it is neither. Any critic committed to single reading of this will commit a misreading.

A VISION OF COMMUNITY:

Over and over again in 1970s cinema we are faced with crowds of ordinary, dowdy, homely, and average people clapping their hands at festivals, at Rotary clubs, at PTA meetings, at marches. A friend of mine says this is but political satire at the emptiness of American life. Wrong. If that were the case it would be an Elia Kazan Face in The Crowd: expressionistic, with key lighting and so on. Even Altman, who is one of the meanest satirists who ever took to the screen is undeniably in love with his crowd scenes. This is not a Marxist vision of emptiness and conformity. This is also ecstatic wonderment at the exuberance and comedy of America. In the 1970s there was the representation of the fullness of American life, not its emptiness. In the 1970s we leave behind the alienation and earnestness of the 1960s. We are in something else entirely. It is my humble project to try and interpret what this something else is.

Director Michael Ritchie was the master at this mode.


Look at the still above when it is not playing. This ugly, brown conference room, the way it is lit, the demeanor of the people and how the viewer is placed slightly outside of it gives you an idea of the aesthetic with which this book is concerned. (Almost no close or reaction shots in the whole scene by the way. No point of view or subjectivity angles.) We are in a deep 70s mode here. But what does it mean?

As soon as you think it couldn't be more radical, more Feminist in its aims, an aim at exposing the Beauty racket, the misuse of girls etc. it will then turn to broad comedy, the kind of comedy that indulges in the sort of Benny Hill politically incorrect sexuality that we were just told is problematic and then after the comedy, it will remind us of the unfairness of it all. It is merciless in criticizing (and accurately cataloguing) the self help and motivational ideologies of America but endears us to the people who hold such beliefs.  It will mock mercilessly, then it will swerve back to compassionate regard. It attacks small narrow businessmen like Bruce Dern, and it shows the girls being somewhat oppressed by their supervisors.

Bruce Dern's Big Bob Freelander, the used car salesman, can be a jerk and an asshole; he is dim and philistine; the film mocks his anti-Arab stance over oil and yet it gives Dern one of the most poignant and affecting of monologues spoken by a man on screen. Yet he is so relentlessly positive and optimistic that some goodness and caring has to come out!

The culture of the 1970s inherited from the 1960s an obsession with the question of Love in all of its forms. Love was a kind of quest, a religion of sorts. Where did it go wrong and why; how could it be repaired? Film after film engaged with this. Think of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage. Cassavette's Woman Under The Influence and Love Streams. Ed Pincus made a film called Diaries that is about four hours long and for those four hours he and his friends and family discuss what love is and little else. In La Maman et La Putain by Eustache love is endlessly discussed. If for earlier films Love was a given or a backdrop or taken for granted, here Love was a puzzle, a hoot, something wild, a rebellion, a lark, both heavy and light.

They felt obligated to love and understand the figures in their movies no matter how flawed.

Like other films in the decade, the film Smile both satirizes and celebrates. It loves all of it so much, partly as a grand human comedy. This fact enrages committed leftists about films like these. Where they want definite stands, Ritchie and writer Jerry Belson are too fascinated with the humanity of it all to want to have a revolution or destruction.  Without once letting us forget that they are flawed he loves their flaws; it is much endearing as it is horrible. It is this contradiction that insures films like Smile into the pantheon of some of the most slippery, tricky and emotionally complex works to be placed on screen. (Wait till we get to the outright dramas of the period and it gets even more complex).  This is partly accomplished through the fullness of presentation. It is photographed in the harshest and coldest utilitarian lighting possible. Scenes are shot leaving us in the audience outside and detached. Yet it will undo this and go in on some human drama. We spend as much  time with horny teenaged boys, dim middle aged businessman as much as we do the beauty contestants. There is even a depiction of a horrific marriage; yet no labels are trotted out. There are no clear victims or heros. This is a view of the world that could only be created before artists and intellectuals decided how they felt about everything.

It is no accident that current director Karyn Kusama, in speaking of Smile as one of her all time favorite films, notes that it would be an impossible film to make today since today's climate demands clarity and simplicity of emotion and meaning. As the director of Jennifer's Body she is all too aware of the pressures of working in the current studio system. In this sense we return to the possibility with which I opened this introduction: that there is a finite and historical nature to what are can or cannot do at any given time.

In  this note for what will eventually be a book, I have dealt with contradiction. Later on I will deal with style more generally and offer a theory of spectatorship and style that I think will focus light on previously unexamined areas of film aesthetics and art more generally.

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Daniel Bell died yesterday on January 26. A classic(al) New York intellectual, he was one of the few intellectuals to resist pigeonholing. Author of The End Of Ideology and The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism, he refused to fall into so many traps into which his peers were almost always thrown. I am most interested in one quote of his in particular which I will reproduce here in its entirety:

"When I had my Bar Mitzvah, I said to the Rabbi, ’ I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God… I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said … ‘Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares’?

Actually that is not the quote I had in mind. Sorry. Here is the correct one:

"I am a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."

He meant by this that in politics he started from the sovereign, inalienable, "individual and not the group", thus liberal in politics. And in economics he thought economic justice a priority, thus socialist though, "not statist". And he was conservative in culture because of respect for "tradition" and a belief that some works of art are better than others, though not that these works necessarily need be elite in status. By conservative he did NOT mean pro-capitalist, anti-abortion, or Republican.

The world will be a poorer place without Daniel Bell.

Reading the World

It was recently suggested to me that I read a text to demonstrate what it is to read, criticize, or analyze it. There have been many vogues in reading over the years, and the tide of new fashions continues unabated. What I should like to do, before picking out something in particular, is to discuss some general things that I feel need repeating, as an invitation for you the reader to perhaps reflect upon your life in a new way.

One way of looking at culture is that it involves the HOW of things rather than the WHAT. Now the "what" surely matters. If we are looking at a book those sentences and paragraphs matter, and of course if those sentences and paragraphs build to create the illusion of a plot, that matters as well, and some of the meaning resides in precisely the general impression or summary we draw from that book. We get a sense of Joseph K, or Dorothea Brooke, or Pip because of the effect of accumulation of assertions about that "person" (whether through a newer free indirect style or older narrative authority). But equally, and, in what I would refer to as the highest works of literature, the means by which this process is carried out might eclipse in importance the summary. Too often, though a reader wants just the summary and reads for that alone. In quite a few cases this might be an egregious mistake, not because that summary or shorthand doesn't matter, but because the meaning of the thing dwells in how it is told. In fiction this sometimes takes the form of twisting and turning the figures written about in such a way that how selfhood is constructed by fictional character and reader alike becomes itself the theme.

I thought it might be fun to look at the world in this way too. We can read our friends, our fashions, our buildings and see how they are made. In this sense the poststructuralists were right to say that the whole world is a text. (Where they were wrong is in their excessive suspicion about what is given in a text, and in their tendency to be uninterested in older humanistic criteria for evaluation, criteria I will try and uphold on this site). Some spiritualist type people and astrologers often talk about reading a person's chart for insight into their character. We rarely have the fortune or opportunity - it is magical really - to step outside of our habits and read the world in this way. What would it be like to step back from our practices and do anthropological field work on ourselves? We might ask why so many males wear baseball caps en masse, for example. Or why certain females have the need to get into oversized and gaudy white machines with flashing lights and drive around a lot and get drunk and giggle incessantly upon planning for a wedding for one in their party. The trick, of course is to defamiliarize all of this, but not to do it in such a way that is neither functionalist on the one hand, nor censorious on the other. The functionalist, like a certain sociologist typically sees the WHAT of the situation. Thus, those girls are doing a timeless ritual of bonding before a wedding. The trouble with this functional account is that it leaves behind some of the most salient facts about that bacholerette party. Why usually the white limo for example? It is completely inadequate to reduce the world into use value in this way. This is one of the problems with NeoDarwninian accounts of human behavior: it turns matters of what into how, which often even ignores the how.

One way we usually get perspective upon our familiar styles is by a certain kind of travel where we live with others who are rather different. But the questions of how we eat, how we dress, how we contain ourselves are opportunities for reflection, meditation and contemplation, whether we are faced with challenging difference from those ways or not.

Before we really make any provisional evaluations we must be sensitive to this issue of how. Of course we do it all the time when our pundits and nutritionists and foodies evaluate the health and nutrition of what we eat. But there are other areas of life that are taken absolutely for granted to the point where the readings of those areas are shamefully poor. The development of the Interstate Highway is one example of the tragic consequences of an abandonment of the power of how. We were in such a hurry to summarize (we read for the plot), that we just built the most unattractive strips of concrete, the better to get from one location to the other and (in theory) the quickest time.

We also read from a particular standpoint. There are two salient facts about me that make me read a certain way. For one I don't drive, and for another I don't drink. As a relentless pedestrian a compulsive peripatetic I am struck by the absolute domination by and love for the automobile. The world is hostile to me at every turn because it potentially threatens me with large machines whose speed extraordinarily surpasses what my feet can do.

Being a nondrinker in a world in which drink is deeply important is another standpoint issue. To make matters more tricky I don't not drink for moral or medical or philosophic reasons as I am not in recovery from anything alcohol related. People can be hostile and irritated by my non drinking. Drinking is an important means for people to connect and maintain those connections.

Now, even though I expressed my alienation from the world of drink, I would be most dissatisfied if someone only looked at drinking as a pretext for people to meet or as a means for people to alter their psychology (to relax or to get into a certain state). I may be a nondrinker but I am fully aware that there is this extraordinary art - and it is ever changing - to beer and wine, to say nothing of, say, whiskey or liquours. There is talk of vineyards, and grapes, and the right climate for this or that preparation and heady and ecstatic talk of tones in a drink, and dryness, and heaviness, and lightness, and bitterness. The writing on our alcoholic beverages in the most mediocre food column can read like Dr. Johnson writing on Shakespeare. And none of it concerns mere functionality.

Thus we can look at the world as a work of art, as we would regard a poem or sculpture. And my guess is, though I can't quite prove it, that if we looked at the world in this way, it would not slow us down or distract us from matters of great importance, but rather, we might become better judges of character in the people in our lives and avoid signing on to projects that in the long scope of history turn out to be disappointing at best or tragic at worst.