Dan Sallitt wrote

> <http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html>
>
> One of my favorite
> moments in all of cinema is the sequence in FORT APACHE where Wayne says
> goodbye to the doomed troops before the climax - there's something
> amazing about the way each of those shots interacts with the next, as if
> we were being ripped again and again into a different instance of the
> universe.

Precisely. I urge you to watch early 30s Ford with this in mind,
particularly when close shots of people are being exchanged. e.g., AIR
MAIL (a really supergreat movie that passes most people by ompletely).

>
>
>
>
> The Hawks section is quite good also. I have a way of looking at Hawks
> which I've become accustomed to, and so I tend to filter everything
> through it: namely, that Hawks sets up a familiar level of movie realism
> keyed to conventions, and then plays the action out at a different,
> faster and more detailed level of realism that releases some of the
> energy stored in the dramatic conventions.

My problem with what you write is that I wish you would not use words
like realism and genre.

I do not think they have meaning.

"Genre" simply does not exist -- other than as an academic conspiracy.
It's an artistic form of racism... Croce damned "genre" as a
"pseudo-concept" (along with a bevy of other cherished academicisms,
like "myth"). You'd be fascinated by this, I think. Try Gian N.G.
Orisni, "Benedetto Croce" (Southern Illinois Press).

>
> Hawks without genre is hard to imagine,

Not for me!
What I cannot imagine is "genre." "Hawks" is infinitely easier! I
suspect what people mean is that they imagine genre without Hawks.

> even
> if he doesn't transform genre from the inside - he is constantly working
> against genre expectations, making actors talk a little more casually
> and move a little faster, making action unfurl without the abstraction
> of dramatic buildup.


Do you really believe that someone writing a story or directing a scene
or playing a part is studiously contemplating what everyone else has
done and deliberately striving to do it differently? Isn't this a
shoddy kind of "originality," "being yourself" or "being unqiue" --
when actually one is simply conforming to conventional models?

The problem is that this sort of thinking assumes that poetry is a sign,
whereas (says Croce) a sign stands for something other than itself,
poetry stands only for itself. It's the uniqueness of the poetic that
attracts us in art; not its location within a nexus of superficial
similarities with "conventions" (also a pseudo-concept, for Croce).

>
>
> Similarly, instead of saying that there's "no world" in Hawks' films,
> I'd say that there's a movie world, movie sets.

That's probably what I meant when I said a stage backdrop. But
"realism" is more your bottleneck than mine.

>
>
> And, in addition to emphasizing the importance of gesture, I'd observe
> that what's really striking in a Hawks film is the *scale* of the
> gesture,

Yes!

> and that this microcosmic scale is part of Hawks' attempt to
> contrast the action with our expectation of what the action would
> normally be.

No!
Can you imagine, in real life, having a conversation with a beautiful
woman who constantly consciously strove to contrast her actions with our
expectations of what she was going to do? How long before the game gets
stale?

>
>
> Your point about the destabilizing effect of women on Hawks' men is of
> course accurate, but I think the male and female forces in his world are
> a bit more balanced than that account suggests. Bogart, Wayne, Grant
> are disoriented by the women in the films, but Hawks also gets pleasure
> from watching them maintain equilibrium, and in some cases assert
> dominance.

When? I mean: okay, maybe they "assert," but do they ever do dominance?
Am I wrong, or don't they all fall down rather frequently?

>
>
> Hawks' comedies tend to put a comic, devastating, larger-than-life id
> figure next to a representative of normality

Who? for example? Usually such reps are also outrageous, no?

> who registers the
> outlandish nature of the comic character, expresses exasperation as the
> comic figure leads the film away from sanity, devotes energy to
> reestablishing sanity in the face of this challenge.

Is sanity truly a goal or even a desideratum in Bringing Up Baby, The
Big Sky, Red River ... ?

> (In other words, a
> character from a more abstract movie is confronted with a character from
> a less abstract one.) This dynamic accounts for at least part of the
> disorienting nature of the woman in the Hawks universe. Note, for
> instance, that the male has the disorienting role in HIS GIRL FRIDAY,
> and the female has the stabilizing role - and things play out much the
> same as they do in other Hawks comedies.


I've always felt that Hawks was a bit gay. In His Girl Friday isn't the
girl perpetually destablizing the boy?

>
>
> - Dan
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
> ADVERTISEMENT
> Click Here!
>
<http://rd.yahoo.com/M=244522.3656190.4921519.1261774/D=egroupweb/S=1705021019:H\
M/A=1595054/R=0/SIG=1246b0b92/*http://ashnin.com/clk/muryutaitakenattogyo?YH=365\
6190&yhad=1595054>
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service
> <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/>.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]