First, in case someone missed it, Zach is traveling for the next ten
days or so, which is why he is not further engaged in this thread.

Dan, thanks for your gentle comments, which allow me to clarify my
thinking about all this.

Dan: "I think that the reason that your aesthetic is in a minority among
auteurists is that it doesn't seem to me to grow from the auteurist
tradition. There's almost nothing of the Bazinian antithesis in your
writing, none of that sense that the mere act of recording reality is
important to cinema's effect."

I think this "sense" is important to certain films, and not others, and
therefore I don't think it's an essential aspect of cinema. My posts
here about "why film and Bach are great to me" are attempts to think
about that essence. When I write about films in which the "act of
recording reality is important," which is most commercial narratives
films, I believe I do engage them on these terms. So perhaps you're just
cauterizing my posts here when you say there's "almost none of that
sense..." in my writing? Because I think that would be a grotesquely
inaccurate characterization of my writing on commercial narrative
cinema, unless I just don't understand what you mean.

To test this, I went to the first article listed in the writing about
film page on my Web site, a review of "Eureka." (
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Aoyama.html )
Here's the opening paragraph:

*****************************************
Last week the New York Times published an article on Sara J. Rudolph, a
survivor of the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four
little girls, one of them Rudolph's older sister. While the motive
behind the bombing was racist, Rudolph said she would never understand
how "someone could be that cold." Now 50, she jumps at loud noises. She
said, "There will never be any closure for me."
*****************************************

I then try to relate this real-life story to the characters of the film.

Most of my analysis of the film talks about framing and editing and
(gulp!) acting in terms that, while not precisely Bazinian, certainly
depend on implicit comparisons of those elements to more "realistic"
films and to what we know of people from daily life. Here are some excerpts:

*****************************************
,,,,Eureka is more deeply about the immeasurable and lasting damage
suffered by those who experience senseless violence.,,, most of the time
it appears to mirror the shell-shocked trauma of its characters....
Those "long, barren sequences" enrich Eureka as surprisingly powerful
and precise articulations of the void within the characters. .....
....Aoyama's characters do not "come to life" in the usual sense - and
that's the point. They are traumatized and don't even understand
themselves. The two children never speak; they use hand signals when
necessary. Both Miyazakis offer wonderfully restrained performances.
Their faces manage to hint at emotions while rarely displaying
them...... When Makoto meets his estranged wife, the scene begins with a
shot of tall buildings and bridges seen through a restaurant window; the
camera then moves around the characters as they talk, deflecting
attention from their faces and suggesting that their growing alienation
is somehow out of their control.... The first instance of Aoyama
intercutting head-on close-ups occurs when Makoto arrives at the kids'
house and they face each other. He is seeking to forge a bond with them,
and the relationship becomes central to the film and to all of their
redemptions. The last two instances occur between Makoto and each of the
kids - at moments when they connect deeply. ....
*****************************************

There is much much more of this sort of thing in my review, and I think
you'd find similar analysis in most all my reviews of and articles about
commercial narrative films.

Dan: "Certainly the whole Bach/Coltrane 'argument from complexity' is
very far from Bazin's aesthetic."

Yes. But Bazin's aesthetic is also not identical to auteurism. Anyway,
this is my attempt to get at what's in common about the greatness of a
wide range of films, for me, from Borzage to Bresson to Brakhage. Thus
it must exclude what's particular to sync sound commercial narrative
films featuring actors walking around and talking. Even then, my Bach
argument doesn't get at what I often like about home movies,
instructional films, industrial films, some documentaries, films by
Maurice Lemaitre, and so on.

I've always wondered, though, if Bazin's superb essay on Bresson isn't a
little bit far from his own "aesthetic." As a great film critic, he
talked about Bresson in the terms the films required him to use.

Dan: "Godard: 'We cannot forgive you for never having filmed girls as we
love them, boys as we see them every day, parents as we despise or
admire them, children as they astonish us or leave us indifferent: in
other words, things as they are.'"

As a filmmaker defining what kind of cinema he wants to see, this is
very nice. (What year was it written, I wonder? It sounds to me like it
could be the starting point for a pretty acidic attack on Godard's
"Hélas, pour moi.") As a definition of what makes great cinema, it's
seriously wrong. A great film can film people without any of this
affectional baggage. A great film can show us things as we never
expected them to be.

Dan: "When you talk about Hawks, you seem to me to be in touch with the
idea that I keep wanting to scream out during this discussion: that the
director affects cinema acting, not just with composition, lighting, etc"

I completely agree with you about this. I do think it's true of
Hitchcock too; I'm just not sure I have the language to articulate it
yet in his films. It's true of many filmmakers I love. Borzage and Sirk
are opposites formally and in their treatment of actors. Margaret
Sullivan, the quintessential Borzage performer with her passion brimming
and bubbling on the surface, would be very out of place in Sirk. I'd
cite the Robert Stack of "Written on the Wind" and "The Tarnished
Angels" as offering the perfect vacant and inward division of Sirk's
fantastically divided heroes of failure. But I'm just not sure every
director that I love yields all that much. Acting style in "Strange
Illusion." I dunno, I think it's middle-period Hardy Boys, and it
doesn't seem to connect all that well with acting style in "The Naked
Dawn." Acting styles in de Toth's noirs versus Anthony Mann's noirs?
Perhaps there are just things I've missed here. As I've said, I can miss
acting more easily than compositions, and since acting is talked about
so much by everyone else as long as I do my best to notice as much about
it as I can I'm not going to worry about this all that much.

"One last observation: you seem not to have noted one of Zach's most
important points: that direction of actors or manipulation of time,
rhythm, emphasis, etc. is no more or less 'formal' than what's in a
composition."

I didn't miss it, I asked Zach to write an essay about it. I'd like to
see this defended, particularly in films I haven't really gotten.

I would defend it, myself, up to a point, in Leone's "Once Upon a Time
in America," which I saw twice in the week it opened in New York around
1984 (so this was some version of long four hour version). I went the
second time because I was incredibly moved the first time and wanted to
see it again, and also because I wondered if I had been wrong about
Leone, if he might be great. I was just as moved the second time. The
intersection of editing rhythm and performance, particularly for example
in the scene between the de Niro character and the actress in her
dressing room when they are aged, is enormously powerful. The varying
rhythms of acting and movement for different time periods and character
ages are beautifully calculated. The use of time-crossing structure is
great: not as a gimmick to hook you into the storytelling (which is one
thing I hated about its later use in "Pulp Fiction"), but as a
meditation on the paradox of life lived in irreversible time. But
finally the film failed my "great art" test because I couldn't see
sufficient structural or spatial integrity in its imagery. All of the
things I loved about it fed into its "human" elements, into the ways in
which it moved me. This still made it a pretty significant achievement;
if it was just opening now and I was charged with reviewing it I'd give
it four stars. But for me it ultimately lacked the architectural kind of
structure that makes a film more than a bundle of carefully orchestrated
affections. I didn't get a real visual form; the temporal form seemed
too tied to the film's specifics; I didn't think it had a real "vision."
Of course it had real vision compared to almost every film released that
year; I'm comparing it to Ford and Bresson. You can call this a bias of
mine if you like, and perhaps it is. Or perhaps too many movie fans,
including the auteurist ones, are too attached to movies as vehicles for
involving us in the characters and the story and manipulating our
emotions. I take the modernist view here, that film is projected light
on the screen and that it should work on *that* level too.

Fred Camper