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Auteurs and their 'key' works   Message List  
Reply | Forward Message #9806 of 48868 |
Re: [a_film_by] Re: Auteurs and their 'key' works

Critics serve various functions, often more than one, depending on the
critic. Critics who work for "general interest" publications usually
have the obligation to try to help readers decide if they would like to
see the film. Critics can also try to educate by providing information
or context that the viewer might not otherwise have. Critics can also
try to change the way people see, by plumbing those valuable aspects of
a film that depend on formal elements that most viewers miss.

About money, film criticism is one of those professions like acting, or
being a "fine art" painter, in which the supply of people who want to do
it is much greater than the demand for it. Hence we have many critics
who write for almost nothing, and many more who write for free, of late
on "Joe's movie page" and the like. Last time I looked, there weren't
any lawyers advising multinational corporations on tax questions for free.

The question of what a good film is "about" is all too often separated
from its style. For a director like, er, Spielberg, that may be the
right approach, but for the filmmakers whose work I love, that's a huge
mistake, in my view. You could look at the script and say "Imitation of
Life" is about race relations, or New York, or the acting profession, or
any one of a number of other things, and if course it is "about" all of
those things, just David is not wrong in his list of what "Seven Women"
is about. But seen through Sirk's lens-eye, the patterns of hopelessness
and notions of "Sirkian impossibility" become controlling, with moments
such as Sarah Jane's grasping at flowers at the end of that great crane
in constituting the not-so-secret-"center" of the film's concerns.
Similarly, the diagonal compositions and lighting, the clutter of the
frames, the mixture of presence and incredible distance in "Seven Women"
create an elegiac vision of a community's collapse, and I find it
impossible to separate the little lesbian sub-plot from all that;
rather, it reinforces it.

I don't mean to suggest that my little blending of formal description
and thematic extraction exhausts these films, and in that sense I partly
agree with JPC; people could easily make plausible cases for the style
supporting other themes. But I think those cases usually have to be made
through the compositions and lighting and editing, if the film meets my
own standards for greatness.

- Fred C.





Tue May 11, 2004 5:59 am

fredcamper
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... "Enjoy" will never be old-fashioned, Bill. Ah, le plaisir du texte! We write to account for and share that pleasure, Kevin. If we can get paid for it,...
jpcoursodon
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May 11, 2004
1:24 pm

Critics serve various functions, often more than one, depending on the critic. Critics who work for "general interest" publications usually have the obligation...
Fred Camper
fredcamper
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May 11, 2004
6:00 am

Ah, this is just too confusing for me! "The Immortal Story"," "I Confess," "The Green Room," and "Once Upon a Time in America" are among my most cherished ...
ptonguette@...
peter_tonguette
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May 11, 2004
5:05 pm

... Confess," ... most cherished ... like "My Fair ... the Cukor, ... beloved films just reminds us that auteurism is not monolithic. We've had those...
jpcoursodon
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May 11, 2004
7:22 pm

Bill's (apparent) rejection of a number of ... We've ... Daney loved it; Mourlet hated it. Apparently is the word. I like a number of the films listed - not My...
hotlove666
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May 11, 2004
7:39 pm

It's a very intriguing notion that 'secret center' films may be their director's least interesting. As Adrian suggests, there are certainly instances where a...
ptonguette@...
peter_tonguette
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May 11, 2004
7:02 pm

... This also brings up the notion of "films maudits." "Party Girl" comes to mind in this regard, as does "1941" and (for rather different reasons Rivette's ...
David Ehrenstein
cellar47
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May 11, 2004
7:17 pm

Lots of these "secret center" films seem very good, such as the remarkable "The Immortal Story", "I Confess" and even "My Fair Lady", which seems today so much...
MG4273@...
nzkpzq
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May 12, 2004
1:34 am

Peter, how is Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can" a 'secret center' film? Kevin [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]...
LiLiPUT1@...
scil1973
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May 12, 2004
2:26 am

... I think it's the most personal film he's ever made. In my review, I argued that the plot - Frank Abagnale, Jr. running from his troubled home life, ...
ptonguette@...
peter_tonguette
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May 12, 2004
3:20 am

... There's something very sentimentally attractive to that notion, but five minutes with Spielberg would disabuse you of it, I believe. He's far and away one ...
David Ehrenstein
cellar47
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May 12, 2004
5:10 am

... Exactly. He's complex and quite talented figure who needs better criticism that moves beyond the assumption that he's only sentimental, only sunshine,...
Zach Campbell
rashomon82
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May 12, 2004
2:45 pm

David, I don't mean to suggest that Spielberg is an uninteresting person or somehow lacks personality; his films alone disabuse me of that notion! I drew the ...
ptonguette@...
peter_tonguette
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May 12, 2004
5:35 am

... In spite of the fact that he's long been regarded (not without reason) as a "consensus" figure, an embodiment of the ideological "status quo," Spielberg...
David Ehrenstein
cellar47
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May 12, 2004
1:04 pm
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