Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 the Sixties part 6 (16), Creator of Forms (iii) Carl Theodor Dreyer - Bruce Hodsdon's series continues

For Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968) Gertrud (1964) was the final feature of his ‘major phase’ as a filmmaker in which he averaged only one feature as writer-director each decade (2 in France, 3 in Denmark) beginning with La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (France, 1928). 

In his initial phase 1918-26 Dreyer made 8 features (4 shot in Denmark, 2 in Germany, and 1 each in Sweden and Norway) described by Noel Burch as being “in step with the dominant [dramaturgical] ideology of silent cinema.” The tragic lack of balance in his output over five decades is attributable in large measure to “the radical cast” of Dreyer’s successive departures from the prevailing ascendancy of ‘invisible’ narrative following the critical acclaim (but not commercial success) of Jeanne d’Arc as an ‘artistic masterpiece’. 

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

To reprise an earlier reference (in part 4), the films of Dreyer, Bresson and Tati are unquestionably the works of an auteur, i.e. someone who creates his or her system in telling stories rather than putting into play an existing system (not their own). In his book ‘Film Modernism’ Sam Rohdie suggests that “an auteur in this sense is a modern artist whereas those that put into play what already is established, might be thought of as traditional skilled craftspeople.”  

Auteurship as it emerged initially in the pages of ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’ in the 50s “was a reward for excellence.” In contrast to the paradigmatic ‘modern artist’ the majority were (and still are) making narrative films basically consistent with the classical system - as was the case with most of the Cahiers critics themselves when they started making narrative features.  All the means (use of the camera, characterisation, dialogue, movement, setting, editing) are subordinate to narrative and story in a way that is primarily imitative (of nature, of existing forms). “The great classical artist is someone great for his or her ability to imitate not innovate, who obeys the rules with grace and style” (Rohdie q.v. 25-7). In these terms Dreyer, Bresson and Tati are modern artists.

Gertrud

While claiming Gertrud as “one of the most classical works of Dreyer,” András Bálint Kovács notes that it can be  associated with modernism by its extremely minimalist, static, and frontal compositions, as well as by the acting style of the main character (played by Nina Pens Rhode) who speaks slowly in a monotone without affect, seldom looking at the person to whom she is speaking. Dreyer’s use of off-screen space and camera movement independent of the characters’ movement seems adapted to the trend of the late modern art cinema’s representation of alienation (315). Ib Monty similarly notes that “Gertrud is amazingly in harmony with the stylistic trends” in 60s art cinema, given that Dreyer was never consciously concerned with keeping up with trends, always maintaining the integrity of his system. He spoke of his pride in the fact, he said, that he was always able “to find a style that has value for only a single film” (Schrader 135). In this there is a similarity to the element of ‘consistent inconsistency’ of style in Orson Welles’s system as noted in 6 (1).

Ironically the film Dreyer completed before Gertrud, Ordet/ The Word (1955), was his greatest success with audiences. He had wanted to make a film based on a play written in 1925 by the pastor-poet Kaj Munk after he saw it performed in a Copenhagen theatre in 1932 and subsequently as a  Swedish film based on Munk’s play directed by Gustaf Molander in 1943. The drama is about a  young woman who dies in childbirth but is brought back to life by an act of faith. The story is set among peasants in the rough Western Jutland. Dreyer simplified the original dialogue written in a more realistic form and cut it by half. There is a strong division in both the play and the film between the men’s and the women’s world and between the optimistic Christianity of the Borgen family and the dark pessimistic fanaticism of the village tailor. The crucial scene filmed in an 8 minute take is the miracle, the awakening of the dead continuing as a major point of contention since the film’s first screenings.

Rationalistically the miracle could be explained as psychic phenomenon. While he remained deliberately vague Dreyer did not see it as an affirmation of God’s existence, rather as a sign of the ambiguous border between the physical and the spiritual world as in Dreyer’s Vampyr. It is also open to interpretation in more overtly religious terms, about the clash of different kinds of religious faith and their reconciliation through a simpler “natural” faith. The mystery resides in the apparently unifying yet ambivalent figure of Johannes. Inger returns to life “as another of Dreyer’s triumphant women.”

In what was to be the last decade of his life, Dreyer had been planning a film of the tragedy, Medea. This is also reflected in Dreyer’s treatment of Gertrud based on a 1919 play by Hjalmar Soderberg (the last four films of Dreyer’s ‘major phase’ were all based on plays), a Kammerspeile (chamber play) described by Ib Monty as “a problem-drama in the manner of Ibsen.” He adds “that while the play was naturalistic, the film is not.” It became the last of Dreyer’s many portraits of women. Gertrud in the film is not “a suffering woman submissive to men” she is free and strong in her total commitment to “love is all” which the men in her life, presented in a disquieting double light, are variously unable to offer.

For Dreyer it was an experiment; “he wanted to coordinate the word and the image, to create harmony between what is seen and what is heard.” This required a special form of stylisation in performance with the image to open up an intended perspective on the characters through the way they speak and move. There are only 89 shots each averaging 78 seconds in 9 scenes, many filmed with travelling camera and no close-ups in a small number of uncluttered purposefully designed sets (there is only a single exterior setting). 

Gertrud

Tony Rayns notes in ‘Time Out’ that “the spiritual serenity of the surfaces in Gertrud “is built upon an aching sense of emotional pain - and the fact that it’s only half-articulated makes it all the more shattering.”  This presents a contrast, more apparent than real, with the emotionally charged close-ups of Falconetti in Jeanne d’Arc in which montage, angled camera and background sparsity combine to destroy all spatial sense. 

David Bordwell notes that “in its day the gap between narrative and style made Jeanne d’Arc unfashionably unfilmic, embarrassingly impure cinema” (196). Something similar was said more directly by critics of Gertrud more than three decades later. In his intensive formal analysis of Gertrud in the context of its predecessors, Bordwell writes that, Dreyer is requiring that “our viewing of the film must change.” That we can follow it “only by sensitising ourselves to cinema as a specific medium.” The inadequacy of its filmic representation in relation to narrative function Bordwell sees as placing the very concept of art cinema under direct assault in his last two films, “as they strive to make themselves unconsumable on any terms (196-7).”  He sees Dreyer’s works remaining “torn by inner conflicts.” In conclusion, “like Ozu, Mizoguchi, Tati and Bresson, Bordwell sees Dreyer’s historical importance as lying in his “contradictory in-betweenness.” Following from his analysis, Bordwell considers that “Dreyer’s fascination for us today is that of a director [who] opens up a problematic distance between dominant cinematic practice and another cinema which demands fresh perceptual activities, a cinema which refuses to be cinema as normally conceived and consumed ” (201).

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

In response to his critics, Dreyer called Gertrud “a portrait of time from the beginning of the century” with the anti-naturalism designed to transform the whole of the past reality into “a camera-reality.” The stylised syntax and subtle oppositional aesthetic engagements on screen resulted in derisive accusations of “ filmed theatre” and unremittingly slow “couch conversations” from unengaged viewers and mainstream critics which ended the much anticipated opening of Gertrud in Paris after only a few days. Monty acknowledges that Dreyer’s last film has continued to divide audiences. 

My own experience is more in line with Kovács and Monty’s conclusions referred to above. Bordwell’s concession to the expressive power of what Dreyer termed his ‘film from the heart’, Gertrud exists “on the margin of unity, meaning, pleasure.” Although initially viewed several times in less than optimal conditions on projected 16mm and a small screen, for me it meets the seven criteria, including the fifth (“repeatability”), of Paul Schrader’s canonical criteria* - see the notes attached to the summary table and director lists. 

 

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David Bordwell in The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (1981) provides in-depth formalist analyses of the ‘final five’ in the context of the author’s film by film analysis of Dreyer's overall oeuvre.  

Raymond Carney’s Speaking the Language of Desire (1989) is a rejection of formalist and thematic analysis in favour of his committed exploration of expressive states of thought and feeling in Dreyer’s films. 

 Noel Burch in “Dreyer: The Major Phase” provides a rigorously compressed adulatory formalist case for Dreyer’s work in Cinema Dictionary vol 1 ed. R.Roud (1980)                                                  

Ib Monty entries on Dreyer and Gertrud in The International Dictionary vol 1 Films, and vol. 2 Directors ed. Christopher Lyon (1984).                                                                                                           

Paul Schrader Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer  (2004)                                           

Mark Nash Dreyer BFI monograph (1977)

 

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Part 6(12) - of Bruce Hodsdon's new series on the history of art cinema - France Part 4 - GODARD: VISIONARY AND REBEL

Peter Wollen reflected (Writings pp.87-92) on Fredric Jameson's observation that Godard began the 60s as a premature post-modernist avant la lettre.  The claim is based on Godard's lifelong penchant for citation and recycling and his view that cinema should be a form of journalism or, perhaps instant ethnography seeking to grasp what is happening at the time of production. This he presented in a kind of visual mosaic - but ending up two decades later, “the ultimate survivor of the modern as such”, always swimming against the current of the age. The futurist visionary and rebel eventually turned into the disenchanted historian [of Histoire(s) du Cinema] in search of transcendence”. 

Wollen further commented on what Godard saw as the debasement of public life in post oil-shock society he “came to distrust spectacle more and more […] without abandoning his fundamental cinephilia.” His disenchantment sprang from what he saw as the cinema's inability to respond to its times. “He became convinced that cinema was indeed a doomed art (Michael Witt quoted Wollen 90), that it had lost the will to live.” “Cinema will disappear,” he predicted in 1996, “when it is no longer projected in the dark, when the beam of light has gone.” Television, on the other hand “is ephemeral...domesticated and insulated,” concludes Wollen who sees Godard's own work in television “as a form of resistance against a symbolic but real occupation, a way of infiltrating enemy-held territory in order to maintain the memory of cinema, to keep a desire for true cinema somehow flickeringly alive in the new millennium.” (ibid)  

In addition to his 'postmodern penchant' already mentioned, Wollen notes a strain of life-style modernism in films of Godard's first phase, “a journalistic sense of the topical, a more sociologically oriented mode of investigation and an attachment to 'the critique of everyday life'... that made him seem both a cultural 'barometer' and an emergent political critic,”  Wollen adding that this strain owed a great deal to the films of Jean Rouch (ibid 77-8). 

Marina Vlady, Two or Three Things I Know about Her

A second strain was Godard's “profound and paradoxical attachment to the idea of art which simultaneously required both the re-inscription and the destruction of that heritage,” his films showing  “a contradictory reverence for the art of the past and a delinquent refusal to obey any of its rules.” At the same time “Godard often seemed to oscillate between a critique of consumerism and mass culture and a delighted fascination with it” (77-8 ibid).  As Nowell-Smith points out, he was still some distance from the radical anti-capitalist and quasi-Marxist position taken up in Two or Three Things...The thinking is more humanist than determinist as the heroine Nana in Vivre sa vie makes an existential choice to be a prostitute. The story, in Godard's words, of the 'last romantic couple' in Pierrot le fou (1965) signified in his “last romantic film and the last for some time in which the search behind appearances is conducted in humanist and existentialist terms.” (N-S 193)   

In 1985, in Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell found the films from 1959-67 offered the occasion to test many of the narrational concepts Bordwell had explored and proposed in the rest of the book in which, as previously outlined in part 4 of this series of essays, he formulates four different narrative modes including Classical narrative (the Hollywood model) and Art-cinema narration. He concludes with a chapter on Godard and narration. Bordwell emphasises that his main intention was analytical rather than evaluative, the modes being “full of internal harmonies and disharmonies ...[of which] the work of Jean-Luc Godard affords vivid examples of such heterogeneity” (155). 

Bordwell started at the point where he found that films of Godard's first phase 1959-67 resisted narrative comprehension not simply as a problem of interpretation that arises in response to the narrative's ambiguity or profundity but at the level of what is being denoted sequence by sequence - what is actually happening on the screen in the telling of the story so leaving the field open to randomly itemising themes.  “Godard's films invite interpretations but discourage, even defy analysis” (311). 

Colliding narratives

Although Godard’s work embodies the mixing of narrational modes in disorienting ways, they remain fundamentally narratives in this phase organised around cause and effect, inviting the viewer to sort out plot and story and treat intertextual material as digressions. Godard employs both recognisable goal-oriented narratives of classical cinema and the psychological uncertainty and ambiguity of art cinema. He invokes norms of classical Hollywood cinema but rather than synthesise them with art cinema norms, Godard lets them collide which led some critics at the time to see him as a cineaste of the isolated moment rather than meeting the demands of a higher order of meaning. “Much of Godard's film practice,” writes Bordwell,”leads to perpetual and cognitive overload” exacerbated by inter-textuality [also called hypertextuality], “the derivation of one text from another by transformation (satire, parody) or imitation (pastiche, remake)” (ibid 312). 

Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Contempt

Amidst this disorientating disruption of cinematic unity with “the violation in his films of nearly every tenet of correct continuity,” as Bordwell notes (327), are the potential explanatory factors: the employment of the concept of “collage” in referring to Godard's disorienting style, what Bordwell sees as  Godard's working towards “spatialization” of narration. This involves the use of paradigmatic form (typically deploying a recurring visual pattern) in a film which, after quoting Godard's detailed  explanation of the treatment of a montage sequence in La Chinoise  Bordwell admits “will seem about as comprehensible as ballet on the radio” (321). He describes at some length the extent of Godard's discarding of the rules of continuity, editing which stems from his routine of shooting a scene in a single take camera set-up. Bordwell quotes Luc Moullet in 1960 as “asserting the only thing that held a Godard film together was his personality” (324). As noted above Godard explained this break down by claiming to think of himself as an essayist.  

Narrator’s role

Despite the problems presented by his films Bordwell acknowledges that “reflexivity,” i.e., the process of self-conscious narration, is organised by Godard “with a thoroughness seldom attained elsewhere in the cinema.” In his films from the beginning the narrator is present to a greater degree than is the case with self-conscious narration in art cinema whose role would be to stress a point or introduce ambiguity as an intrusion into the fictional world which remains intact, continuous and independent. He further points out that “Godard's work could have been created only in the era of art cinema, [ as with the New Wave] with its valorization of an authorial presence hovering over the text, its drift towards confusing narrator and creator” (332).

In 1966 there was within Godard what Nowell-Smith terms “an epistemological shift” which Robin Wood also identifies although, as N-S points out, references to these elements can be found in Godard's previous films: revolution in Les Carabiniers (1963), Brechtian theatre in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) and quoted by Fritz Lang in Le Mépris/Contempt (1963). Beginning in Masculin-Féminin (1967) references to revolution and adoption of principles of Brechtian theatre become more central. “The targets are structures of power and of commodity production as analysed by Marx. Hollywood now tends to be referenced as dangerous rather than seductive (N-S, Waves 194).” Deployment of sound/image dialectic in relation to the content of the message is subtly heightened to become more challenging.  

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Part Three of Bruce Hodsdon's new series on the history of art cinema

Editor’s Note: This is the third part of a series by Bruce Hodsdon in which he analyses the history and impact of Art Cinema. Part One appeared on March 10 and can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE. Part Two appeared on 16 May and can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE

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Howard Hawks

 

Part 3: From Classicism to Modernism

 

Although Howard Hawks (1896-1977) was active through the decade directing two of his best and most representative dramas, Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966), Hawks was never recognised as a director of the year by IFG's selection panel on a par with their selection of four other great directors from the studio system: Cukor, Hitchcock, Minnelli and Huston. Neither was John Ford ever selected by the IFG panel despite directing two major 'testaments' in the 60s : The Man Who Shot LibertyValance (1962) and Seven Women (1966). The editors provided little clarity as to what the 'Five Directors of the Year' selections were intended to represent other than their personal choices and that the format was modelled on the Wisden Cricketers' Alamanac's '5 Cricketers of the Year', IFG's editor, Peter Cowie, being a cricket tragic.

John Wayne, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, Rio Bravo

In Sight & Sound's 2012 decennial World Poll Hawks is not voted with Hitchcock, Ford and Fritz Lang, amongst the top 25 directors of all time; Rio Bravo is voted equal 63rd with 24 votes in the “100 top films.” As to be expected, the minds of the great majority of 1200 critics and filmmakers “were variously and more dutifully most often opting for rating the milestone movies and turning points in the art of film.”  

Hawks is reinforced as a paradigm of the Hollywood professional by his most committed defenders when they claim that he directed the 'timeless' best film in every major classic Hollywood genre. The doubters are held to account by David Thomson in his  'Biographical Dictionary' for their dismissal of Hawks's work as being “subject to the limitations of the entertainment film, prone to a romantic view of men in action; in short, a moviemaker for boys who have never quite grown up.” Thomson goes on to add that “because he is so unassuming as an innovator, so natural as an entertainer, his work has not been surpassed.”  In comparison with John Ford, Thomson argues “that while Hawks's West is equally romantic in Red River and Rio Bravo it is only a background for character studies that are profound, humane and touched by sadness.” In comparison, in a judgement that most would consider excessively harsh, for Thomson, “Ford was so often bigoted, grandiloquent and maudlin.”

Thomson proceeds to argue his case in his 'Biographical Dictionary'. Like Hawks, Ford's work, as voted for in the World Poll, has only one film in the top 100 but it is ranked seventh.  Thomson concedes that The Searchers,for him a film apart in Ford's oeuvre, is “very moving and mysterious...it does not cheat on a serious subject, and beautifully relates the landscape to its theme.” Ford would have directed more great scenes than any other classical American director and, as Thomson concedes, “he had an eye,” more so than ever after Ford lost the sight in one when he was wounded while filming a documentary of the Battle of Midway. Ford's indulgences do provide plenty of material for the unsympathetic critic in his extensive oeuvre of Irish-Americana which stands in contrast to Hawks's understated consistency in the playing of the dramas against the comedies, placing in relief the high points that seem to emerge organically in his best films.

John Ford

Sam Rohdie in his exploratory book 'Film Modernism' devotes his entry on 'Classicism' exclusively to Hawks. Referring to the dramas, Rohdie locates the secret of Hawksian laconicism in his self-acknowledged interest in “characters rather than actors,” choosing actors with 'character' (e.g.     Bogart, Bacall, Wayne, Clift, Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson, Jean Arthur, Cary Grant, John Ireland), a  journey or itinerary providing a simple and straightforward structure with readymade continuity in   which the characters resolve their differences. “Hawks is the perfect classicist. It is as if his films objectively imitate nature and invent nothing, going along with what occurs and what is met on the way exactly as his characters do” (ibid). The comedies often made almost systematically in relation to the dramas, reveal a darker Hawksian reversal – coarseness of humour involving slapstick and gender role reversals successfully replacing the subtlety of the dramas by Hawks' genius in retaining full control in the pacing and timing of the comedy. As John Belton points out, the action films and the comedies complement each other: while the male characters in the former resist change, those in the comedies learn to adapt to it as the female characters oversee the 'feminisation' of their man.

"gender role reversals"
Cary Grant, Ann Sheridan, I Was A Male War Bride
(Howard Hawks, 1949)

What Rohdie outlines is how the work of a classical American director was assimilated into the modernism of 'la nouvelle vague' [in a way that Ford's wide ranging traditionalism was not]. He notes how the New Wave had enthusiastic appreciation of Hawks's qualities and classicism. “By naming and revealing its self effacement (objectivity, power and grace), Hawks's style was made evident.  As a consequence his images (means) were recognised as both integrated with, but separate from, their original narrative ends.”  By rupturing Hawks's continuity “they rescued American cinema by highlighting its classicism giving it new life by making it part of the forms of the New Wave's modernism” while also undermining its classicism by making it visible, that it was no longer merely serving the narrative. This left what was learned from Hawks's skills, and their potential for use, “as primarily formal and cinematic.” When cited in a Godard film they were as fragments excised from classical cinema “given a home in the new forms and awareness of modernism” (ibid). In other words they had their your cake while eating it too.

Barrett Hodsdon quotes Hawks's biographer Todd McCarthy's conclusion “that his oeuvre did not represent an autobiography; rather it constitutes a massive self-projection, a portrait of his fantasy of himself”  (The Grey Fox p.6) Hodsdon adds that “as with Ford, Hawks's career was still a remarkable projection for a hard-nosed mainstream filmmaker who believed in and worked under a commercial rubric. However, unlike Ford, Hawks never deconstructed himself [and his  'world view'] but retreated into his personal mythos in his last films.”  (The Elusive Auteur 129-30)

Hawks's last 6 films were released 1959-70: Rio Bravo, Hatari!, Man's Favorite Sport, Red Line 7000, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo.  Ford's last six,1961-66, were : Sergeant Rutledge,Two Rode Together, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Donovan's Reef, Cheyenne Autumn, and Seven Women.

Transformation of Film Style                                                                                                                                             “There is little doubt that a classical aesthetics looks for and favours films that can be constructed as organic, coherent, meaningful controlled art” (Adrian Martin 22).

 

                       For classical cinema, rooted in the popular novel, short story and

                       well-made drama of the nineteenth century, “reality” is assumed

                       to be a tacit coherence among events, a consistency and clarity

                       of individual identity. Realistic motivation corroborates the com-

                       positional motivation achieved through cause and effect. Art-cin-

                       ema narration, taking its cue from literary modernism, questions

                       this notion of the real rooted in the nineteenth century popular

                       novel and well-made drama: the world's laws may not be know-

                       able, personal psychology may be indeterminate.

                                                                                  (Bordwell 'Narration' 206)

 

Bordwell acknowledges Marcel Martin's summing up of new aesthetic conventions which recognise these new 'other realities'. Neorealism sought to depict the vagaries of life as lived to “de-dramatise”the narrative by showing both climaxes and trivial moments. “Specific sorts of realism motivate a loosening of cause and effect, an episodic construction of the syuzhet (plot), and an enhancement of the film's symbolic dimension through an emphasis on the fluctuations of character psychology”  Bordwell goes on to illustrate how art film's reality is multifaceted in dealing with “real” subject matter such as contemporary alienation and non-communication (ibid).

  

Jerzy Skolimowski in his film Walkover

                                                                    

The sixties became the decade of transformation in the history of film style in which classical mise en scène could be “rejected wholesale but also referenced, cited, and thereby bracketed, problematised and merrily interfered with.” Godard in Le Mèpris (1963), as Adrian Martin further describes, “both mi-micks the classical system for expressive purposes while poking holes in its surface in a myriad of in-scene distances” (Mise en Scène 80).  Jerzy Skolimowski, not long out of film school, in the midst of the Polish new wave, made a critical experiment in the way he deployed the extended long take in his second feature, Walkover(1965), one of the first films to do so, remarkably as Martin describes it in the opening single shot of 11 mins and throughout the film of only 29 shots in 72 mins. Skolimowski, inventively places traditional mise-en-scène (with its deference to montage) within potentially subjective scenes 'in crisis', as Martin recognises, by maintaining distance through total objectivity in lateral movement, fresco-like across sudden shifts of viewpoint.  Although Skolimowski claimed not to have seen any of Godard's films before making Walkover,Martin notes his work on cinematic style “as having evident, transnational affinities with what Godard and others were doing in this period and throughout the remainder of the decade.” (ibid 75-6)

 

“The competing claims of realism and modernism was one of the sustaining debates through the last century from the late fifties to seventies that “produced many of the conceptual models of the cine- matic image, from André Bazin's realism to Screenjournal's modernist Marxism,” as G&S note (15). Historical and ahistorical impulses, being integral to their flexible appeal “are held in creative tension by art cinema, it is further suggested (G&S 14-15). Its flexibility lies in this combination of the ahistorical (its refusal of traditional historicism potentially avoiding ethnocentrism) and the historical (e.g. in the importance for it of movements and national film waves). In the end, any defining of international art cinema returns simply to a nostrum that potentially it encompasses narrative film that is “not Hollywood.”

 

As already referred in part 2, the local has played a key role in the evolution of “art” in international art cinema. In outlining its history Geoffrey Nowell-Smith emphases its heterogeneity across national cinemas through the sixties in western and eastern European cinemas. He is dismissive of the attempts that were made to give definition in art cinema to distinct generic properties analogous to Hollywood cinema and other mainstream film genres. While Nowell-Smith acknowledged an identifiable sharing of structural and stylistic breaking of the rules of classical construction and characterisation in many of the art films of this period, he saw this as continuing to move in many directions.

 

 The apparent diversity of key New Wave directors from common ground, contributed to their international film festival and art house notoriety accompanied by the engagement of critics and a growing public interested in the variety offered by art cinema. Its opposition to Hollywood rests on the international variety of its films from austerity to spectacle, neo-realism to Felliniesque fantasy, radical narrative experimentation to relatively conventional storytelling, and Marxist inflected narrative to romantic humanism. As the scope for divergences between individual filmmakers outside the mainstream increased so also did the dependence on the commitment of producers prepared to back originality. The 60s also saw the increase in new forms of state aid in France in the 60s, and from television in Italy (RAI) and Germany (ZDF) in the 70s. 

 

Against institutionalisation

The radical events of May 68 generated an international climate for new cinemas as well as sharp differences in formal strategies for dealing with overt political content independent of the mainstream, in Europe, Africa, India, Japan, and North and South America (1).

 

"...overt political content independent of the mainstream"
Nagisa Oshima

In 1981 Steve Neale referred to the containment of the variety of art cinema by its economic infrastructure with “its basis in commodity-dominated modes of production, distribution and exhibition [within] a general institutional framework of discourses on high art and culture, and by the repetitions that tend to mark such discourses (15)” (2). In the new millennium the uneasy relationship between  high art and low (cult) art was highlighted by David Andrew's polemic for new ground. He argues against what he sees as the outmoded containment of art film in the distinct generic terms identified by Neale as an institutional practice closely associating with designation and stratification of films according to the 'quality and artfulness' of modernism. Against this actual, or at least potentially reactionary institutionalisation as 'high art' cinema, Andrew proposes an “egalitarian,value-neutral path” which would admit disenfranchised areas such as 'soft-core porn'. Soft core art film emerged with the progressive relaxation of censorship in the late sixties to the mid seventies (3). What Andrew is specifically referring to in this context is a 'feminised' soft core genre first established as a cultural industry in America in the 1980s which remained unacknowledged for serious study. His main goal has been to develop a framework whereby untraditional scholars could “justify their exploration of cinema's most disenfranchised areas” using an art cinema approach (4).      

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Notes

(1)The emergence of the concept of a Third Cinema in the late 60s initially in Latin America, did not simply refer to so-called Third World countries but to any films confronting political and social issues that challenged entrenched modes of  mainstream action genres or individually expressive narrative: the First Cinema being the mainstream Hollywood model , the Second Cinema being the auteur-based Art Cinema centred in Europe. This will be further discussed in Latin American cinemas in part 4.

 

(2) It may be that art cinema is best defined not through a certain historical period, nor a directorial canon, or a set of distinctive subjects and styles but as an institution in whichcertain films are 'assigned' a position within the general film culture and are defined in terms of a particular mode of consumption. Film festivals are a key component of this institution. The institutional context is critical to the stabilisation of the 'genre' and the films' separate status as cultural objects. This circulatory network may be the key unifying aspect serving to distinguish its minority audience from the mass audience of the commercial mainstream cinema. ( from Tom Ryall  “Art House, smart house  Movie no. 90 1981 quoted Cook & Bernink  eds. 108)

                                                                                                                                                                                             

(3) Steve Neale notes (33) that the gradual postwar opening of anglophone film exhibition to European films increasingly provided commercial stability for 'adult art' on the screen beginning with films like La Ronde(1950), One Summer of Happiness(1954), And God Created Woman(1956), Les Amants(1958), La Dolce Vita(1960), Antonioni's 'trilogy' beginning with L'avventura(1959-62), The Silence (1963), Une Femme Mariée(1964), and Belle de Jour (1967) to art films with a reputation for explicit representation of sexuality such as I Am Curious Yellow(1967), Pasolini's 'trilogy of life' beginning with The Decameron(1970-4), Robbe-Grillet's Eden and After(1970) et al, Last Tango in Paris(1972), The Night Porter (1973), and Jancsó's Private Vices, Public Virtues (1976).  

                                                                                                                                                                                       

(4) David Andrews is a specialist in American literature, and art film including soft core porn. In 2006 Ohio State University Press published his book, 'Soft in the Middle', described as a nuanced study of the devalued soft core film and TV industry which occupies an ambiguous “female friendly” middle ground between hard core porn and Hollywood

 

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Geoffrey Nowell-Smith  “Art Cinema” Oxford History of World Cinema 1996                                                                                           

John Belton “Howard Hawks”  in Nowell-Smith op cit  

Steve Neale “Art Cinema as Institution” Screen v.22/1 1981                                                                                        

Rosalind Galt & Karl Schoonover “Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema” Global Art Cinema 2010                                      

Stephen Crofts “Concepts of National Cinema”  Oxford Guide to Film studies Hill & Gibson eds.                                                 

Murray Smith  “Modernism and the avant gardes”  Oxford Guide ibid                                                                                                       

David Andrews“Towards an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema”  Global Art Cinema ibid                                                                                                                                                    

Sam Rohdie  Film Modernism 2015                                                                                                                                       

Adrian Martin Mise en Scène and Film Style  2014                                                                                                                

Julian Petley “Art Cinema” The Cinema Book 2^nded. Pam Cook& Mieke Bernink eds. BFI 1999 p.106                  

 David Bordwell  Narration in the Fiction Film 1985                                                                                     

David Bordwell ”The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” reprinted with afterword in Poetics of Cinema  2008