Dwight Macdonald on film; The films: An historical overview

Another mark against the movies in the academic grading book. Was that they appeal to two rather disreputable cultural groups one the masses are almost everybody. And to the avant garde or almost nobody. These two groups like different kinds of films. Though there were large exceptions mostly American such as Chaplin and Griffith hawks. But each group in its own y appreciated the art of the cinema. Now things have changed. Today movies are discussed and argued about. The right plays and poems and novels used to be. I often meet people especially young people. Who see in their sight movies two three four times and in extreme cases I've actually met a couple of kids who see them 10 or 15 times where I think that's really excessive. You are listening to McDonald on film.

During the past decade Mr. McDonald has been perhaps the senior critic among American film critics and during this past year he was distinguished visiting professor of film history on criticism at the University of Texas. These programs were drawn from that lecture series the topic for this program is the film an historical overview. And now once again here is Dwight McDonald and this is a course on the history and criticism of movies on more elegantly to cinema. It's about the movies as on not not as business. I'm not in this social effects. I think these are interesting topics but not the one that I'm going to deal with. The cinema is the one new one important for developed and I century and in fact it's been developed even in my own lifetime. As they both died it's very rarely that you can actually say when an

art began was invented really and by home. But anyway in this case taking 1000 AD which was the year in which Griffith began to develop the basic vocabulary of the film from the close up to the structural use of montage Caterine Griffith used frames each one of the pictures is called a frame used to frame somebody as a composer might use notes and music. Do build certain rhythms to build a general structure. This is a completely nonliterary and completely cinematic why. Making a movie. Now movies. First of all it's a bastard on that form because supply is also similarly a bastard form it's nothing more I don't use bastard in a pejorative sense. An opera is even more of a bastard High's form because you have music as well as words and

staging. A movie tells a story about individuals or in the case of the great Russian silent films about masses in history. I tell the pilot in words dialogue captions in his silent films even sometimes you have a novelistic commentator a narrator. This is become fairly common and more recent. But mostly it tells it in pictures which I should be anyway composed just the wife of a painting or a drawing is composed and the great directors do compose in that way. Now cinema differs from the all the art forms in several ways first of all it's a collective art. You only need a pencil and paper to write in the rushes and colors and canvas to paint but to make a movie the director needs not only complicated and expensive machines but also crowds of other people some of whom are extremely expensive. There is a cost this recent post-war trend

especially among the students young. Everywhere all over the world making cheap movies themselves and it can be done with extraordinary economy. In fact I think it all began in powers just about the time the new wave began about seven or eight years ago and some direct some freshmen is supposed to have said that now a hand camera is just like a fountain pen. Now that's one difference as a collective Secondly Prost because of this collective aspect of the movies the director has much less control over his creation. And so you have the greater variation in quality between works of the same director and even a very good directors sometimes only a year or two a pot. It also explains why that so many good actors even great directors you might say almost the majority of them burned themselves out in a very short

time. When you think of creators and other fields like Titian who are still finding great things at the age of eight he says on. BACH Well we haven't. He also but there's a lot of children as well as great works of music. But Cassella Picasso at 80 is still creating Still that. Yeats best poems in his old age. When you think of that it's very strange when you think of the way that almost all the great ones. From Griffith and wells to. Well I'm afraid go Doris can go time I practically was exhausted I've been one for all but anyway I think the reason for this brining out of the director of the August is again the collective nature of the fact that he has to deal with so many people and he's even not by everybody in fact an eight and a half that great film by Fellini which is about a movie director.

You see a way in which she is nibbled to death by all these people that he has to work with for Leni recently estimated that the productive life of a director like himself. Actually he's gonna be a father but anyway another productive life of a series director was about 10 years and I think this has in general proved to be true because it's a collective rot. Thirdly the evolution of sentiment times of styles and periods has been in decades rather than in centuries. As with the old thread to me you might call them. First of all American classics which would be a chaplain's strawman Griffith. Then the Soviet mass abstract school of silent films I didn't sign but tough goes in staff and then well and the Germans out of them might be

called Weimar Gothic. That's Pabst. Pabst Mer now lying and of course the great Doctor Colligan I where you have realism and fantasy but with a lot of contradictory mouths but both of them carried to extremes that I can only call it a classicist rather rather Gothic. Then you have the earliest sound period the Cro-Magnon sound period. You might call it 1930 45 in which 20 years after the OT begins you have decadence beginning to set in. In fact voice and decadence it was really a regression to pretty graphic levels in general took a long time to learn how to handle sound artistically. This was true everywhere. And then after the war you had the Italian and the realistic school open city shoeshine and so on then you had what you might call Bergman by Roque dissuading

and now you have a renaissance. And a real renaissance in little SATs. As the old and as not it many times to the classic Only in this case that have been 2000 years later it's only 30 years later it's a rebirth everywhere but in two countries and the two countries in fact it led the world in the 20s namely Russia and United States. You have all these new major directives for the NEA Antonioni and I bike and rally in India and someone who have learned how to how to relate sound to images and in recent films even have begun to discover how to make a color film that will look beautiful. Now first and most important difference between the movies and the traditional art is that until quite recently the movies have not been generally considered part of respectable are

serious or high culture. Up until recently music aka docu drama literature and even ballet Yes movies now. One of these of course was that since cinema was only invented 60 years ago the great bulk of its production was terrible. It took many centuries for writers to produce the few books that we can read today with pleasure. After all talent is not a very widespread commodity at any time a place so naturally movies have produced relatively little that's good in their short lifetime. Also the fact that the movies were an exclusively 20th century art. They were produced almost wholly as commodities for the mass cultural market. And so they had to strike against them with the writers of textbooks. Another mark against the movies in the academic grading book was that they appeal to two rather disreputable cultural groups one the masses

are almost everybody and to be a rock god almost nobody. These two groups like different kinds of films though there were large exceptions mostly American such as Chaplin and Griffith Hawke's Ford. But each group in its own y appreciated the art of the cinema. Now things have changed where we have become almost too respectable a cultural subject since the 20s when the only friend with whom I could really discuss movies seriously was James Agee. Today movies are discussed and argued about the right plays and poems and novels used to be. I often meet people especially young people who see in the cited movies two three four times and in extreme cases I've actually met a couple of kids who see them 10 to 15 times where I think that's really excessive. But I rarely met anyone who

has seen a play more than once or read a recent novel more than once. And how many recently complained to me. People don't talk about players anymore. All they want to argue about is the latest movie. Now this is because of cause of this renaissance I'm talking about that in the last 15 years a great many exciting and original films have been produced all over the world Italy France Sweden and Polland even Spain even India. Even a couple not two bad films and in England in fact we have this renaissance taking place everywhere in the way out except in this country. Now because it wasn't all was thus Gryphus as I've said invented the AAT and a peculiar thing to invent an art. And he produced a half dozen masterpieces before and I had 25 then there was Von Stroheim Chaplin

Keaton the Mack Sennett comedies are listening early 20s then the engineers found a way to add sound and a long decline began and not only in Hollywood but throughout the world. Now of course there's nothing wrong in itself with adding sound. On the contrary. First of all movies need sound for some reason or other. When you see a silent film in a projection room as I have on several occasions without any sound at all it seems as if you are in a dream is not emotionally or sensually real so therefore a movie doesn't need some kind of sound and also cost in the silent films those printed titles as I call them were an extremely clumsy way to convey dialogue and they were even clumsy when I tried to convey the plot as poor Gryphus often did. So there was nothing wrong with the addition of sound in fact it was necessary. Trouble was that the silent film in 1929 was still developing its

technique. And sound cut short this natural unnecessary evolution by adding a formal device which truly OT back into its pre Griffith infancy. We do see in cinema again to the mere photographing of a stage play the little recording of dialogue became the important structural element as against the visual technique which is obviously sort of the cinema visual techniques which had been discovered and was still being discovered by experimentation and Russia Germany and this country. Those early sound films were extremely stiff and in fact problems only been solved in the last 15 years. To see how to flexibly use sound as lot of the abstract aesthetics of the cinema. The grade school of Russian sound and cinnamon which carried befits their discoveries and techniques to a more conscious and sophisticated and complex level was cut off in its

paan with an abruptness and a finale that is only possible in totalitarian culture. And if anybody tells you that this country is the worst than what I have over there just think about what happened. For one thing to the right. So we had cinnamon. Two of its masters I just kind of adopt initiative famous manifest in 1928. This one of the most fun I see in documents in film history and also one of the saddest. They said they wrote about the dream of a sound film has come true. Sound Recording is a two edged invention and it is most probable that its use will proceed along the line of least resistance. And then they predicted. And any pocket of its automatic utilization for highly cultured dramas. And other photographed performances of a theatrical sort. The first experimental write with sound

must be directed along the line of its distinct non synchronization with the visual images. And only such an attack will lead to the creation of an orchestral counterpoint of visual and aural images. Sound tweeted out this is a continuum. Sound treated as a new montage element as a factor divorced from the visual image rather than editable introduce new means of enormous power. Well that last was whistling in the dock I'm afraid. From 1930 on. Because sound was used in precisely the realistic theatrical way that none of the DA is going to want to get in this country. We went right back to the photograph stage plays in Russia. Under Stalin who came to power in 1929 a same year that sad was an event that sings about a catastrophic era. I. Can't apologize he minutely of course banned montage which is these rather

abstract and experimental idea of building a structure of a movie not by the narrative live which is like a novel or apply but by blocks of actual frames using the frames the way that you would use notes or chords in music. Because it's a good example of well the two examples of monthlies illustrate what it is. One of them is the famous Griffith birth of a nation in which you have the seeds then I log cabin and be saved I'm afraid by rather evil negroes and coppered bigas and scallywags and so on. And who is coming to rescue it I'm afraid the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah but they look terrific and I was you know even the horses have white sheets on it because I think right. But anyways how it you say you cut back and forth between the rescuing Klansmen galloping out the galloping and they bang bang bang the abysses poddy in the blockhouse and this is montage.

It was one of the first examples of its use it couldn't be done in any other lot. And another example in Russia famous example that put off is the following and the Russians discovered that. That one picture will influence the next picture in the mind of the audience. And so this experiment was made they showed an audience a picture of of of a smiling baby and then the next the next picture was of a great great act and then mosque then. Everybody is sad. Look how subtly he's smiling at them at the pleas of the baby then I shot a picture of a plate of soup and the next picture was of a mosque then. And I said Look how he's greedy and his eyes glint with hunger and so on in the next one was a pistol pointed directly at the at the audience and that is it mocks and in this case the audience said how he's registering terawatt across it was exactly the same picture in each case of mosques in exactly the same

but the audience had seen something different because. Of what they had seen in the in the preceding patch and how this is a very elementary example of what you can do with montage. Anyway montage was outlawed and the Russians and I went back to the level and way below the level in fact of Hollywood because it only took Hollywood maybe six or seven years to begin making fairly interesting sound pictures but under a. Dictatorship like Stalin they never got back and only since he's gone I know they've been making anything of any interest at all. So now we have today for the first time since the induction of sound all over the world except to question Hollywood. A large number of directors who are experimenting with a sound film in a much bolder why than it's ever been done before will get in surprise after surprise. Now this new cinema uses dialogue and sound in the spawn lines way that the manifesto from. I didn't sign it but doc can recommend it. It abandons the

well-made ply emphasis on the plot line as in the great silent films the form is not that of a linear narrative in time but rather a montage in space of episodes related to each other not chronologically but by that aesthetic and symbolic right in the heart of composition. Marshall McLuhan is keeps talking about this too not about film so much but his idea of what he calls a mosaic because his own books are sort of a mosaic of all McLuhan I think carries a little lunatic extremes they think the objection to the straight line linear narrative which has been calculus the God of the written word and is calculus isn't right. But anyway you see the difference is that instead of beginning. From With the birth of the hare our weather is falling in love or something and going to the end of the love affair and marriage and divorce and remarriage and so on that's all in one line. Instead of doing

that what these new films do and which is what they all films did too. It is rather special because it can't be simultaneous that's unfortunate but it can't be it has to be it has to be in literal time. Linea. And finally the new cinema makes the image on the screen the point. The movies on a Senshi was not a sensual art that it would be like a blue movies but then ah there are sensual craft. But the movies are a sensuous art like painting and music. They appeal to the awe you just have to have a brain to but the eye is the main thing. That I was also have a story almost all of them do anyway. But it must be Tolle not in literary theatrical terms but in visual times the emperors had was beyond what the eyes see and not on what the mind understands. For instance an example from one

of the great recent films a fairly recent Antonioni. I'm a visual metaphor. Is the following. We have the architect who is the main character. He has sorrowed out. And he knows he's sold out his talent. He expresses his pride and frustration by deliberately knocking over the ink bottle on the drawing board of a young architectural student who is in the square before a great buy rug making a very careful drawing of a detail of this church. And this charge and the palace adjoining that which is it now tell and certainly has already been established in the film as the as the kind of a building which this architect says rather grumpily sourly to his girlfriend that he might have achieved if he hadn't gone in for money instead he's always that is so then when he comes into the square and here this guy's gone and so he deliberate

he's swinging his you swinging some keys on the end of a chain sort of idly and he comes up you know looking looking at this fellow's joint and then you know accidentally but of course not accidentally they keys hit the bottle and this black flight of ink goes all over this drawing of this beautiful church. And obviously the metaphor I think is pretty is pretty quick it expresses his bite and he wants to obliterate. And he does obliterate with blackness. This beautiful thing and also he's very jealous and feels very guilty about this idealistic young. STUDENT I want to be idealistic because one always assumes young people are idealistic maybe this fellow is just as much of us out as he was but they will he will he look young and idealistic. Let's put it that way. Now some generalities. Here's a homemade definition of OT. I just made it up today. Ah it is the

ordering of the confusion of existence into forms that give us pleasure both by their internal coherence and. Structure and by enhancing our understanding of life. Odd is the ordering of the confusion of existence into forms that give us pleasure both by their internal coherence and by enhancing our understanding of life to two qualities. God is therefore I would say abstract and unrealistic by nature. Now I know what movies are considered to be realistic because they're composed of photographs of real people an object. And a photograph for some reason or other I consider it also to be realistic but of course they're not really realistic at all. Photograph for one thing it's flat in one dimension which isn't the way that things are. And the lens sees things quite differently from the eye. All kinds of this take place in any movie of any photograph. As you know those photographs you tag on vacation when you get the camera right up close to the feet of

somebody was lying down and the feet look enormous and so it doesn't look that way to you know I. Also photograph is rectangular. And the image is cut off sharply at the borders. Because that's not the way that we see it all and vision sort of fades out we don't have any huge shop division of where we stop scene. And also we see in color. And if the photograph or movie doesn't isn't black and white then this obviously isn't realistic. And even if it's in color is not the same kind of color that we see. I don't think I will be that kind of color because the kind of color we see is something that is so much subtler and more a matter of course than anything I've ever seen in the best movie photograph. So therefore a photograph is not reality not realistic it's one of as inventions that you know savages aren't able to read a photograph I mean you show them a photograph even a photograph of themselves and they don't even know which way to hold it up. And to them it's simply an arrangement like I had about as part of his modern arrangement of black and white.

They simply can't see it. That shows that it isn't really. But a close approximation of reality. TS Eliot route about Chaplin. Here's agree just merit is that he was a scape in his own way from the literalism of the cinema and invented a rhythm. Of course the unexplored opportunities of the cinema for eluding unrealism must be very great. Elliott sentence. Now I'm looking at a movie. Please watch what's happening on the screen. I mean just that. This is a first principle about the criticism of movies the aesthetics of movies and the first principle is to stick to what's on a screen and down over and type it. There's a tendency to over in type but everything. Is enjoyable should be enjoyable as one thing there's a way to enjoy a pleasure

beauty enjoyment these things I terribly old fashioned Now when you pronounce them about a work of rot in fact. So isn't some tigers made a whole whole aesthetic out of the fact that the movie is very ugly boring and especially boring. And pine fall. Therefore this is what's so great about it. Well I just don't know. I don't believe this I don't think Susan ever looks at what's on the screen before I saw a dirty movie not not a blue movie but a scene movie I suppose you call it the flaming creatures and I would have thought it was the same movie that we both saw I know she got a rave review about it. I thought it was just rather dull boring. So I mean look at what's on the screen and don't try to even type it. It's just funny the sanest one last from Toscanini conductor Toscanini's of one stop and

an orchestra in a second movement of Beethoven's ironic and symphony and shouted at them is not Nepali and is not is not Mussolini. Is Al a gravel con Breo. And that's the way you say look at it. You have been listening to Dwight McDonald on film. In this program Mr. McDonald discussed the film an historical overview. These programs were drawn from Mr. MacDonald's lecture series during his recent tenure as distinguished visiting professor of film history and criticism at the University of Texas. This series was produced by communication center at the University of Texas for national educational radio producer for the series Bill Jordan. Phil Miller speaking. Well. This is

any are the national education.