The film critic in the United States is in a curious position: the greater his interest in the film medium, the more enraged and negative he is likely to sound.
– Pauline Kael – Movies, The Desperate Art, 1956
I can relate to that. Actually the whole article is worth reading. The writing style may not be for everyone, and the references will be to a lot of things none of us have seen, but it’s very relevant to current movies, and music— all areas of it— and even drumming, our little corner of it.
I’ve pulled a few choice quotes:
[The film critic] can assert his disgust, and he can find ample material to document it, but then what? He can haunt film societies and re-experience and reassess the classics, but the result is an increased burden of disgust; the directions indicated in those classics are not the directions Hollywood took. A few writers, and not Americans only, have taken a rather fancy way out: they turn films into Rorschach tests and find the most elaborate meanings in them (bad acting becomes somnambulism, stereotyped situations become myths [“iconic”? -tb], and so forth). The deficiency of this technique is that the writers reveal a great deal about themselves but very little about films.
The hostility toward art and highbrowism that infects much of our culture helps to explain the popularity of so many untrained and untalented screen performers. Fans like untrained actors; perhaps they like even the embarrassment of untrained actors (why should they tolerate the implied criticism of speech or gesture that derives froma higher culture’).
Hollywood productions are official parts of American life, proofs of technological progress; derision is subversive. You will be reproved with “What right have you to say Samson and Delilah is no good when millions of people liked it?” and you will be subjected to the final devastation of “It’s all a matter of taste and one person’s taste is as good as another’s.” One does not make friends by replying that although it’s all a matter of taste (and education and intelligence and sensibility) one person’s taste is not as good as another’s.
The serious, literate audiences share with the larger American audience the fear of being duped. Even the small audiences at cinema guilds and art houses are suspicious of new artists, who might be charlatans pulling tricks and willfully obscuring things. Americans are susceptible to the widespread democratic propaganda that the really great artists of history were simple and lucid; they don’t want to be had. Music lovers who listen to nothing later than Mozart are saved from errors in taste; they are certain to consider themselves discriminating.
While it is not easy to recognize or understand new art, meticulous, ponderous craftsmanship — the emulation of already recognized art— can be appreciated at once.
The look of solid, serious construction seems to be very important to the educated audience[.] Readers who put down The Horses Mouth and ask anxiously if Gulley Jimson is really supposed to be a great painter are, no doubt, part of the same audience that feels reassured when George Stevens says, “I don’t make films for pleasure.” Work without joy is respectable; it doesn’t raise doubts that it may not be serious.
Americans don’t have to go to the movies at all. They spend as much money on equipment for fishing as they do at movie box offices; they spend as much on hunting and bowling. Sports not only invite participation, they provide suspense about the outcome (something which our movies have failed to do fora long time); sports are geared to leisure interests, travel, photography and a whole range of consumer goods —casual clothes, equipage. And sports comprise the proper interests for getting along and getting ahead in a sociable way.
Drama, on the other hand, posits intense interest in the character and destiny of the individual, and American culture is indifferent, and even hostile, to strong individuality. The American film is no longer concerned with characters of real dramatic stature; it gives the actor few chances for any interesting or full characterizations and often constricts acting possibilities to the barest minimum. Films do not center as much as they used to on one or two heroic individuals who were often engaged in a grand passion, or a drive toward money or power, or even in some struggle against society and conventions. The new heroes and heroines of film and television are dismaying— not because they’re not attractive and presentable (often they’re competently played), but because they represent the death of drama as we have known it. They are not protagonists in any meaningful sense; they represent the voice of adjustment, the caution against individuality, independence, emotionality, art, ambition, personal vision.
[E]very work of art has a core of risk and it is around this core that the work takes form.
Our commercialized culture never integrates all the individuals with energy and talent. They constitute a reserve of independence and dissidence, and idiosyncrasy. And in this reserve there is, perhaps, a more vital hope for the American film.
Films are at the mercy of this knowing audience: it goes to see everything it can in a film, and often comes out with much more than it was intended to see. I na sense, every movie is a documentary: the actor is as exposed as the tenant farmer, the sets as exposed as the Aran Islands. In one way or another, everyone who goes to the movies knows this; when the film fails to hold the attention of the audience and when the theater situation permits, the disgruntled patrons comment on what is exposed to them.
From the beginning, American film makers have been crippled by business financing and the ideology it imposed: they were told that they had an obligation to entertain the general public, that this was a democratic function and a higher obligation than to give their best to a few hundred ora few million people. This “obligation” forced even the early innovators to lard their work with sentimentality. And this “obligation” has contributed to fear of the medium itself— they began to use titles and music to explain and add to what they were already doing with images; when sound became possible, they were fearful of imaginative or difficult speech and music. It is clear now that there is more than one audience, and that artists must judge their own obligations. The film artist knows what happened to the innovators; he knows he can’t expect the banks and studios to finance him.
The responsibility is on the artist, even when he tries to evade responsibility. If, so far, American experimental and “little” films haven’t received much support, most of them haven’t deserved it, either. All too frequently, after an evening of avant-garde cinema, one wants to go see a movie (at least a little fresh air comes in through the holes in Hollywood plots). Though avant-garde film makers don’t always know what they’re doing when they make a film, they demonstrate a marvelous talent for the postfactum scenario; often their greatest effort at composition is in explaining away the lack of it in their films. They become so adept at escaping consideration of their failures and limitations that they rarely develop at all; what they fail to put in they deride you for not seeing there. You’re supposed to find a whole world of meaning in that three-minute cinepoem. The times are out of joint: the poisonous atmosphere of Hollywood premieres is distilled to pure pretension at avant-garde premieres. Object to the Hollywood film and you’re an intellectual snob, object to the avantgarde films and you’re a Philistine. But, while in Hollywood, one must often be a snob; in avant-garde circles one must often be a Philistine.
I hope people aren’t put off by the snootyish New Yorker type of writing— people who care about things have to read what people say, not the way they say it. It could be rewritten into acceptably hip language, and the referrences updated, and it would be immediately and obviously relevent to our current situation, to all of us.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
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