Why Ontological Film Books?
Weinblatt, Alan
Alan Weinblatt Why Ontological Film Books? Why Film? It would be difficult to deny that today there is more widespread concern about the arts at almost every level of society than in recent times....
...If such an awakening were to be grounded in the broad tradition of humanistic epistemology that seeks to kindle the mind into activity, what, then, would be the precise nature, the essence, the ontology of such a medium...
...Imagine having to dredge up your deepest feelings and heartfelt convictions, the majority of which repose unexamined and unexpressed in dusty corners of your past...
...It still sounds right...
...Epistemology mirrors ontology, and the movies, as we grow more self-conscious and concerned, must accept the burden of investigation and examination as part of the larger choice that looms: to accept reality as it is imposed on us by a debased art of our own creation, or to rediscover art so that through it we may recover reality...
...Which approach do we choose...
...and a wide range of Effects, which can, more or less successfully, be organized hierarchically as of prime or secondary importance...
...and in its invention of the urban adult cinema where overworked businessmen may indulge their sweetest fantasies during protracted luncheons from eleven until two...
...in its brilliant contrivance of the suburban drive-in horror movie as a backdrop for casual fornication...
...That is, when you're not concerned with yourself - But just being an eye...
...It cleaves the unitary question -"What are good movies...
...Eliot remarks that A common interest in the moving pictures-Frequently brings young people together," behind him (though discreetly out of sight) stand vast mountains of statistics about the dating habits of adolescents, numerous inquiries into the diminished opportunities for privacy afforded by urban housing, even the demographic distribution of movie houses, all transformed, transformed utterly, condensed into Eliot's magnificent hauteur...
...Are we dealing with two separate (and separable) problems or with two aspects of a more inclusive and significant problem: where are we to discover an approach to the movies that offers both a critical vocabulary adequate to our insights and sufficiently comprehensive not to fall prey to the reductionism of more limited and simplistic viewpoints...
...into separable, antithetical and mutually exclusive propositions...
...Bearing directly on this point is a brilliant passage from Walter Jackson Bate's The Burden of the Past and the English Poet: "A great deal of modern literature-and criticism-is haunted, as Stephen Spender says, by the thought of a 'Second Fall of Man,' and almost everything has been blamed: the Renaissance loss of the medieval unity of faith, Baconian science, British empiricism, Rousseau, the French Revolution, industrialism, nineteenth-century science, universities and academicism, the growing complexity of ordinary life, the spread of mass media...
...Social observation, whether by phy-chologist or satirist, trades equally in types: both activities depend on what might loosely be termed the typological imagination which dehumanizes, denatures, reduces...
...Ultimately, it is to view experience (felt response) and expression (intellectual conception) as inseparable...
...and even the inner life of the movies - the gradual evolution of styles, the deepening of genres beyond their initial meaning, the rise and fall of whole cycles and schools - tend inevitably to be regarded as involuntary (hence reluctant and grudging) responses to developments occurring in society at large...
...We have assimilated the movies to life: if assimilation is the ultimate form of conquest, we are conquerors all...
...Imagine that your wife or loved one were suddenly to demand - a not uncommon occurrence these days - that you offer fresh and convincingly original expressions of your affection each day as proof of the sincerity of your feelings...
...They view art or the serious cinema as a kind of prestigious secretion to be spread over the visible surfaces of their lives to daunt friend and foe alike...
...Art, in one sense of its classical formulation, may be thought of as a counter-force working to shatter these types, these crude abstractions, these fuzzy and untested myths, and, by kindling the mind into activity, to be capable of bringing us slightly closer to the palpably real...
...for artist and critic alike, struggle - continually defeated, continually renewed - toward disclosure of the real becomes an ethical calling, the vocation of a lifetime...
...High theory and the evocation of intensely immediate experience: the drama of Warshow's writing is, at its most vital, to draw these poles together, to discover their mutuality, to declare them fully complementary facets of the same, common stuff of experience...
...We can no longer draw comfort from the tired myth that movie-making and movie-criticism are hostage to the philistinism of Hollywood...
...This pervasive concern, be it termed malaise or unease or the sort of increasing sophistication that signals loss of innocence, has raised serious questions about the relation of movies present to those of the past, about the kinds of movies that are appearing and the audiences they attract, and about the reality of the movies at any single moment and the enormous variety of critical postures and expressions of concern which exist at every level of the movie-going public...
...and if, at the same time, one's tools of expression - indeed all language, all art, all fixed, mediate forms of expressing the immediate, the utterly unique and particular, are increasingly felt to be inadequate, stale and cliched, then the task of the critic becomes at best quixotic and impossible...
...Ought the question even to be posed in this way...
...there a piece on Clifford Odets, followed at random by discussions about Arthur Miller, the Rosenbergs (Julius and Ethel) and The New Yorker Magazine (vintage 1947), the essays seem more independent, more self-contained, less implicated in the general meaning of each other...
...Or, as Arlen puts it more succinctly in another passage: the piece of photographic film is "transformed by someone's care and sensitivity - and so one's imagination goes out toward it and connects...
...You must have learned how to look at people, Peter," an aspiring movie director is told, "When you look at them with an eye for the films...
...In the end, such unnatural division leads not only to reductive, inane abstractions but to an evasion of the ultimate problem: can we separate the objective valuation of any form of art from our own subjective response to it...
...Imagine that your dinner, domestic harmony and the peaceful continuance of your days all depended on finding fresh and meaningful ways of saying "I love you," and providing reasons to bolster your words...
...And, in turn, these meanings may be said to inhere, to draw their very sustenance from an underlying myth or set of related myths - and myth is really the only word suitable - that stand at the center of Warshow's thought...
...when they do chance to touch on the issue of casuality in cultural phenomena, it is for the most part in an offhand way, and even then their remarks are little more than aphoristic afterthoughts in their unelaborated brevity and simplicity...
...The truth is, most of us might better be thought of as embodiments (willing or otherwise) of a kind of inherent entropy principle, which tends to reduce our thinking to a level of crude types and empty abstractions that require only occasional re-enforcement...
...The movies no longer show us where we are going so much as where we have been...
...in its ability to reduplicate itself at will, sprouting along our highways and byways like some variety of exotic and wondrous mushroom...
...Taken alone, "What are good movies...
...As a place where you must stand in line interminably, hurriedly gulp bad expresso as the show begins, and spend the remainder of the evening regretting both...
...But, even conceding the likely impossibility of such an achievement, is not the presence of such a motivating aspiration, such a heuristic goal vital to every writer and critic and member of a movie audience...
...At first, this dramatic movement is not clearly evident...
...adjacent to the contemporary madness of Skyjacked ("One of these people is a maniac with a bomb...
...But then, at a certain moment, the conclusion to each essay, the summing up, the drawing forth of meaning from the subject at hand, begins to reveal a tell-tale similarity to each of the others...
...Alan Weinblatt is a graduate student at Harvard and an instructor of English at Boston College...
...And if the movies are held in thrall to the ambient fantasies in which we swim, originality or innovation (or what these terms may come to signify) will be exercised only within limits prescribed by the outer contours and inner dialectic of our social mythology...
...Though the movies may suffer impoverished creativity, their advertisements do not, leading to the suspicion that growing numbers of people, instead of going to the movies, are staying home to read the advertisements ! Settle back in your favorite chair, allowing the muscles to become pleasur-ably limp, and cast your eyes over the superbly suggestive montage of film advertisements in your Sunday newspaper...
...In turn, narrow elitism breeds the need for recognizable signs of discrimination, for badges and symbols and marks of distinction...
...It has long been an ill-kept secret that the apercus harvested by these disciplines were hit upon centuries earlier by the arts...
...If, then, we continue to find this mode of criticism so heartily congenial, if we are truly determined to discuss the movies in terms of what they are good for (and the answers range from the depiction of malcontent and mad to the gratifying of baser desires to the short-circuiting of anti-social behavior), we ought to resolve henceforth to view the endless classifications and sub-categories and super-niches and cross-referenced slots of the social sciences as a vast province (though subordinate realm) of satire...
...Yet, surprisingly enough, an alternative vision does exist, and its much acclaimed discovery (which occurs regularly every few years or so, and is just as quickly forgotten), turns out, after our feelings of congratulatory self-esteem have ebbed, to be, properly speaking, a periodic rediscovery, a periodic recovery of the very oldest and truest of our elassical verities...
...First: that most forms of mass entertainment, television especially, serve chiefly to gratify our fantasies, to confirm and support the dream-like cocoon in which we dwell - "(Television) tells us nothing, almost nothing about how life is and how we are...
...How much more felicitous, and closer to a truth expressible not as fact but as value, to skewer this genus by portraying them as they really are: pants-suited young fashionables, blatantly mispronouncing foreign tongues fortissimo, marching proudly into the cinema, and just as proudly out again, their now altered expressions of baffled exasperation worn like badges of intellectual travail...
...The title of Warshow's consistently brilliant, vulnerably ambitious, ultimately disquieting and perhaps not entirely successful essays accomplishes a double effect: by invoking an image of the artist-critic as one whose vocation impels him to struggle to articulate his inchoate feelings and emotions (as he continually scrutinizes his changing responses to the world - and the world of art - around him) without recourse to cliched language, stale interpretation or the stock usages of past tradition, he aligns himself with those who do battle with the besetting problem of modern aesthetics - the problem of sincerity...
...What are movies good for...
...This awkwardness may best be exemplified by a wholly unoriginal (and paraphrased) query: What are good movies...
...Now it is suspected that a similar occurence has overtaken the movies as well...
...Unfortunately, even if we are able to keep our UMYA's distinct from our UMYA's, such sociological profiles miss the heart of the issue: what do they seek from the Art Cinema...
...What is almost always lost sight of is the fact that the subject of social utility (inevitably reducing to the neat, S-R, Pavlovian models that issue from academic clinicians), while partially accessible to the austere rubrics and forbidding pigeonholes of the social sciences, may be portrayed with far greater brilliance and acuity by the sharpened eye of the satirist...
...they have become a single facet of what we proudly call our total environment...
...Finally, it implies that by choosing one approach we have concurred in a rejection (if not outright denunciation) of the other as being undesirable if not wholly illegitimate...
...And just behind them, see the bedenimed film enthusiasts (UMYA-adolescent), their eyes glazed with adoring incomprehension, their responses thick with inarticulate fervor...
...Our appetite for examples and instances (film and the individual, film and the group, film and the masses) grows voracious...
...Eliot-have been two...
...And surely even the minutest dollop of television or movie watching lays that myth to rest...
...Dictate the good, and we will wear it like a mantle of self-righteousness...
...What are movies good for...
...their few genuine contributions could be translated with ease and relish into the appropriately acidulous tone of satire...
...Moreover, Eliot urges a not dissimilar task for the critic...
...It encourages us to accede to the most blatant forms of reductionism with scarcely a whimper of protest...
...Eliot, though only briefly, touches on the possibility of what an ideal cinema might be...
...Substantively...
...We have become so used to a reality of gross types, so addicted to their static simplicity, so incapable of confronting the real world without their protective mediation and interposition, that, in large areas of our life and culture, the real world has quietly disappeared, become virtually invisible, and what we call reality (and much that we call art) has shrivelled and shrunk to conform to the only thing we really desire to know: types...
...And that is why a handful of sterile and ridiculous notions about the nature and purpose of art have been allowed to cloak themselves with the authority reserved for profound aesthetic dicta, and, with their scientific gimmickry whirring and cumbersome psychological and sociological machinery clanking noisily for all the world to hear, have been worshipped as the source of reality itself...
...the feline leer of Fritz the Cat ("X rated and animated") juxtaposed with Uncle Vanya ("Anton Chekhov's immortal classic"), the first film spectacular from China, Red Detachment of Women ("A cultural first...
...in your Chevrolet," ran the maddening jingle, and all Americans answered the call, trudging here and there with the industry of mindless pilgrims, and then, at the moment of triumphant exhaustion, affixing decals to every inch of automobile glass and chrome with the fervor of old military campaigners...
...It looks favorably on the tendency for discussion about the movies and arts in general to organize itself with inexorable rigor around one or the other of these now competitive viewpoints...
...The second half of the book, which consists of related writings on "Charles Chaplin" and "The Art Film," is more involved in traditional cinematic dispute over questions of the relation of technique to the exact nature of the cinematic medium, and discussion of these is best postponed to be dealt with in the larger context of the writings of Arnheim, Eisenstein, Bazin and others...
...Film books, at least the overwhelming portion, serve an analogous, distinctly decalomanic function: they chronicle and flaunt our intellectual adventures, hoping to elicit the despair and envy of our rivals...
...If all this sounds faintly remote and academic, imagine, if you will, a condition of anxiety and uncertainty so pervasive that, in every situation and context in life, you were required to say what you mean...
...For example, what remains in our memories a month or two after we have put down Michael Arlen's The Living-Room War...
...What happens when we separate these questions, treating them as independent and self-sufficient modes of investigation...
...A torrential proliferation of psychological, sociological, socio-psychological, psycho-sociological and kindred other tomes about the movies...
...Dipping into the volume at random, finding here an essay on the comics (remember when parents regarded them as Public Enemy Number One...
...Unfortunately, critics like Arlen and Didion seem content with more modest appraisals of their task, confining themselves mostly to fluent displays of irony or feelingful evocations of cosmic despair (as in Didion's allusion to Yeat's poem in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, for example...
...Displayed artfully on conspicuous shelves, flung carelessly on glass coffee-tables, nestled snugly between annotated copies of Hesse and Vonnegut, they signal, if nothing else, our growing intellectual dishonesty...
...One of the most common of these is the film book, essentially a picture book of the most provocative or licentious stills that a publisher can cull from a single film...
...The movies have assumed the status of visual Muzak...
...They can no longer be said to reflect the established forms of our life - they have become assimilated to them...
...The significance of Eliot's metaphor is twofold: first, the creation of good art depends on being able to see the world undistorted by the mind's desire for passivity...
...See the U.S.A...
...Perhaps such a quest is in itself delusory, a hopeless searching after a non-existent ideal...
...None too subtly our focus has shifted from an interest in film qua film to film qua instrumentality, its uses and effects...
...Young people divide into the Upwardly-Mobile-Young-Adult (in sociological notation: UMYA) and the Upwardly-Mobile-Young-Adolescent (also UMYA), who together, in a splendid example of social symbiosis, form the majority of Art Cinema patrons...
...That is why the role of the movies has very largely diminished into little more than a stage backdrop against which we play our tiresome roles, act out our "types" with unperceived pathos and sadness...
...Such irresponsibility inevitably fosters elitism, since, the fewer numbers of enlightened patrons, the greater glory redounding to...
...Requiring some measure of financial equity even to survive, the movies are held in thrall by the complex and continually elaborating cultural fantasies to which they must minister, deftly balancing every present gratification against the promise of future stimulation...
...Hence the ostensible matter of film serves as pretext for the real matter of social observation...
...So does the satirist - but with the humor intact...
...The point is moot...
...And what is meant by an eye for the films...
...Fantastic...
...And how do they secretly regard the Art Cinema...
...The litany of secondary effects that Warshow sees as having enfeebled our culture and hence our popular art, notably the movies, is neither surprising nor unexpected: having at least partially destroyed the delicate symbiosis between language and culture, we have sought refuge from the overwhelming complexities of experience (which our brittle and attenuated language cannot comprehend) through various evasions, defenses, postures and roles...
...Terrifying and real...
...Beautiful, terrifying and real...
...Seen in this way, it is inevitable that studies of the movies become little more than particular occasions and points of departure for larger sociologies of contemporary culture...
...Elaborating this idea, T.S...
...For, in almost every case, whatever the actual subject being discussed, Warshow's method of closure is to invoke, to draw upon a highly limited repository of recurring words ("experience," "feeling," "reality," "vocabulary," "adequate," "inadequate," "escape," "detachment," "defense," "evasions," "gratification," "posture," "role" and "attitude" are some), often amplifying their latent suggestivity in rather lengthy paragraphs of expository prose, occasionally embedding the same key word in highly disparate kinds of explanation (first art, then politics, for example), until, almost without warning, each essay becomes but a particular, almost subordinate illustration of a more general, more critically important, set of meanings, which it is Warshow's real aim to communicate...
...Indeed, the issue may be thought of as a continuing opposition between the passive acceptance and the active pursuit of reality...
...Thus, when T.S...
...The results are sadly predictable...
...More importantly, its prime effects-and here Warshow, in his concern with the precarious relationship between the health of a culture and the health of a language, sounds remarkably like T.S...
...in its power to provide islands of refuge and solace for the bored, the lazy, the frivolous and the un-airconditioned...
...In fact, the very conception of the function of criticism advanced by Eliot is strikingly similar to that which he gives to the artist...
...For Warshow, the politico-metaphysical cataclysm was not any of these, except in a highly indirect, contributory manner, but rather the "crucial experience" of "the Communist movement of the 1930s"-hence the centrality of his initial essay, "The Legacy of the 1930s"- which manifested itself, first, as "a disastrous vulgarization of intellectual life, in which the character of American liberalism and radicalism was decisively -and perhaps permanently-corrupted" and second, as a kind of invisible, noxious malady-the "psychological and sociological phenomenon" of "Stalinism"- which, having struck our collective psyche in the 1930s, has been slowly and invidiously poisoning American culture ever since...
...First, since "the problem of experience and the problem of a language for (expressing that) experience are...one," our very capacity to experience broadly and deeply and actively has perilously diminished, and, equally significant, "having removed (ourselves) from experience as experience...the problem of feeling-and thus the problem of art-is not faced...
...in its capacity to ease our cultural schizophrenia by supplying high and low cultural fare within the walls of a single twin-cinema...
...and all this has wrought the decline of our language, our art and our sensibilities...
...Between these polar oppo-sites of high theory and almost unbearably intense, raw experience occur a number of other assorted pieces (far less ambitious, more focused, more controlled) on comics, individual movies, single authors and the nature of two natively American movie genres, the Western and the Gangster film...
...In both cases the results are similar...
...reveals our desire for an objective arbiter of taste who lifts the responsibility of experiencing and thinking about our experience from our shoulders...
...The truth is, Hollywood (as euphemism, of course) is hostage to us...
...Despite all this, the reductio ad absurdum of this form of argument may be seen in the suggestion that the influence, indeed the very presence, of the movies can be felt without ever having to view them - indeed, without ever leaving home...
...But Eliot's classification of young people as a single unit is really overly simplistic...
...By focusing on this point in isolation we transform the movies into a sort of technologically magnificent instrument for manipulating and coercing society and accomplishing other acts of social utility...
...we have enlisted all levels of culture-high and low -to gratify this consequent craving for simplicity and stasis...
...and second, that art, so created, will continue to have an analogous effect on others...
...Two points...
...the first half of the book, comprising essays, sketches and pieces on American Popular Culture and American Movies, hovers somewhat uneasily between two immensely ambitious and highly theoretical speculations ("Author's Preface" and "Legacy of the 30s") which attempt to think through, among other issues, the complex nature of the bonds between the movies and culture per se, and the almost indescribably beautiful piece entitled An Old Man Gone," in which Warshow, amidst the arrangements and preparations for his father's funeral, makes the attempt (and, mind plummeting, thoughts lunging dangerously out of control as he tries to understand the frightening compulsion that lies behind this attempt) to puzzle out, to frame in words something like a definitive meaning of his father's life...
...The content of Warshow's book divides roughly into two broad segments...
...While the real world, flowing quietly beyond our grasp, remains a constant if silent reproach...
...And in terms of the argument what better agent of cultural transformation than the movies...
...and as the mind's eye comes alive, across the memory flashes the description of that classic of several years ago, Groupies...
...Why should this be so...
...Second: that the value of art, at even the most rudimentary level, lies in its ability to "at least (be) willing to break through the dream...
...Unfortunately, the prevailing tendency in movie criticism, to say nothing of the other arts, could not be more removed from that ideal...
...Because the very act of searching, the very act of toiling in behalf of such a goal aids us continually in finding ways to articulate our own individual and immediate experience of the arts (presuming that we have had an experience that in magnitude exceeds a grunt of disapproval or a shriek of unthinking enthusiasm) and helps us to maintain our own views against the general currents and fads of the time...
...What then...
...Of the very, very few critics who have made the attempt to combine a treatment of the movies and mass culture, of which the movies are the single most important part, with a head-on confrontation of the weightier issues in a serious, even theoretical way, Robert Warshow's posthumous volume, The Immediate Experience, in its willingness to range beyond irony (which is often piquant and hilarious) and lyrical impressionism into the more dangerous and shaky complexities of tracing the relations of aesthetics to the conditions of culture and language, is the acknowledged masterpiece...
...a series of wonderfully ironic verbal jabs and feints against the dismal condition of television programming...
...What is the nature of that myth...
...Given this concern, this unease, we are faced with the distinctly awkward question of how best to approach the movies...
...The Mickey Mouse Club grows up and rapes the American Dream...
...To the degree that events in the movies and in our lives are interchangeable and to the degree that people we encounter in the movies and in our lives are indistinguishable (not similar, not simulacra, but identical), the distinction between reality and the movies has collapsed, leaving one uncertain twilight to be known...
...It is an analogue of the tendency in recent pop criticism to bemoan (and occasionally to celebrate), the ascendancy in originality and imaginativeness of television commercials - those strange syntheses of hardsell huckstering, insane logic, ethnic humor and visual fantasy - over the more pedestrian level of routine programming...
...The proof, then, of the social utility of the movies is indubitable, incontrovertible, infinitely ramifiable: is it not clearly manifest in the movies' treacheous ability to nourish and confirm our most passionately held (and most carefully guarded) stereotypes...
...Two parts may be distinguished: an event of cataclysmic magnitude, cast in politico-metaphysical terms, which functions as a First Cause...
...And this, I think, is the cause of the unremitting pessimism which seems to lie at the heart of Warshow's vision: for in a world where the road to the truth dictates the necessity of perceiving things with freshness and acuity, where to cut through the types and stereotypes is paramount, where, as Iris Murdoch suggests, "We must be ruled by the situation itself, and this is utterly particular," an almost unbearable burden is placed on one's tools of expression...
...For that reason, the yoking of ontology and film is hardly gratuitous...
...each...
...Sticking on those decals became a savored ritual: while the world stood in envy at our triumphs, we could bend our thoughts to territories as yet unconquered...
...What is the nature of this cataclysm...
...If the opposite or "Rousseauean premise" were valid, suggests Joan Didion, another perceptive critic of the contemporary scene, then "most people, left to their own devices (would) think not in cliches but with originality and brilliance...
...it gives us) the world we dream we live in...
...and in so doing, he commits himself to a rejection of the traditional form of the essay as a short, tidy exposition of known truths, as blueprint or outline, as sententious espousal of commonly accepted dogma in favor of the essay conceived as dramatic performance, as a struggle (not always graceful or successful) before the public to attempt, in and through the very act of composition to hit upon fresh and more truthful valuations of ones' own experience, to come, in other words, closer to the truth, while simultaneously struggling to find those words, phrases, even vocabularies which will prove adequate to express and communicate the moment of immediate experience...
...What are movies good for...
...Come to think of it, that's what they used to say 'education' meant - a drawing out...
...And yet, in its capacity to reawaken our sensibilities, is not art also the instrument of redemption...
...Does the social scientist desire to give us niggling, humorless accounts of every aberration on the screen and off...
Vol. 6 • October 1972 • No. 1
