Histories of the Movies
Dworkin, Martin S.
Histories of the Movies by MARTIN S. DWORKIN This is either the best or the worst time for histories of the movies to come out—depending upon whether we think the present chaotic uncertainties are...
...The unifying theme repeats a classic apology for nostalgia: that the movies haven't changed since they began...
...Histories of the Movies by MARTIN S. DWORKIN This is either the best or the worst time for histories of the movies to come out—depending upon whether we think the present chaotic uncertainties are a phase in an evolution, or in an era's ending...
...Nor is it one of merely being "unburdened either by technical jargon or the special esperanto of cine-club experts," as Knight contentedly characterizes his own commendably lucid, but often excessively urbane style...
...Rudolf Arnheim's Film as Art, an adaptation of his own Film, also in paperback (University of California Press...
...and The Liveliest Art, by Arthur Knight (Macmillan), an urbane survey of movie history, significance, and apparent future directions...
...A venture into integrated literary and film criticism, Novels into Film, by George Bluestone (Johns Hopkins Press), seems to be the only seriously intended critical work among the new ones...
...But there must also be a profound comprehension of the forces in the lives of peoples that have given the movies their ideological power...
...To explain the nature and meaning of the movies, there is needed a lot of Griffith's and Mayer's sense of the movie stars in the firmament of the people's dreams—as well as Knight's knowledge of techniques...
...In this light, The Liveliest Art popularizes some vital aspects of movie history in interesting, factual fashion...
...Among the captions and paragraphs pasting the photographs to one another are many shrewd observations, aptly made—as well they might be...
...For, in one sense, Griffith and Mayer's The Movies does not properly belong to the renascence of interest in books on film, but to the current passion for nostalgia for our recent past-—the Twenties most of all, the Forties and Thirties, and the early decades of the century, too, when the pictures-that-move and the antique automobiles were genuine wonders...
...is uneven in others, such as some of the "International Trends...
...But the critics in the coterie of cinema and art magazines are more serious about not taking him seriously...
...As it stands, thick and formidably diverting, The Movies appears as less a history or work of consistent interpretation than one of those overpriced, poorly printed production jobs run up for the gift trade, the book clubs, and—all too soon—the remainder counters: a "picture-book" in which picture selection ultimately determines what is to be treated at all, and picture layout how much precious white space is to be squandered on text...
...Popularization in its most meaningful educational sense is the choice of a level of clarification, rather than the specific omission of essentials...
...This is a sense of the movies as fun, and as they have vivified the dreams of those who rarely read books —other than the ones drawn from or destined for movie translation...
...But it is true that Knight's concern with the movies is largely limited to studios and theaters, rather than extended to comprehend their meanings in social history...
...The issue once again is that perennial sentimental insistence (hat history be historiography: that what happened be what we want to describe...
...The criticism of the Griffith-Mayer picture-book, and of Knight's elementary survey, must itself not be grounded upon that unconscious disdain of the movies that makes movie criticism such an easily irresponsible enterprise for so many, presenting opportunities for opinionating without standards or relevant competences, and permitting the sublime luxury of demanding masterpieces without possessing criteria of judgment that have something to do with the particular, unique nature of the filmic art...
...If Griffith and Mayer seem to care more about memories, cynically spiced but affectionately redrawn, Arthur Knight, who is film critic for The Saturday Review, presents an introductory handbook for film appreciation, in which film history is interpreted in terms of trends towards the present—or, rather, towards whatever future may be materializing, as theatrical and non-theatrical forms of film experience compete and combine...
...His emphasis thereafter, however, is upon techniques and styles of film making, events and directions in the business of presenting movies to the public...
...The problem of popularization, then, is not simply one of enticing people towards the exercise of critical awareness of the elements of film, as that has already begun by the time a book is opened...
...Nothing is gained in understanding of the movies as social phenomenon or as art by disparaging histories because they review the trash that has filled the screen...
...It is a pity that they—and/or the publishing powers—were so plainly carried away by the picture-book format, and by the particular pictures finally selected, that so massive a work as The Movies is so infrequently more than illustrated nostalgia, for end-table entertainment...
...The others are popularly historical and carefully introductory in approach, aimed at the widest response, if not the deepest interpretation: Bosley Crowther's epitaph for the crumbling Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer colossus, The Lion's Share (E...
...And all the hundreds of photographs are there in orderly sequences, suitable for browsing, to prove it...
...P. Dut-ton...
...The latter two panoramic works are impressively different in intention and appearance, demonstrating again that there may be as many ways of being popular as of being serious...
...And in correctly crediting directors, technicians, and businessmen, he even leans too far away from a realization of the fame-splashed, tabloid and fan-magazine reality of Hollywood fakery, that is what "the movies" have meant to most people, everywhere...
...and is inadequate or wholly neglectful in dealing with the social, political, and philosophical considerations that may be the most important of all, in understanding the history of what happened to us on screen...
...And, deepest of all, there has to be recognition of the movies as representing the modern revolution in knowledge of the world...
...That they do come out, at a time when theater attendance is dwindling disastrously, does say something for a growing serious interest in the movies that is encouraging—a development presaged a year ago (in my "Lost and Found," The Progressive, March, 1957...
...So far, Knight's artfully unpretentious "Panoramic History of the Movies," as The Liveliest Art is subtitled, has stimulated the flow of aesthetic bile among the cineastes much more than has the loudly booming treatment by Griffith and Mayer, "told in 1,000 wonderful pictures and 150,000 words of brilliant text...
...The point bears making because of the manner in which serious film people have greeted both books —and because we must forever reiterate the platitudes that something popular may nonetheless be seriously significant, and that popularization can be a quite worthy way of extending knowledge, provided that the substance of what is to be known is not contemptuously cheapened to dross...
...He introduces the inventor, the artist, and the businessman as "the three points in the triangle of film creation," and says immediately that "none of them could function without that vast, motley, disorganized throng which, assembled in neat rows in orchestra, mezzanine and balcony, becomes momentarily 'the audience...
...and, most recently, The Movies, a gigantic picture-book with text and captions by Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer (Simon and Schuster...
...and a revised edition of Gilbert Seldes' pioneer excursion into critical comment on the new mass-entertainment media, including some of the earliest deliberate movie criticism, The Seven Lively Arts (Sagamore Press...
...we, the audience, have changed...
...There may be a certain wisdom in this— aside from the partisan purposes being served...
...Reading books about the movies already signifies a commitiment much different from that involved in sitting in theaters, or watching films on television...
...Not that Knight is taken more seriously than are Griffith and Mayer...
...of the movies as a force that has changed the world and our ways of knowing the world...
...Arthur Mayer is one of the most intelligent persons in the business end of the movies, a sharp commentator on the practicalities of getting better films to greater audiences, in his many essays and his book, Merely Colossal...
...The depth of the seriousness since then is best indicated, alas, not in new penetrations, but in reprints of cinema incunabula: Sergei Eisen-stein's Film Form and The Film Sense, joined in a single paperback volume (Meridian Books...
...There is no question that The Liveliest Art belongs with the new bibliography of film—although there is some questioning about its value as introduction, history, or interpretative commentary...
...In avoiding the doctrinaire political interpretations of older histories of the screen, Knight has neglected social meanings...
...And yet, there is a flashy quality to the book's stress upon the movies' carnival brass and brilliances, that captures a sense of their continuing appeal, come whatever aesthetic theories and social maturities may, that is somehow slighted in Knight's more detailed, analytical treatment of techniques, directors, and international trends...
...Richard Griffith is curator of the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art, and author of several books on film...
Vol. 22 • March 1958 • No. 3
