Impressionist History

Impressionism started in France in the 1860's and went through the rest of the 19th century, spreading throughout the Western world as painters in country after country caught on. Up until that time, painter's were judged by how closely they could render the surfaces of the world: flesh, glass, steel and lace. Photography was invented in France in the mid-19th century, and in some people's minds, photography started making this "realistic" painting obsolete. So all those painter's you've seen, Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh, turned to an "impressionistic" style where the brushstroke could capture the essence of something - light, summer air, frost. And they moved away from the subjects of their fathers and grandfathers, the large history paintings with characters and action and moralizing ("The Death of Socrates" by David).



So what I'm suggesting is that something very similar happened in movies and, more importantly, continues to happen today. It happened very fast and very simply: D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein hammered out the film language we now use: long shot, medium shot, close up; head shot and reaction shot; linear- and cross-cutting. That freed up the hundreds of hacks to churn out thousands of movies, increasing in length until we got to the one and a half hour feature that was good enough until the pretentious 70's arrived and started making those bloated two hour features we're stuck with today.

I've described the Storytellers and the Entertainers.
The most pure Impressionists were those experimental film makers who dispensed with plot entirely.

At this point (yesterday, in fact) Mike said, "So Bergman is an Impressionist, right?"
The question implies that I'm describing styles here, and that because plot is not the most important element of a Bergman film, it follows that he's an Impressionist, and more interested in getting certain responses from his audience than he is in telling a story.

And, I think, that's not what I mean at all.

(And I think if I were a better writer I would have explained my point better by now.)

My point is a little more extreme (please don't say radical) than what Mike implied: what I'm saying is that all Hollywood movies today are made by storytellers and entertainers. And the impressionists are not making movies at all. They're making music videos and commercials. I'm saying that commercials (drug and alcohol commercials in particular) have become the impressionist visual form of the 21st century.

The weekend is here. Jack is one week old. Comments are encouraged

The Impressionists

I'm going to borrow a label from Art History, Impressionism, to describe films labeled "Experimental Cinema" or "Avant Garde Cinema."
The most well-known American film makers in this category are Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Ken Jacobs. Also, (you may have heard of) Jonas Mekas, who is now mostly known for helping other filmmakers.
These people made short independent films before Sundance. They worked in the 50's and 60's and I think I can say that with the arrival of MTV in the 70's, Experimental Cinema in America was gone.
There's a point in Ken Burn's Jazz documentary about black musicians picking up brass instruments left over from the Civil War and using them to make great music. That's kind of what happened with 8mm movie cameras in the 50's and 60's. (I'm speaking from personal experience here.) Kids borrowed Dad's home movie camera and made short movies with very little money. And as it has been said elsewhere, these movies bore little resemblance to what was in the theatres and on TV. The 60's was a time when it seems like everyone took themselves very seriously indeed, and these little movie makers were no exception.

Stan Brakhage was a true American original, an outstanding film maker. He was obsessed with vision, and I'm not talking about the metaphoric kind. You can find some of his films on YouTube, which is a good thing. As you can imagine, you lose a lot, watching on a computer in a well-lit room. The title sequence to the movie Seven is a Brakhage homage. I think I should write about the films of Brakhage at a later date, when more people have seen a little of his work. I should also say that I attended a five week summer course with him at NYU.

People who study art history seem obsessed with labels and I am no exception. So this subject is -to be continued. I want to say what I mean by Impressionism in this context, what happened, and how this ties into our list of ways to look at movies.

Storytellers and Entertainers

I want to introduce one more way of thinking about movies, and because I'm borrowing terms from art history, I'll be using terms that may evolve in time.

You assemble people together, have them sit down, then you tell them a story, in the dark, by a flickering light. You want to hold their attention, so you keep them in suspense, and make them keep asking, "What happens next?" This is what movies and campfires have in common.

Most great filmmakers are great storytellers who are good at putting it all together on film.

When movies became feature-length, in the 30's, your typical Hollywood director was a loud, heavy-drinking tough guy. He was good at bossing people around and getting them to do what he wanted.

And he was good at telling stories.

I'm thinking of John Ford, William Wellman, Victor Fleming and, later, John Huston. I remember a quote from someone describing John Huston before he came to Hollywood as "just a guy who was good to go out drinking with." Most directors made terrible movies (as they do today), but a handful matched that storytelling talent to a vision and... the rest is history.

Then there were another bunch of directors in the 30's: sound came in, and the studio bosses wanted pictures that appealed to women and pictures for people too poor (it was the Depression after all) to see live theatre shows, whether it be vaudeville or legitimate theatre. The bosses hired a lot of theatre people and vaudvillians and put them to work and they made many, many bad movies. But one special guy came out of this: Busby Berkeley.
Berkeley made great movies with amazing camera movements that had never been done before, but he just was not interested in telling stories. And the funny thing is, nobody cared. He made movies that were advertised as "all singing, all dancing" but they really were the avant garde cinema of the early sound era: surreal and weird and it's amazing that they were so popular.

Tomorrow: the Impressionists.

The Movie Grab Bag

Jack Anthony Costagliola was born on Friday. Both he and his mom are doing very well.

Back in the 70's, Mary and I saw what I can only call a horror film: we were enrolled in a natural birth class in the local hospital and they ran this thing called "You and Your Baby" or something like that. In the movie, masked people grab this 2 minute old human, pry his eyes open, one at a time, and shine a flashlight right into his cornea. Call it excess empathy if you wish, but we were truly horrified. And then they moved on to the circumcision...

I'm detouring from my list of ways to think about movies to address some issues raised by the comments. It's easy to think about mise en scene and montage as objects in a director's movie grab bag and it would seem as though if you had total control, and big budget and a lot of time, that you would just pick a style that fits each scene. And maybe that's so, once in a while. But then you would have swallowed the Hollywood Kool-Aid: that a movie is just a string of filmed scenes. Scenes of actors who could just as well be on a stage, except there's no money in it.

If this was a book, I would rent the Departed so I could really go over that scene in the elevator that Sean referred to, before writing about it. But this is a blog, and I want to address Sean's comment right now, today.

With this scene, Scorcese has made an original visual connection to give us a little Theatre of Death. The action starts on the upper floors in the elevator, but he yanks us out and away and puts us, dead center, outside, in front of the elevator. We know the doors will open just like we know - and here's the connection - that the theatre's curtain will rise, and the show will begin. So here we are, in front of this little stage. The doors open, and we look at: mayhem. And here's the horror film connection: we cannot look away. We're trapped in the mise en scene. The actor raises the gun and we want to yell No! Stop! Cut! But still the film rolls. It's like a little horror movie inside this psychological cops and robbers thing.

Auteurs

Since the 50's, the Auteur Theory has dominated critical thinking about the movies in all places but a few college campuses. Although I've never seen it described this way, it's really movie criticism hijacked by the English Department, but instead of Famous Authors we get Famous Directors or Auteurs.

Auteur Theory is so pervasive, it's hard to believe it's only 50 years old.

(Once again, I'm struggling to make this believable: that people really used to think another way about things. It's easier to talk about the Middle Ages in this regard because it's a given that "it was a different time." In fact, the reverse is true: people can't think of St. Francis as a troublesome teenager singing songs (from another country - it was the "French Invasion" instead of the British Invasion) that drove his parents crazy, but it's true.)

Anyway, to describe life before auteurs, I have to talk about Tom Hanks.
People say: Have you seen the latest Tom Hanks movie? Did you like the last Tom Hanks movie?
If I say, answer quick: Who directed the last Tom Hanks movie? or, in desperation: Can you name any directors of any Tom Hanks movies? (I think you can name only one.)
Before the auteur theory, there were a lot of Tom Hanks-style actors: (going backward in time) John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin. Each one was the Tom Hanks of his day. I cannot think of a single Gary Cooper movie where he plays the bad guy. Not only that, he always played the role that the audience principally identified with. His career seems to have been micro-managed to keep his fans happy all the time.
So the Auteur Theory was developed in reaction to this mind-set.
Now we live and breathe in the world of auteurs. It's a cliche: if you talk seriously about movies, then you're talking about directors.

Mise en Scene and Montage

The second way to organize movies is by form. The action of the movie is propelled by montage or by mise en scene. It's hard to describe these terms historically and without prejudice because each one is loaded with passionate critical baggage. So I feel like I'm discussing the history of the Trinity in a room full of Protestants.
Montage is easy to describe if you've seen a film by Eisenstein. He took small pieces of sometimes very static shots and created great motion and emotion. The shower sequence in Psycho is a great recent example.
Mise en scene is a theatrical term that's been applied to movies: the director positions the actors, positions the camera, and says,"roll 'em!" Sometimes the actors move, sometimes the camera moves and sometimes they both move. We were taught in film school that the master of mise en scene was Jean Renoir ("Grand Illusion") and recent good examples can be found in anything by Stanley Kubrick.
But this is Formalism, and it's so old fashioned that I'm not sure I can convince you that people once believed that movies can fall into one of these two categories. But they did.
Everyone can see that the most heavily edited film still has "scenes" which are "set" and that even the film with the longest, most boring shots still has them strung together, but look at it this way: Where is the passion of the director? Is it in creating something purely filmic, purely synthetic (people used to talk this way) in the editing? Or is the director interested in capturing the perfect motion, the perfect gesture in the scene?
Once again, it's fun to think about which movies fall into which category:
I've said that Kubrick is the right stuff, but on the bad side, 100% of what's made for TV (excepting commercials -- more about this later) is mise en scene's bad stuff.
Montage has been given a bad name by those wordless "montage sequences" where the two lovers get to know each other by going to the beach, the playground, the park, you get it.
If I just say great editing and you think of the Corleone Baptism sequence in Godfather I, you'd be right.

Lumiere and Melies

Instead of covering the dreaded Terms and Conditions, I thought I'd introduce other people's ways of organizing movies, before I get to mine.
This will give me a chance to change my mind.
I have a hazy memory that this Organizing Principle (this will not be the last time that I start sounding like Winnie-the-Pooh) was spoken by a character in a film by Francois Truffaut, a member of that same New Wave to which Goddard belonged.
The idea is this: all movies are descendants of two French filmmakers, Lumiere (really the Lumiere brothers, there were two) and Georges Melies.
The Lumiere brothers came first. In the 1890's they made films like "Train Entering the Station" and "A Lion at the Zoo". We'd call these documentaries now. Straightforward, no actors, but exciting to those who saw them new because they were, well, new. People said they were "real" and "real life" until someone, many years later, pointed out how much they owed to French Impressionist painters.
Melies saw what the Lumieres had done and started making his own movies, except these were "trick films" with disappearing people in stage sets and all sorts of film magic. In other words, "special effects" movies. He's most remembered for "A Trip to the Moon" in 1902.
A pandering note to twentysomething readers: the Smashing Pumpkins music video for "Tonight, Tonight" was done in the Melies style.
And the children's librarians among us have insisted that I mention the 2008 Caldecott Award Winner, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" which uses Melies biographical details and images.
So there it is. On one side there's Lumiere with documentaries, dramas, and even comedies. And then there's Melies with fantasy, science fiction, and horror.
It's fun to argue about the movies that have trouble fitting:
"Fight Club"? I'd say Lumiere.
"Mission Impossible"? I'd say Melies.
What do you go to the movies to see? Real people? With real stories that make you laugh and cry?
Or do you want to see things you've never seen before, like a bunch of aliens drinking pina coladas at a bar and listening to jazz?

The Dreadful Beginning

Mike and Sean and Tom came back from their American Tour, and Sean said, " I need some sort of guidance. Have you seen anything by Goddard?"
Everybody liked their blog. It was fun to read and it was fun to travel along with the boys as they wrote and drove. So writing a blog seemed like a good response to Sean.
It's good that I don't know what I'm getting myself into here.
My inclination is to define my terms and make rules and state my intentions, if only for the chance to look wooden and uninspired in retrospect.
My plan is to fit what I know into this blogging structure, then go on (and on) until I get a response that shows me where I've got to go.