Ads for The Talented Mr.
Ripley quote Roger Ebert's description of it as being
"As intelligent a film as you'll see this year." That
really hits the nail on the head, I think. No one, I think, could
be in much doubt about what he means: a film that deals with
well-developed adult characters and that treats its audience like
adults--not least of all, by presenting sexual relationships
between men in a totally unsensationalistic and dramatically
relevant fashion. If I insert a demurer at this point, it is
neither to qualify my praise for The Talented Mr. Ripley
nor to take issue with Roger Ebert, whom I respect quite a bit.
However, "intelligence" seems to me quite slippery
ground to serve as a foundation for making critical judgements
about movies. To be sure, today when there is a surplus of motion
pictures that have been dumbed down to the mental capacities of
the most obtuse pubescent male, it might be something to rejoice
about when a film does not lack intelligence in the sense defined
above--and I think this idea underlies Ebert's statement. Still,
to many educated movie goers, the term has a far broader, and
less well-defined connotations. To call a film
"intelligent," might mean reflecting the aesthetic
norms of traditional artistic media, especially drama and the
novel--or it might mean, as I fear it often does, aping the high
tone of op ed pieces about The Meaning of Life or The Existence
of God or The Decline of Moral Values, etc.
Although the first of these uses
of "intelligent" as applied to movies is less obnoxious
than the second, neither of them seem very helpful in deciding
what makes a film good or bad, as the example of the two Anthony
Minghella pictures can well illustrate. The English
Patient is an example of an "intelligent"
movie in the ambitious sense of the word: not only is it based
upon a well-known novel by a serious writer, Michael Ondaatje,
but it employs novelistic devices familiar to literate viewers.
More importantly, the quest of the enigmatic Count to find his
soul in the desert adds a philosophical premium to the
proceedings--even if that wheezy conceit dates back to Robert
Hichens' The Garden of Allah, if not further.
Unfortunately, none of this prevents The English Patient
from turning into arty dreck at some points--as in the scene of
the plane crash. By contrast, The Talented Mr. Ripley
owes its artistic success to very solid, very controlled movie
making from beginning to end. For a sensitive viewer, the
thematic overtones will add something to the experience, but
evidently many people can--and do--appreciate the movie at its
primary level of entertainment. Needless to say, when it is a
question of Eyes Wide Shut or Bringing
Out the Bodies things get more complicated, since anyone
incapable of tuning into the thematic overtones will find the
experience of watching the movie frustrating. But saying that a
movie presupposes an intelligent response on the part of the
audience is a different matter from dragging in intelligence as a
critical category. To imagine that either film is effective first
of all because of its basic idea--the uncertainty of desire in
the one case, the longing for redemption in the other--would be
ludicrous. Eyes Wide Shut would really be boring
without Kubrick's obsession with the power of images just as Bringing
Out the Dead would be painfully lugubrious were it not
for the intensity of Scorsese's vision. To paraphrase a
famous quip of Stephane Mallarmé's, movies are made with images,
not ideas.
Many years ago, when I was
attending San Diego State College, most of my friends faithfully
attended every new foreign film that opened in town and disdained
commercial American productions like Howard Hawks's Hatari!
In their eyes, the foreign releases were
"intelligent"--they possessed a respectable
intellectual content--while a movie like Hatari!
was no more than silly popular entertainment. While I admit to
probably having over valued Hatari!--my knowledge of
Hawks in theatrical screenings was limited to Red River, The Thing, and Monkey Business, while I had only
seen Bringing
Up Baby in a 16mm print and The Big Sleep and Only Angels Have
Wings
on television--but in retrospect I do not at all regret having
championed it over the art house hits of the day. One of these, for example, was Federico
Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which was hailed by
some reviewers as virtually the cinematic equivalent of Oswald
Spengler's The Decline of the West. But the most
ambitious sequences, like those involving the
"intellectual" Steiner--whose shortcomings some critics
noted at the time--are positively unbearable, while what stands
up are the brilliantly choreographed moments of fashionable Roman
sybarites at play. A far more damning example to cite would be
the various British realistic pictures of the same period such as
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, whose saving
virtue lies mainly in having supplied a showcase for some of the
most gifted actors and actresses in the English-speaking world.
But the movies themselves only serve to illustrate a
"content" that suffers from what Hegel called
"abstract one-sidedness."
It would
be tempting to explain this phenomenon in purely auteurist terms,
as a difference between weak and strong directors, but more than
anything else it seems to me to reflect a fundamentally
inadequate concept of film art and one that has hardly vanished
from the screen.
However, it is necessary to make some clarifications here. In the
first place, to speak of an inadequate concept of film art in no
way implies the existence or one right or worse
"authentic" concept of film art. Even less does it
imply some ontological difference between supposedly
"real" movies and ones that are deemed not to be. All
motion pictures, whether well made or not, are equally motion
pictures, period. Any sensible critical discussion of movie art
can only start by comparing individual films and then attempting
to establish more general aesthetic criteria--which are not
necessarily generalizations--but not by beginning with some
cinematic categorical imperative. Clearly, there are different
possible concepts of film art, and these are different not just
for different subjects but are probably basically different for
filmmakers and critics. Moreover, the task of distinguishing
between these is not one primarily of separating good from bad,
or right from wrong but of weighing strengths and weaknesses.
Last but not least, this is not a question of "form"
versus "content," itself not only a cliché but a
highly abstract one. As far as the present topic is concerned,
rather than making a distinction between form and content, it
might be more useful to distinguish between two kinds of content:
a visual content and a narrative one, in the sense of an implicit
structure that informs the action and orients the flow of images.
The
relation between these two kinds of content should in no way be
envisioned as that of a one-to-one correspondence. If anything, their most usual relationship
is one of a lack of equilibrium. One case is illustrated by films
like Sleepy Hollow and Any Given Sunday,
where there is a preponderance of visual content with a narrative
content that does not effectively interact with it. But if this
relation almost automatically leads to aesthetic disaster, except
where the narrative content is relatively meager--as is the case
in many horror or action pictures--the converse case where there
is a preponderance of narrative requires a more thoughtful
examination, which will need to be postponed for the present (but
see below). Very roughly speaking, it is important to distinguish
between artistic ineptitude where the visual content seems
strained by the weight the narrative content imposes on it, and
artistic asceticism where a deliberately restrained or even
austere mise en scène stands in a relation of dynamic tension
with a highly complex narrative content. (Something of this kind
happens already in certain films of George Cukor such as The
Women, but in a far more radical way in the films of
Michelangelo Antonioni in the early 1960's, and in Jean-Luc
Godard's Les Carabiniers.) Yet something quite
different happens in the case indicated above, where a film's
point of departure is a highly abstract thesis which then gets
transcribed onto celluloid. If Ingmar Bergman might seem guilty
of having proceeded in this way in some of his films, what still
counts more is the point of arrival than that of departure. Some
of the speeches in The Silence or The
Passion of Anna might sound like the sophomoric
grumblings of a neurotic intellectual, but there is nothing
sophomoric about the visual content of either movie.
Where the
screen serves as nothing but a magic writing pad for transcribing
"ideas", film is reduced to being little more than a
medium in the most literal and impoverished sense of the word. No creative tension can occur when the
visual content is denigrated in this way. Nevertheless, the ideal
case--if there is one--is not that of a coalescence between the
visual and narrative content. To the contrary, even in a
"degenerate" case like the one described above, the two
continue to interact. But in a far happier situation, the
interaction becomes interplay, a contrapuntal, multiple
relationship that lasts no longer than the running time of the
film.
I would not go so far as to claim
that Hatari! illustrates this latter kind of
relationship. Hatari! is not top-drawer Hawks.
It is leisurely in the manner of Rio Bravo, and
as in that film Hawks further slows the pace by throwing in all
kinds of picaresque narrative complications. But if Hatari!'s fable is
simple, recalling that of Only Angels Have Wings--the arrival of
outsiders disrupts the harmonious life of a group of professional
hunters capturing game in Tanganyika--this is hardly true of the
narrative content as such which reveals a high degree of what
would be termed intertexuality in literature. Without looking at obvious parallels with
earlier films by Hawks, Hatari! has interesting
connections with a number of older MGM productions shot on
location in Africa including Mogambo (1953)
directed by John Ford, King Solomon's Mines
(1950; Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton), and going back to W.S.
Van Dyke II's legendary Trader Horn (1931).
Belonging to the same period is Victor Fleming's Red Dust
(1932), the source for Mogambo, with a setting
in Indochina and shot in Hollywood, but much closer to a Hawks
picture in tone than Ford's remake. At the same time, the
narrative content does not only function at the level of plot
situations and dramatic motifs; visual constituents also play a
significant role in it. Far from simply serving as a passive
substance for the narrative content, the images possess an
autonomous organization of their own, an organization which in
turn enables them to function as signs pointing outside the
immediate narrative framework of the film.(Like any sign, these
visual signs can be quite ambiguous, a possibility that Kubrick
brilliantly exploits in Eyes Wide Shut.) Most
arrestingly, the African landscape perhaps serves as a silent
metonymic reference for narrative material from a different
medium: Ernest Hemingway's travel book, The Green Hills
of Africa as well as his two famous short stories,
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro." (Hemingway, a friend and
hunting companion of Hawks, had committed suicide the year before
Hatari! was released, and it is not too
far-fetched, I think, to see in it a memorial tribute to a
Hemingway of better years.)
Nor is the visual content any the
less rich. Hawks skillfully uses an opposition between
interior/exterior shots that goes back to The Dawn Patrol
(1930), juxtaposing classically composed dramatic scenes with
action sequences that take place in seemingly endless African
vistas. (Some of the location exterior shots might well be
described as "sublime" in the Burkean sense of the
word, as "productive of the strongest emotion the mind is
capable of feeling." Their effect is all the more impressive
because Hawks incorporates them into the action rather than
setting them out for the spectator's delectation like the visual
tutti-frutti of The English Patient.) But Hawks
superimposes upon this spatial contrast a different, wholly
cinematic one: between studio and location photography. Hawks had
employed this device before in Red River (1948),
going so far as to shoot key exterior scenes in the studio, but
he goes further in Hatari! by introducing a
novel stylistic resource. The latter film not only utilizes a
contrast between the studio interior shots and the location
exterior ones, but also a contrast between the classical
photographic style of Russell Harlan--who did all the dramatic
scenes, both studio and location--and Joseph Brun's remarkable,
highly physical coverage of the hunting sequences, often making
use of a handheld camera--still quite uncommon in mainstream
American productions of the early 1960's. If it were only for
these episodes, which go far beyond the nonsense purveyed by
Disney nature documentaries and other garbage of a similar ilk, Hatari! should have been
recognized by contemporary reviewers as something out of the
ordinary.
Nevertheless, neither the visual nor the narrative content in and
of themselves guarantees anything about the artistic success of a
motion picture--only their interaction on screen. But it is here
that Hatari! becomes most interesting.
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