by Jim.
(with apologies to Jaron Lanier)


Experience tells us that art is necessarily a subjective enterprise and for the most part subjective is just what criticism of art should be seen as - one person's trash, another's treasure. But for those of us who are looking to make films, this reality offers little guidance - what separates the work of a fumbling amateur of the craft from the assured work of a master? Other art forms have their principles -- standards which guide craftsmen working from within their forms toward a method of expressing themselves clearly -- but film by-in-large, and accordingly film criticism, seems to lack a comprehensive study of its principles.

Admittedly, while I have studied film for quite some time, I'm nearly as much at a loss now as I was when I had just begun my foray into film theory, the chief difference being that now I think I know what questions need to be asked in order to move forward and begin to assemble a more comprehensive understanding of the craft. What's to follow then, is a somewhat disjointed list of my concerns and objections to what I see as crucial problems in film theory and appreciation.


I. Toward A Hierarchy of Film Expression

Let's start with the basics, what a film can do, then we'll start to worry about what they should do. At one end of the spectrum we have pure visual expression in the service of itself - expression. A motion picture like this would have to be abstract even within the context of its frames, filled with simple shapes and shifting colors, somewhat like visual 'music.' Given too concrete a form, visual expression begins to venture into our next category - motion pictures in the service of a narrative, a story.

The benefits and limitations of abstract film art and a narrative film are closely related, and they revolve around clarity - the more abstract a film, the more it is likely to affect a wider audience and yet at the same time, the less it is likely to affect them greatly. The burden of a more intense emotional transmission can't be carried by random, chaotic images. At the same time, the more exacting and complex a film's narrative, the more the audience has to work within the confines of what they know of the characters and their relation to the story. Once a film assumes a narrative structure, we then face the eternal form and content dilemma and hence my first quandary - what should be of greater value, what a film is about or how a film appears to the audience?

I'd hasten to say that the best films (among the best works of art) are a successful marriage of both form and content in a way which suggests that the only true answer is both. But where are we to place films along a scale of value which err to either side of form and content? Am I supposed to respect a film like Gummo for its supposedly superior form while in denial of its deliriously repulsive content? To insist so seems to me to encourage the type of foolish thinking which would praise the craftsmanship of a metal tube separate of the realization that we're looking down the barrel of a rifle. I suspect that these films, while certainly providing me some personal enjoyment as a spectator relative to a host of personal tastes and experiences, may be considered trivial when compared with films which unify form and content.

Some theorists would insist that the more a film utilizes visual means of expression, the greater it is to be considered a film. My only thought is that such a film might only go to greater lengths to proclaim its inherent filmness, more strongly declaring itself to be apart from other arts, which is to say something entirely different than that watching it is a desirable experience, or that it should be in some way deemed qualitatively superior to other films.


II. Auteur Theory - Let Burning Phoenixes Lie?

Most writers tend to assume that there is some body of films we can safely call the 'Western' and then move on to the real work - the analysis of the crucial characteristics of the already recognized genre ... These writers, and almost all writers using the term genre, are caught in a dilemma. They are defining a 'Western' on the basis of analyzing a body of films which cannot possibly be said to be 'Westerns' until after the analysis ... That is, we are caught in a circle which first requires that the films are isolated, for which purposes a criterion is necessary, but the criterion is, in turn, meant to emerge from empirically established common characteristics of the films.
-Andrew Tudor (Genre and Critical Methodology)

The auteur theorist, should he insist that a filmmaker is a superior craftsman merely on the basis of his consistency in bringing themes and images to the audience, is in a similar bind because the auteur theory casts the director as a genre. Auteur theorists assign a criterion of what they feel is a truly realized, say, Alfred Hitchcock film, and can do so only after a careful study of his past films, successes and failures included, and then with these criterion in hand they aim to judge his later films. The criterion on which an auteur is to be judged is composed of two parts - the auteur's intentions, as in a Horror film's intent to horrify, and a set of visual motifs, or the auteur's mis-en-scene (loosely, the auteur's assembling of images within a frame), as in a Western's tall hats, gunfights and vast sun-bleached sand and stone backdrops.

For the traditional American auteurist, Sarris and those who might be said to practice Sarrisism, it is the realization of the auteur's intentions which is to take precedence over all else. The problem is that should a film be dramatically inert when viewed by the audience, it can still be considered great so long as it conforms to or displays evidence of the previously divined checklist of themes and motifs. Conversely, a film which is a great success with audiences, but does not conform to these expectations may be said to be a lesser work, not nearly as fully realized. Kael swiftly counters this notion of realization with a wry "The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better?" ("Circles and Squares," from I Lost It At The Movies.) Furthermore, doesn't it smack of a constricting and limited view to insist that an artist be confined to motifs and themes? Isn't this antithetical to all art, which I feel has among its chief goals the constant exploration new emotional and intellectual territory? Should an artist successfully explore new themes and motifs, are we to rewrite his intentions or is this an indication of the inadequacy of such an idea in the first place?

I can see the appeal of the auteur theory as a method of seeking a more exacting catalogue of a filmmaker's methods and thematic obsessions (a goal a value greatly), but without acknowledging an audience centered component, one which references what philosophers call "internal experience," then I have little use for it as a measure of the quality of films. The irony is, while Sarris and others seem to insist that a lack of internal experience is just what the auteur theory demands and proclaim this as its greatest strength, I see little evidence of this in the writings of the Cahiers critics. Take, for example, this reflection by Truffaut on the films of Alfred Hitchcock :

The art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience, so that the viewer is actually a participant in the film...

The nature of Hitchcock's cinema is to absorb the audience so completely that the Arab viewer will forget to shell his peanuts, the Frenchman will ignore the girl in the next seat, the Italian will suspend his chain smoking, the compulsive cougher will refrain from coughing, and the Swedes will interrupt their lovemaking in the aisles.
-Hitchcock/Truffaut, p. 17

These seem to me to be the words of a critic who readily acknowledges the significance of a film's responsibility to the audience - why should we demand anything less?


III. Overwritten and Underthought and Vice Versa

It is tempting to many of them, apparently, ... to suggest that they ... possess an ultimate understanding of reality, which is something quite apart from having tremendous influence on it.
-Jaron Lanier

While I have written in the past that there needs to be a greater respect for more rigorous (and rigorously intellectual) discussion of film theory, I hope to be clear that criticism, like filmmaking, should aim to involve as wide an audience as possible. Only in doing so will the ideas we espouse be given exposure to a vast collection of differing minds, and consequently only those theories and opinions which are worthy of our time and energy - our very passion, survive. It strikes me as lazy, and worse criminal, to feel that any collection of ideas somehow subsumes or includes competing theories if there is little evidence that these ideas do nothing to promote an artist's perfection of their craft, to elevate the audience's emotional and intellectual involvement in the appreciation of film, and finally to affirm the stream of experience, pleasures and fingers pricked, that is life.


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