Sunday: a blog makeover

8th June 2014

Although there is no sign of this here, I have been thinking a lot about a new direction for this blog. I have remarkably downtime at the moment and I’m all too aware that I am not posting regularly. The next RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcast is coming up fast – Henry IV Part II on Wednesday 18 June. There are other broadcast projects underway, plus I am researching and writing articles on, among other topics, live cinema, Henry Moore, Shakespeare on television and Ken Russell. And I am doing my best to work on the data entry for the Screen Plays database which needs to be complete by the end of the year – and we still have a long way to go. Finding the moments to post here as I have in the past has simply become harder in recent weeks. So I am going to try something a little different. Please bear with me over the coming days as I work out quite how it should work.

I intend to post something here every day – but not to feel that I have to craft an article for each entry. Rather, many of the entries will just be a link or several such or a video or a book I’m reading, with a line or two of commentary. And I’ll keep the past seven days active in a separate updated entry – and then ‘retire’ entries eight days or older into the archive. You’ll get the hang of it, I hope. Anyway, here goes…

Sunday 8 June

Previously on the blog… I used to compile a Sunday links section of things that I had found interesting during the previous week. I miss this, as I think one or two of you do also, and I am hoping that my blog makeover will offer some of the links that I would have previously highlighted. So to begin on this new path I am going to point you towards a terrific series of recent posts on one of the blogs that I admire the most, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s Observations on film art.

In April and May David Bordwell authored a wonderful series of posts about film reviewing in the United States in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. They are full of richly interesting ideas about the cinema, writing and the culture of America. He intends to pull these together into an e-book but in the meantime you can read them here:

• Otis Ferguson and the way of the camera, 20 November 2013
David Bordwell characterises this piece as the ‘prologue’ to the series. He reflects on the writings of the film critic of The Nation between 1934 and 1942.

• The Rhapsodes: Agee, Farber, Tyler and us, 26 January 2014
Introducing James Agee, Manny Farber and Parker Tyler…

I’m captivated by all three. None holds me hostage, though; I write as an enthusiast but not a promoter. What attracts me now, in tandem with the book I’m writing on Hollywood in the 1940s, is what they did in their first decade. Although many readers didn’t notice, these three made writing about American film exuberant and important. They raised it to a level of frenzied acuity that it had never enjoyed before. They helped create, by the delayed action I sketched earlier, the modern institution of movie criticism, with all its virtues and excesses. In the process, they forged some original ways of thinking about American cinema.

 • Agee & Co.: a newer criticism, 9 February 2014
Leftist ideas about popular culture – and especially Hollywood – in the 1940s…

James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler […] wrote criticism with a zany gusto that nobody else imagined possible. They didn’t telegraph their punchlines; sometimes you couldn’t be sure that there was a punchline, and sometimes there seemed to be too many. As for popular culture: They seemed, with reservations, to like it a lot. They liked being unSerious, which only lent greater oomph to the moments when gravity was demanded.

• James Agee: All there and primed to go off, 23 February 2014
On Agee on Chaplin and John Huston, and on Walker Evans too.

It’s terribly easy to be sentimental about Agee, and almost as easy to be hard on him. (Brutality, as Stroheim and Griffith knew, has its sentimental side.) But I think that reading him can do something rare in film criticism: He calls you to your best instincts. His dithering can be frustrating, and he often snaps open too many pipes in the sonorous organ of that style.

• Manny Farber 1: Color commentary, 17 March 2014

• Manny Farber 2: Space man, 23 March 2014

We’re so attuned to late-phase Farber that turning to this hero’s apprentice work may seem to court disappointment. But from the start the writing is racy and engaging, and not so densely impacted as in his late phase. Moreover, he has long been considered our critic most sensitive to the look of the movies. By rummaging first in his youthful art reviews, we can get a better sense of exactly what his criticism owes to the visual arts, modernism in particular. The result, which I’ll present in the followup entry, wasn’t quite what I’d expected.

 • Parker Tyler: a suave and wary guest, 2 April 2014

Tyler tries something different [from Agee and Farber]. He’s not a realist but a surrealist. What Agee and Farber praised as “accuracy” or “authenticity” scarcely concerns him. And story–at least, the story the film pretends to be telling–doesn’t matter to him so much. The very first chapter of his first book is titled, ‘The Play Is Not the Thing.’

• The Rhapsodes: after lives, 20 April 2014

If there hadn’t been films that pushed the boundaries of cinematic storytelling, even the cleverest reviewers couldn’t have written so fruitfully. Without Sturges and Welles, Huston and Wyler, Hitchcock and Wilder, Wellman and Walsh, Lang and Preminger, Mankiewicz and Val Lewton; without perversities like The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Salome Where She Danced (above) and Turnabout; without ambitious pictures like Citizen Kane and The Story of GI Joe alongside dozens of sturdy programmers, the Rhapsodes would have had little to work with. The cascade of overpowering, exuberant, piercing, and crazy films of the 1940s surely pushed them to go all out. Great criticism can flourish, it seems, when there is great cinema.