callen bach review t off 1960

7/28/2019 Callen Bach Review t Off 1960

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Review: [untitled]Author(s): Ernest CallenbachSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Winter, 1960), pp. 56-58Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1210363 .

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56MeinKampf

Directed by Erwin Leiser. Produced by Tore Sjo-berg.According to the San Francisco InternationalFilm Festival brochure, most of the footage inthis Swedish documentary was taken from Rus-sian material-"long and delicate negotiationssecured the prints." Mein Kamnpf ontains muchfascinating material, a good deal of it unavail-able in this country, or available only in thevaults of the Library of Congress. The filmcovers the history of the Third Reich, with somestill photographs of Hitler's early life.The most interesting scenes include Van DerLubbe's trial, the trial of the conspirators afterthe attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944, andsome telephoto close-ups of blond youths whichmust be presumed to have come from Leni

Riefenstahl's legendary Sieg des Glaubens oTag der Freiheits [see the Fall 1960 issue oFQ]. Unfortunately, the footage devoted to theindescribably horrible existence of the Jews inthe Warsaw ghetto during the war eventuallybecomes so overwhelming as to vitiate the effectof the film as a whole.It is unfortunate that the film's producersoverlooked the existence of newsreels of Hitler's1924 trial (re-edited by the Nazis, with a com-mentary, in 1930), and the memorable news-reels of Horst Wessel's funeral from BlutendesDeutschland (now available, with a fictionare-creation from Hans Westmar, from the Mu-seum of Modern Art Film Library). MeinKampf, despite its unbalanced structure, willremain for many years a fascinating document,of the greatest interest to students of history,even more than to the student of film propa-ganda.-CHRISTOPHERISHOP

Book ReviewsTheory of Film: The Redemption ofPhysical Reality, by Siegfried Kracauer.(New York: Oxford University Press,1960. $10.00.)

Kracauer's extraordinary book is, or ought tobecome, the bible of neorealism. It is the mostelaborate and carefully worked out theoreticalbook on film to appear since Spottiswoode'sGrammar (published in 1935); and it summar-izes, thoroughly though not eloquently, the viewof film which has been dominant for some dec-ades and came to its climax in postwar Italianfilm-making.This is not, of course, the only basic theoreti-cal view that can be taken of the film as a

medium. But it is the most powerful, ramifiedand useful so far devised; and it rests upon along and honorable tradition of film-making.Though its days may perhaps be numbered,Kracauer's contribution in codifying it morecoherently and explicitly than has ever beendone before is a major one. And the book'spractical usefulness, as a focus of film thoughtand a handy sort of landmark, will surely proveimmense.

Everyone with any interest at all in film mustread the book; and there is little reason to giveany extended account of its contents here. Itsgeneral position is, however, that film is not an"art"in the usual sense, but rather a means ofseizing on what Kracauer variously terms "theflow of life," "camera-reality," and the like.The good in films arises when the film-makerrealizes this and subordinates himself to thispeculiar nature of the camera; the bad ariseswhen he tries to incorporate "artificial" tech-niques or ends more proper to the stage, novel,and so on.


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57Nothing that Kracauer says along these linesis new, so far as I can determine; it is familiardoctrine, to which hundreds of writers havemade contributions in the past. In Kracauer's

hands, however, it takes on a substance andform never before attained. And there are oddsurprises. Those who do not know the Kracauerwho wrote Orpheus in Paris (a biography ofOffenbach) will be amazed at his gentle han-dling of the film musical, surely the most arti-ficial of all film genres. And countering therather dogged argumentation of the book (it ishard reading, no question about it) one findsdelightful asides which, though they never dis-play really wicked doubts, at least demonstratethat the author's concern for theory has notdimmed his delight in the medium. Everyreader will probably groan as some favoritefilm goes through the Kracauer meat-chopper;but the results are almost always acceptable.(There are, however, a certain number of fac-tual errors in the book, which seems odd con-sidering the long period it was in preparation.)The troubles with Theory of Film seem atfirst glance minor. Its use of examples is some-what cursory and general, for instance. Well,one might think, so it must be in a book at-tempting to provide a real theoretical overviewof the film. Yet on second thought, one suspectsthat if Kracauer had attempted to deal in realdetail with even one film the entire theoreticalbalance of his argument would have been putin serious jeopardy. Not fatal jeopardy, to besure: in its basic lines, its fundamental assump-tions, the theory is a useful and workable one.But, obviously, it is not general enough; and,not paradoxically at all, its theoretical limita-tions become apparent precisely through theway in which Kracauer handles the actual fabricof films.

He speaks many times in phrases like "thecamera's ingrained desire for indefinite ram-bling." (He sounds sometimes like Dziga-Vertov, but more often like Zavattini.) And ina general way we all know what this means:we like, these days, things that seem real; andif the camera seems to capture the real un-awares we are especially pleased.

Is the epistemological and aesthetic issuecontained in the above term "seems" a trivial oracademic one? I think not: on it, I maintainarose not only a watershed in philosophy butone in film history as well. And observe whatKracauer does in this connection. After theabove-quoted phrase, he goes on to illustrateby saying: "In Limelight Chaplin knowinglyavoids such a finale [an "ultimate solution"]He concludes with a shot which reintroducesthe flow of life: the camera moves away fromthe death scene in the wing toward Terry whois performing on stage."Good. Now a man who had never written ashooting script or watched carefully the actualproduction process might say that the cameramovement in this scene can be construed as"indefinite rambling." (The familiar ending ofthe Tramp pictures is a similar case.) Butsurely it is anything but indefinite and anythingbut rambling: it is, in fact, articulate, purpose-ful, artful.

And after finishing Kracauer's book one be-comes uncomfortably aware that his method ofargument has this consistent defect: so anxiousis he to believe that all filmic virtue springsfrom nonart, from nonformativeness, from sub-mergence in the world, that he cannot bear tolook closely at any given scene. For indeed,even in the hands of the early Rossellini, everygiven scene has some kind of form; it is not anaccident. It is part of the "indefinitely ex-tended" world, linked to all that world byvisible and not so visible links; but it is only apart. And the ordering of the relation betweenthat part and what we please ourselves to thinkof as the whole is precisely the province of thedirector who creates the film. And to under-stand how this ordering is accomplished re-quires very detailed analysis.In sober fact Kracauer's aesthetic scheme istoo simple to cope with the actual strategies offilm artists-or even with the most extreme pro-grammatic neorealist statements, such as Zavat-tini's proposal for Italia Mia, through which ele-ments of control and artifice peep in everyparagraph.


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58It seems to me that the real and extraordinaryvirtues of the film spring precisely from thetension between their tendency to seem inert,part of the great indefinite web Kracauer writes

of, and their created form. It is this dialecticalplay of order and chaos that provides film-makers, in an enormous variety of ways, withthe energy that makes of film a potential artform. Kracauer, by concentrating so intentlyon one side of this counterpoise, inevitablyneglects the other; yet without it his side wouldsoon cease to interest us.*I do not mean to imply that Kracauer isagainst "stories" and the like; and his classifi-cation of story types is a useful one. But he isedgy about such matters, and largely confineshimself to saying (there is a certain amount ofredundancy in the book) that those akin to theflow of life are good, while those which deal indrawing rooms or the prearranged emotionaldance of the stage are bad. True. But what ofthe exact ways in which the potentially goodmaterials are handled? Here we find ourselveson our own again; Kracauer gives us the word,but does not make it flesh. (Sometimes almostliterally: of Brief Encounter-which he likes-henotes that it "clearly shows that films with acontrived intrigue may well be episodic inspirit." And his discussion of the Roman pros-titute episode in Paisan, while surely correct inits conclusions, is curiously insufficient in rely-ing on dicta such as "All these chance occur-rences defy chance.")Kracauer's work is thus in one sense an ad-mirable and largely conclusive book: it laysdown the line on the film and reality in a generalway. Few, even of those most interested innew theoretical developments, would deny thatmuch of this general position must be retained.Theory of Film is indeed a landmark. But likeall landmarks it raises the question "Where dowe go from here?" The direction is known, Ithink, to no one. But perhaps we must start byregaining some of the ground which Kracauerhas given up. Surely it is not necessary, as hedoes, to abandon those realms of experience

from which poetry, fiction, and art have drawnin the human past, in favor of what he likes tocall "actuality." These are concessions whichon the record of Bergman, Fellini, KurosawaResnais, Bufiuel, film has no need to make. Buof the strategies of these men we still havealmost everything to learn, and perhaps Theoryof Film will do its greatest service, in the longrun. by reminding us of this.-ERNESTCALLENBA

* I exploredthis issue as it appearsin questionsof documentarystructure n "The UnderstoodAntagoniand OtherObservations,"FQ, Summer1959.

The Three Faces of the Film: The Art,the Dream, the Cult, by Parker Tyler.(New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960.$6.95.)

One's first reaction to the film criticism oParker Tyler, of which this volume is a collection, is almost inevitably on the level of styleHe is a complicated writer, as any dip into thebook will show:"If it was true in 1950, it was probably meanto be true now. Yet one opines that this allegation, on the corollary evidence, is, and wasfalse. Real murder has taken place within theprofessional colony of Hollywood as elsewherein the world, but exactly because of that factdiscretion forbade that the rough stuff of SunseBoulevard should bear any tangible resemblanceto it."In this case, as in most of Tyler's contributions to film criticism over the years, what he isaying is more often than not perfectly soundBut readers feel that he is trying to make filmcriticism seem like a more esoteric affair thanit really is. Neophytes in film criticism sometimes conclude that Tyler is an obscurantist; oldhands sometimes conclude that he plays foolishgames.Such reservations noted, however, one musrecognize that Tyler is acute, usually to thpoint, and concerned with aspects of film arthat receive far too little attention from othe

callen bach review t off 1960

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