Oppositional Film Criticism: Social Realism and the Radical Critic of the Postwar Era

- Introductiono Re-phrasing Leblanc: “[w]hat kind of cinema can, in the society where we

are writing and filming, best serve the interests of the Revolution?” (Ellis)o Film must be supplemented by the written word (see LeBlanc; Godard)

- What is oppositional film criticism?o Criticism as a form of political interventiono For oppositional critics film criticism is ‘instrumental’ in constructing an

alternative politique to conventional practices of the cinema being produced at a particular historical moment.

o ‘What form does capitalist exploitation take in the cinema?’o The construction of (a political) art-world (Godard, France; Mekas, New-

York Avant-Garde) ‘and the practices such a world would entail (or be obligated to)’

o Theorist vs. critic - Social Realism (Ferguson)

o Criticism that speaks to the realities of everyday life, the worker’s historical and material conditions

o “The formalist argument that the most essential and authentic literary works of the American transcendentalists were their journals—an argument that has been made not only for Thoreau and Emerson, but also for Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Charles King New combined also has a social dimension. The “deliberately unsystematic, irregular, almost dilatory relation to calendrical time” of the Concord “cottage industry” of journal keeping has been understood as both “a partial rejection of American tempo” and “a partial rejection of American mechanical and mercantile capitalism” (Rosenwald 1985, 89 in James 1992: 162);

- Ideological Criticism: Analyzing Form o The social and political component of aesthetics o Vertov’s commitment to film journaling o ‘Not reviewing in the conventional sense’o See Bordwell o Providing new methodologies for interpretation

- Criticism as material praxis (Marxism)o Criticism turns its back on social realism?o If criticism was to speak to the realities of everyday life, the worker’s

historical and material conditions, it had to resist being couched in theoretical jargon.

o To Leblanc, criticism that best serves the intentions of the revolution analyzes “the form capitalist exploitation takes in the cinema.” For Leblanc, this is a question “bourgeois criticism leans over backwards to ignore.” For Leblanc, a criticism that analyzes the form of bourgeoisie cinema addresses criticism’s oppositional aims. That contextualizes its industrial and historical properties as a form of material historicism. “Putting the question that way obliges one to recognize that a film is a product of work.” Criticism turned its back on social realism.

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o But did this new form of oppositional criticism speak to the reality of everyday life? A reader response suggests, no. The reader puts forward the following question to Cinethique’s editorial staff (Leblanc’s emphasis): “Ask yourself whether a WORKING MAN or a PEASANT with a serious interest in the cinema could understand everything you write” (Cinéthique No 5., Sept.-Oct. 1969). In response, Leblanc proposes a new “direction” for the agenda of Cinethique, proposing that ‘the aim’ of the magazine’s ‘enterprise’ should be “ to combat the obscurantism and dogmatism rife in contemporary cinema criticism, we have to nip a reputation for being esoteric in the bud.”

o Leblanc: one must recognize cinema is a product of WORK- Criticism as social intervention: Mekas

o According to David James, along with his diary films, film criticism was Mekas’s “most visible intervention in cinema” (1992: 152).

o “Mekas recognizes that an art world of film, in addition to avenues of production, distribution and exhibition, needs a critical discourse to validated these works, to cultivate a more sophisticated audience, and to provide methodologies of interpretation” (Ruoff 1992: 307)

o “Movie Journal” was not reviewing in the conventional sense (which he always bitterly disparaged) but a polemical and impassioned record of his personal musings and activities around the independent cinema, including accounts of his own filmmaking and promotional work for the avant-garde” (James 1992: 152)

o Mekas’s opening editorial in Film Culture would outline his personal agenda for the avant-garde.

o Mekas in particular believed that, “Like all art, cinema must strive towards the development of a culture of its own that will heighten not only the creative refinement of the artist but also—and pre-eminently—the receptive faculty of the public” (Mekas 1955: 1).

o He systematically criticized the resistance of the established newspaper and magazine critics to avant-garde film, writing in the 9 December 1965 column: “These smart and literary critics are ignorant of the fact that cinema, during the last five years (and through a series of earlier avant-gardes), has matured to the level of the other arts” (Mekas 1972, 218).

- Film Criticism as Film Educationo Film criticism = the cultivation of an audienceo ‘Undoubtedly, one of the most important factors contributing to this

change [in the growth of the American experimental film] is the increase in film education’

- Criticism as Ideological Intervention: Godardo With the events of May 1968, and the general political climate at that

time, came decisive changes to the nature of oppositional criticism. As a result, there was a movement from away from practical criticism toward a science of criticism.

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“The formalist argument that the most essential and authentic literary works of the American transcendentalists were their journals—an argument that has been made not only for Thoreau and Emerson, but also for Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Charles King New combined also has a social dimension. The “deliberately unsystematic, irregular, almost dilatory relation to calendrical time” of the Concord “cottage industry” of journal keeping has been understood as both “a partial rejection of American tempo” and “a partial rejection of American mechanical and mercantile capitalism” (Rosenwald 1985, 89 in James 1992: 162); “In this respect and in the refusal of conventionally validated literary genres, transcendentalist journal writing refused the prevailing mode of literary production and consumption. Cutting across the distinction between private and public discourses, the habit of sharing and circulating journals actually resisted the growing commodification of writing, as well as implying amore general resistance to the commodity-based social relations of bourgeois society at large. It sustained a semipublic literary sphere, outside art and commerce alike, existing between the private realm of the individual conscience and the public realm of commercially published books. The sign of transcendentalism’s utopian social project, the interdependence of the personal the public in this literary sphere, was also the means of its implementation. The same issues are at stake in Mekas’s work, modernized and translated from the journal and literary sphere to diary film and cinema” (James 1992: 162)

‘The desire behind film criticism is to express the ‘life’ of the self as subject in response to film’; and extension (and reaction to/reflection of) the limits of cinema as an apparatus of representation’; how a spectator marks their presence in a world that demands their absence (an act of authorship)

**Godard: “Filming is also different from writing in the first persons singular, expect insofar as one has recourse to spoken and written language. To posit the “I” of first-person verbal narration other than through language, one is largely dependent on an equation of the “I” first-person pronoun with the eyes, with visual perception” (Turim 1992: 195)

Brakhage, perception, ‘metaphors on vision’; ‘the immediacy of recording and seeing’; ‘the collapse of the camera “I” and subject “I”: “belies the gap between what the subject sees and who the subject is, or even who the subject construes himself to be” (Turim

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1992: 195) [INTERPRETATION]; “Brakhage knows he is using metaphors, but he also sincerely believes in the equivalences they establish” (Turim 1992: 195)

The essay form notable for its tendanecy toward complicatin (digression, gragmentation, repetition, and dispersion) rather than composition, has, in its four-hundred-year history, continued to resist the efforts of literary taxonomists, confounding the laws of genre and classification, challenging the very notion of text and of textual economy. In its heterogeneity and inexhaustibility….the essayistic worlk bears with it a logic that denies the verities of rhetorical composition oand of system, indeed of mastery itself” (Renov 1992: 215)

The Barthes Effect: The essay as Reflective Text (Reda Bensmaia)

“In my writing on the essayistic in film and video, I have chosen to resist the lure of genre, preferring instead to consider the essayistic as modality of filmic inscription. The invocation of mode rather than genre sidesteps the difficulties raised by the latter’s far greater historical stake in taxonomic certainty, as well as the presumption of thematic consistency attached to it. Conversely, the determining principle of resemblance for the mode is a formal or functional one. As Jacques Derrida notes, quoting a distinction framed by Gerard Genette: “Genres are, properly speaking, literary/or aesthetic/categories; modes are categories that pertain to linguistics or, more precisely, to an anthropology of verbal expression” (Derrida 1980, 210). IN the instance of the essayistic for film and video, formal, functional, and ideological commonalties converge as defining characteristics” (Renov 1992: 21)

“Knowledge produced through the essay is provisional rather than systematic; self and object organize each other, but only in a temporary way—“Nothing can be built on this configuration, no rules or methods deduced from it” (Good 1988, 4); ‘its concern for the self and other’; ‘Descriptive and reflexive modalities are coupled; the representation of the historical real is consciously filtered through the flux of subjectivity. Neither the outward gaze nor the counter-reflex of self-interrogation alone can account for the essay. Attention is drawn to the level of the signifier (“let attention be paid not to the matter, but to the shape I give it” [Montaigne 1948, 296]); a self is produced through a plurality of voices, “mediated through writing, forever inscribed in the very tissue of the text”’ (Renov 1992: 216)

Epistemological uncertainty: “This plurality of voices provides a clue to a fundamental if implicit presumption of the essayistic mode, namely that of indeterminacy. Neither locus of meaning—neither subject nor historical object—anchors discourse so much as it problematizes or interrogates it” (Renov 1992: 216)

What’s the difference between ‘epistemological’ (the essay form) versus ‘ontological uncertainty’ (the cinematic text)? Can we define what we gain from the text of cinema versus the knowledge we gain from criticism as two different types???)

Montaigne: “On Repentance”: “The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion…I cannot keep my subject still…I do not portray being, I portray passing…If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions, but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial” (Montaigne 1948)

Barthes, Montaigne—a refusal of being-as-essence; being as final determination (Renov 1992: 217)

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“I am elsewhere than where I am when I write” (Barthes 1977, 169)

**MONTAIGNE’S “BOOK OF THE SELF” ‘THE ESSAY AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY’**

Aesthetic criticism (focus on form and truth/history/event); the essayistic tradition (resist form; genre and focuses on the subject—‘active, fragmentary, and self-absorbing’)

Lukas: “The essay,” declared Luckas, “is a judgment, but the essential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict…but the process of judging” (Lukas 1974, 18) (Renov 1992: 217)

“In Reda Bensamia’s phrase, the essay is an “open-ended, interminable writing machine,” for just as the real resists the strictures of representation (how to fram or carve out a historical personage or event without the loss of authenticity), so too are the fixity of the source and the subject of enunciation called into question. The interminablity of the essay follows form the process-orientation of its ctivity, the mediation of the real through a cascade of language, memory, and imagination”

Oppositional Cinema/Oppositional Criticism

Diary film as oppositional cinema: “The resistance to public consumption that keeps it essentially within the community of friends who are represented in it—across both the aestheticist avant-garde and the commercial industry, and counter to the different kinds of reification they entail—reflects the terms of Mekas’s engagement with the medium itself”; ‘A desire to render the filmmaker’s life in the world and not in the studio’

‘Documentary poetics’; “It is worth noting, for example, that the traditional documentary approach to which Mekas unfavorable refers, discernible in the fervent recording of expatriate activities in Lost’s early reels, is circumscribed and absorbed by the complex weave of the film’s sound/image orchestration” (Renov 1992: 221)

“The reference to Grierson and Rotha in the interview quoted above is significant inasmuch as they were the chief polemicists for a vision of documentary film as a tool for propaganda and social education during the embattled decades of depression and war” (Renov 1992: 221)

The avant-garde’s ‘engagement with formal questions’

Mekas’s attachment to social realism, to ‘the Lithuanian exile community’ “gave way to broader as well as more personal concerns and the engagement with formal questions’

The ‘tendencies’ or ‘aesthetic functions’ of the documentary film (in relationship to Mekas) (Renov 221)

“When I am filming, I am also reflecting” (Mekas in Renov 1992: 234)

Alexandre Astruc’s “camera stylo”; auteurism; and the ‘essay film’

Cavell on ‘Writing’Writing as edifying as living (providing moral or intellectual instruction)???

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James Agee—documentary filmmaker?

Brechtian line of thinking = ‘cinema should be highly socially responsible’

‘Jonas Mekas’s advocacy of a radical American cinema existing outside the methods and concerns of commerce’; ‘Sarris’s writing on the auteur theory and the unexpected power of the American commercial cinema’; Gunning: “I have never been able to forget that these nearly opposite forces were articulated in the same seminal journals, film Culture and the Village Voice, and that Sarris and Mekas began their careers in criticism closely intertwined—in fact, if not in theory. As a film historian I have learned to vale the contingency of space and tem as much as intellectual differentiations” (Gunning 62)

For Mekas, criticism was a way of ‘transforming independent cinema’ (part of a larger project—the Cinematheque; screenings; new distribution networks; Anthology Film Archives)

“On one side there is Hollywood; on the other side, are the experimental film-makers. The middle, the largest area, the whole of human reality, sung by the poets and painted on canvas from time immemorial—as the source of all art—is lying fallow” (Jonas Mekas in “Experimental Film in American”)

?? “For while all notions of a utopian cinema must begin from the possibility of production outside and against commodity relations, any real counter bourgeois practice must oppose bourgeois society’s most fundamental distinction, that between industrial and amateur, between labor and the leisure that renews it. The lifework of Jonas Mekas, who was displaced from rural Lithuania by World War II and who since then has been an immigrant in New York, has proposed such a utopian cinema. His negotiations with film were determined by several overlapping and mutually inflecting schema: the way he lived modernism’s master narrative, the history of the displacement of the organic and rural by the industrial and the urban; his attempt to salvage an identity from within the confrontation of United States and Soviet imperialism; the continual passage back and forth in his work between writing and film, by which the resources of one have regularly been drawn into the other; and his commitment to a truly populist cinema” (James 1992: 146)

‘Capitalist cinema as ‘structurally incapable of responding to the realities of American life that a generation of cinephiles would be obliged to reinvent the medium in a way that had not previously been imagined’; “There is not other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses” (Mekas Village Voice February 1959); “These cineastes, self-styled “The Group,” issues a “First Statement” (Film Culture 22-23 [1961]), which asserted that “the official cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring. Even seemingly worthwhile films, those that lay claim to high moral and aesthetic standards and have been accepted as such by critics and the public alike, reveal the decay of the Product Film”; a ‘cinema as personal expression’; new forms of distribution and financing (‘The Film-Makers’ Cooperative’ (1962)

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--CRITICISM AS PRAXIS--

Both critics saw criticism as a type of ‘praxis,’ as a way to insight ‘revolutionary change’ in the cinema. These critics ‘envisioned for film the aesthetic, social, or cognitive functions claimed for painting or poetry. ’ Both led lives that were consumed by ‘all branches of the cinema’ (screenwriting, screenings, etc.); both filmmakers and cineastes; ‘Mekas’s ongoing journalistic enterprises’

(The critic as artists): Both began as critics, and then became artists; ‘By the early 60s, Mekas attitudes were also informed by his own experience in production’; documentary films on the immigration of ‘Lithuanian communities’; first sent scripts with his brother to Hollywood; Guns of the Trees (1960); ‘For so long the servant of other filmmakers and other cinemas, he appeared to set the pattern for such disregard, and it has never been easy to hold his films in common focus with his other activities’ (James)

Postwar ‘New York and the organization of the film community’; criticism and praxis extends to the formation of a community; an ‘initiative’ that began with Maya Deren; an ‘extensive artist support system’; the cinematheque

Criticism as ‘cultural revolt’ against “the conventional, dead, official cinema” (Mekas); the presence of Marxist materialism or ideological criticism in ‘such discussions’ must be acknowledged. ‘Left wing aesthetics’

**“On one hand we talk about our involvement in society, revolution, etc., we march and we protest and we go to Washington D.C., on the other hand we have this fantastic, miracle too which we could use to criticize, to record, to celebrate, or reveal society around us, to expose it to ourselves and others; instead we prefer to play abstract artists. I think it’s pretentious” (Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice, 20 May 1971, 72)

‘In 1959 Mekas wrote a long report to Europe on the sate of new filmmaking in the United States for Sight and Sound, with much attention devoted to recent documentary and socialy orientated films’

Mekas as “a displaced European heavily involved nthe American film-making scene” (Pruitt 1992: 57)

Criticism as a process, a dialogue

“There was an atmosphere that was common to both things [The American Cinema and the rise of New American Cinema]—the underground aspect, the covert aspect , the revolutionary aspect. In the one case you have people who are genuinely underground. Very many of them subversive ideas of one type or another, either political, or social, or sexual, or behavioral, or formal, or artistic, ideas. Then there was the second underground thing. It was the perception that a great man ythings that were considered disreputable, grubby, cheap, vulgar ,were really muc more interesting than that. And that there was something underneath al of this. The process of getting underneath is basically an intellectual process. It’s a high-art process. It’s not fandom, it’s not just undisciplined enthusiasm. It’s ovetruning something. And I think my generaltion, the jpeople with whom I identify critically, people at Cahiers, people at Movie, were in their different ways overthrowing a very pious, proper socially conscious, socially

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responsible---but really socially sonseratvie-establshiment, mostly a critical establishment. It’s like when rock music came in, people said, “Well, what’s new aobut that?” Well, what’s new about it is that it just completely overturned everything else. It ended jpop music in the way it had been; it desetroyed it. The nourvelle vague did a lot of damage, the Cahiers peole did a lot of damage, I did a lot of damage. You can’t make an omelette withoutld breakig a lot of eggs, and a lot of eggs were broken, a lot of eggs that didn’t’ desrve to be broken, not that completely. Now I feel I want to return to film hstiory everhting that we dislodged…So I think there is a relationship. And the fact that these two things happen to coexist, which at first seemed so strange, is not so strang; they were both revolutions of sorts. They had different goals, different objectives, but they had basically the same impetus: to change something, alter something, shake things up” (Sarris in interview with Gunning 1992: 74)

Canonization, Criticism and the Art Film: Mekas saw the “need for apermanent home where classic works of film could be shown on a regular basis. Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Mekas himself drew up plans for such a museum , to be called Anthology Film Archives. A selection committee made up of James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas, and P. Adams Sitney were to establish “The Essential Cinema,” a permanent collection of “the monuments of cinematic art. Unlike Mekas’s previous screenings, the Anthology was from the beginning critical and discriminatory” (James 12); showcasing “film as an art” (Mekas); a ‘commitment to canonization’ (see James 12-14)

The purpose of David E. James anthology is to survey and lay claim to the impact Mekas has had and continues to have on the ‘history of (artisan) filmmaking in New York.’

‘The journalism of Mekas youth in Lithuania and DP camps’

Mekas and the ‘advancement of the AG’; Mekas’ ‘notorious attack’ “The Experimental Film in American; “Mekas himself later termed tis a “Saint Augustine-before-the conversion piece,” and the religious metaphor is entirely appropriate, for within a few years he was the fiercest advocate of what he had come to see as a new and distinctly American film culture, and an entirely new sense of its political significance” (James 1992: 8)

“All Mekas’s early film projects were undertaken with a view to reforming the mass-market, studio-produced film. Not only was a mass audience essential to his political objects of enlisting film in the fight against war, but industrial production was intrinsic to any cinema of which he could conceive. Consequently, his ideal through the late fifties was reformed industrial cinema modeled on a proto-auteurist reading of prewar European film and the postwar European art film. The turning point in his life in cinema---and it is a crisis enacted in all different field of cinema in which he was involved—was his realization that he Americanization of these traditions faced distinctively American differences in the production systems and the relation of those production systems to American life; capitalist cinema was so structurally incapable of responding to the realities of American life that a generation of cinephiles would be obliged to reinvent the medium in a way that had not previously been imagined. As the possibility and indeed the progress of these transformations became clear to him, Mekas abandoned the idea of reforming commercial practice, and instead espoused the radical

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decentralization of production, the reclamation of the apparatus by previously dispossessed social groups, and a whole register of formal vocabularies that facilitated unprecedented expressive functions. These new independent cinemas sould take their terms of reference form the metaphor of poetry, the exemplary and summary form of disafflilated cultural practice” (James 1992: 8)

--FILM CULTURE--

The establishment of Film Culture (America’s Independent Motion Picture Magazine) in 1955; editorial board: Mekas, his brother George Fenin, Louis Brigante, and Edouard de Laurot; “In his first editorial Mekas proclaimed the need for “a searching revaluation of the aesthetic standards obtaining both among film-makers and audiences and for a thorough revision of the prevalent attitude to the function of cinema” that function, he asserted, was neither entertainment nor the production of commodities, both of which had combined to blunt public recognition of the “full significance of filmic art.” (James 1992:7); magazine as ‘oriented toward Europe’; “from the beginning Film Culture gave sympathetic critical attention to American film, and eventually seminal work on Hollywood appeared there most notably Andrew Sarris’s “notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” and “The American Cinema” (appearing n 1963 in nos. 27 and 28 respectively)” (James 1992: 7); Film Culture as the ‘voice of the avant-garde’ (James) in the 1960s; ‘In 1955, Mekas and his associates founded Film Culture magazine, a review that contained substantial studies of past cinematic achievements, but whose main thrust was to support worthy contemporary filmmaking, to help found a “New American Cinema” in which the filmmakers would control their own work, free from the Hollywood industry’ (Pruitt 1992: 52); ‘looked to Europe for inspiration’; Gunning: what was the ‘particular aesthetic attitude’ that Sarris was told the magazine was to have (64); Sarris: ‘that we were serious’; “But there wasn’t much serioes consideration fo film, pretentious or otherwise, at that time. I mean there were good people scattered around. But there was no institutional focus for it. And that’s what Jonas represented. A lot of the people he represented were people from the New York community…” (Sarris 1992: 64); “Jonas was not articulating a magazine aesthetic. From the beginning he was articulating a film aesthetic” (Sarris); Sarris: ‘We had complete freedom; we could write anything we wanted’; * “There really was very little linking the different segments at the magazine. There were political people, the antiquarian people, the experimental people, there was the gay subculture, much less political than it is now”

Film Culture as ‘an institution of alternative cinema’

Sixties culture and ‘the collapse of work and life’ (the collapse of the aesthetic autonomy of abstract expressionism’)

“In very interested in the muddle you’re describing, how much the various element which were in Film Culture were not necessarily meant to cohere in any sense But there is another common denominator that’ always struck me, even though I know the differences outweighed the common, shared elements. In the early sixties, when you began writing The American Cinema, to praise directors like Sam Fuller or Edgar g. Ulmer was a kind of provocation, event though I’m not saying that was your purpose. And that’s something that was shared in a much more polemical and intentional way by the evolving New American Cinema: a sense of underground movies as provocation. I’m curious whether you see that as another kind of accidental overlapping

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or whether that was some shared area, or where you draw the boundaries?” (Gunning interviewing Sarris 1992: 74)

‘Early issues of Film Culture and Mekas’s first films testify to a different cinematic allegiance than the vocation annonanced during Mekas’s later years as a film critic for the Village Voice’

No one in early Film Culture took one ‘pure aesthetic stance’ (Pruitt 52)

Mekas’s column for the Village Voice (1960s-1970s); ‘the twenty or so years of Meaks’s regular public writing’; a ‘brief-stint’ with the Soho Weekly News

--CRITIC AS ARTIST--

‘Mekas’s humanism’; ‘Jerry Tallmer had written a column some mothns before I came on telling how a lot of people that they were disgusted with Jonas—that he wasn’t a real reviewrin, he was so personal, you know the usual…’ (Sarris); “The whole think with Jonas was that he wasn’t’ a critical journalist. He was an evangelist. There is something in Jonas that is consistent, this marvelous consistency, the personality, the life, the career. And I think that Jonas’s great virture, or great achievement, is in demonstrating through himself that anything is possible. Jonas goes out and does things that no one had any reason to believe can exist. There is no demonstrabale need for them. Btu he says, “We have to do this,” and something happens. I’m the antithtsis of that” (Sarris 1992: 69) ‘There wasn’t enough rigor in his aesthetic—but there never is in anybody’s’ (70); “Jonas has never questioned any aspect of my aesthetic. Jonas operates by the individual, by the human being, not by what the human being professes” (we are all doing something) (Sarris 1992: 71);

“And I think one of the things to say about Jonas in this context is that he wasn’t overthrowing anything. He was less that kind. But I think some other people took up the cudgels. I was polemical. I’m much more of a dialectician than Jomans. I think everthing that goes up, something else has to come down, that’s natural. I have a very political instinct, much more so in a way than Jonas does. Jonas is a religious figure. I’m more political. I think that’s the difference” (Sarris on Jonas 1992: 75)

“It’s always struck me (Mekas, in fact, kind of refers to it once in a column in the sixties when he’s jabbing you a little bit) that’s there a rough similarity between the principles of the auteur theory as you particularly outline them, the idea of the personal filmmaker, and the ideals of Jonas’s New American cinema---and also an obvious contrast” (Gunning interviewing Sarris 1992: 71)

“I’d say that the big cleavage between us is that Jonas puts a higher value on expression than on communication. I put a very high value on communication. I think

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you have to reach someone, that there has to ben an audience there. My rejection of most of the film avant-garde has to do with a fundamental rejection of the idea that movie have the same options that the fine arts—painting and sculpture—do. They don’t. Painting and sculpture essentially are spatial and non-temporal. Temporal forms—music, drama, narrative, fiction, literature, cinema—these are time things. And to take time form people, you have to enrich them. You can’t just repulse them. Now this is a very complicated argument. And the argument has taken different shapes, different forms, over the years” (Sarris 1992: 71)

** [SARRIS ON NARRATIVE + FORM] “Later the argument was refined. From de Laurot you went to the new theoreticians, the people concerned with film structure, like P. Adams Sitney. I had many arguments with Jonas about that. In the sense that there’s a fallacy involved. The whole implication of the Bazinian thing is that cinema renews itself over time. It doesn’t need formal renewal. It’s self-renewing, because life changes, time changes. People talk about new forms, but it’s new forms of relation to the content, the visual world which constantly changes, it’s evanescent, it’s impermanent, it’s vanishing. I thought that the American avant-garde became frozen in the sense of the purely visual. I think its future would have been much more interesting if it had concentrated on the documentary aspect, finding new forms for documentary. I don’t thin it ever could ceompete with narrative…The avant-garde has to understand that there were new mythologies created in narrative cinema”

“I think that pretentious gloss Jonas put on the wholse tnertprise at Film Culture ina strange way legitimized my writing in a way that a less pretentious format wouldn’t have. Because there was so much pretentious writing, forentsic writing, so much bullshit: academic and revolutionary, avant-garde crap, that all these poisonous academic people were expose to the writing of mind whoe wouldn’t have been otherwise. And that was the big think, that Pauline really won in terms of the mainstream. Her argument was embraced by so many people, she became so famous, so popular and everthing . It was something that everybody sensed: “You’re taking the fun out of the movies. You’re taking them too seriously. I mean w like them, but we don’t want to think aobu them” (Sarris in Gunning interview 1992: 78-79)

“I wasn’t typically New York. I was sort of reacting against it. And I got a lot of mileage at the Voice by puncturing humanistic critics, humanistic platitutdes. People were outraged…But I didn’t set out to be provactative. It’s just that I am genuinely centrist, genuinely provical, sentimental, romantic. I’m nto abrasive; I don’t want to blow everthing up. I just want to get into all these nice places” (Sarris to Gunning 1992: 80)

--FILM DIARIES--

The film diary as praxis“Women’s diary literature and autobiography, recently unearths and reevaluated as literature, finds an uncanny likeness in Jonas Mekas’s collected film diaries…The rise of the American avant-garde diary film coincided with this reevaluation, and it is possible to place the discoveries of one next to the achievement of the other to some avail” (Keller 1992: 83); ‘Dairies are a retrospective compilation of accumulated footage, linked by commentary, narration, or intertitle’

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**“But that the modern diary is not inevitably so solipsistic is proven by the women’s diary writing in the seventies, where introspection and self-awareness were understood as individual participation in a collective historical recovery. The politics of the diary were consequently heavily invested by women, eventually to the point where its open-ended, nonhierarchical, impermanent form could be proposed as intrinsically feminist, defense against its completed, teleological ordered, permanent and hence masculinist sibling, the autobiography proper” (James 1992: 150)

The diary film was a means “of mobilizing a subjectivity, otherwise stranded between the impersonal rationality of structural film, on the one hand, and on the other, the preoccupation of the field of subjectivity by people of color, women, and gays” (James 1992: 151)

** “Since leaving Lithuania he had kept a written journal; much of his poetry is in a diaristic, documentary mode; and he had already appropriated the genre as a metaphor for what was for many years his most visible intervention in cinema, the weekly Village Voice column “movie Journal”…which had been proceeded for a short time in 1955 by his “film Diary” in the Intro Bulletin. “Move Journal” was not reviewing in the conventional sense (which he always bitterly disparaged) but a polemical and impassioned record of his personal musings and activities around the independent cinema, including accounts of his own filmmaking and promotional work for the avant-garde. For almost twenty years (1958-1976), the movie journal about film and the one in film were pursued side by side, and if the values expressed in the former are more completely manifest in the latter than in any other films, the discoveries he made in his own filming informed the criteria expressed in the writing” [Footnote: “Mekas has claimed that his written and his film diaries are “almost identical”; “I only changed my tools” (MacDonald 1984) (James 1992: 152)

“While specific sub- or parageneric groupings allow for taxonomy and genealogy, each person’s diary is virtually sui generis; we will agree that “a diary is what a person writes when he says, ‘I am writing my diary’” (Fothergill 1974, 3). “Writing my diary” is, however, more specific as a mode of literary production, implying---though not requiring--single authorship; serial, spontaneous composition of some regularity; an identity, not only of author, narrator and protagonist, but also of reader, that at least makes possible a privileged veridicality in the relationship between text and history; and at least an initial existence outside the commodity relations of most other forms of writing. The respective material properties of writing and film differently inflect the scene and possibilities of composition in the two mediums, allowing the film diary new functions, a different relation to time, and different relation to subjectivity” (James 1992: 152-153) [Film criticism’s specific function, it’s ‘different relation to time, and to subjectivity’]

‘For the written diary, events and their recording are typically separate, but in film they coincide’; In the traditional diary, “(t)he only present it can record is that of the omment of composition and reflexive commentary on writing…Image and audio recording, by contrast, only capture evetns as they happen”

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‘Mekas maintained that there were certain film he did not cover, not because he did not like them, but because others like Sarris gave them suffiecent attention’

“(T)he complex, ambivalent nature of [Mekas’s] critical stance and the continuity between his criticism and his filmmaking endeavors” (Pruitt 53)

According to Pruitt, realism was “leading criterion” for the criticism of Mekas’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s’; Move away from Realism: Film Culture’s first lead article “Towards a Theory of Dynamic Realism” (Edouard de Laurot); “His guiding assumption was that “dynamic realism” was not a mere slave to actuality, but rather actively engaged social causes” (Pruitt 1992: 52); ‘The operative word in virtually all Mekas’s editorials and critical surveys of the late fifties is that slippery one: “realism”’; to a certain extent “recapitulated the point of view of Bazin”; ‘his linking of Rosselini, Renoir, Hitchcock, and Hawks into one grand tradition from which he watned new filmmakers to take their cues’; Mekas 1950s criticism was a ‘critical appraisal of realism’; As Pruitt points out, Mekas’s ‘critical appraisal’ of American experimental film did not begina later in his critical career; Pruitt charts the “story of Mekas’s “conversion”’ in order to ‘reveal’ the “complex, ambivalent nature of his critical stance and the continuity between his criticism and his filmmaking endeavors” (Pruitt 52); his essay as a “Saint-Augustine-before-the-conversion piece”; his ‘loyalty to the realist tradition’ would filter though in his column for the village voice, says Pruitt; Mekas would come to be “almost entirely identified with the avant-garde” (Pruitt 60); Film Culture would transition from being a magazine to being more ‘print-oriented’

‘Left wing aesthetics’; “How did theoretical background of a Marxist quality matter or even enter into such discussions?” (Buhle 272); Marxism as giving us ‘insight’ into the

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complexity of social relations; Marx and Engels ‘guidelines for aesthetic considerations’; ‘Communist efforts to judge artists of any kind along political lines’;

Practical criticism; ‘praxis, as tending toward revolutionary change’

“Politics is a practice which transforms its raw material (given social relations) into a given product (new social relations) by the systematic use of the given means of production (the class struggle). In the case of a Marxist party, this practice is based on a theory: ‘it is not the spontaneous but organized on the basis of the scientific theory of historical materialism’ (Althusser from ‘On Dialectical Materialism’ in Fargier 1977: 26)

‘The cinema’s role in class struggle’

Criticism as ‘an action of the proletariat on the political scene’ (but also an action of the bourgeoisie---see Barthes)

What is ‘left-wing’ or ‘oppositional’ criticism? Does it depend on the specificity of the film being analyzed? (A reading of a left-wing film; a radical reading of a commercial film, and so on)

Criticism as ‘product’ and ‘work’ “It is in the interests of the bourgeoisie to conceal the work involved in producing anything, including cinematic products; they like to keep the origin of surplus value a secret. The situation with the cinema is just the same as any other product: the bourgeoisie attempt to cover the races of exploitation of labour by positing an abstract equality between consumers (exploited and exploiters) in consuming the product, and between different members of the audience (exploiters and exploited) in the consuming the work of art” (Leblanc 1977: 16-17)

‘Is there a way to find common ground with working class and its allies: the intellectuals’

Leftist humanists, social realism

The radical praxis-oriented position of the post-1968 critics

The alternative reading

‘The oppositional film critic’; what is ‘practical criticism’? OR criticism in practice

The working critics: the ‘serious film magazine’ versus ‘journalistic practices’Otis Ferguson?

Said's definition incorporates the activist, praxis-oriented stance of post-1968 critics with the self-reflexivity of more contemporary schools: “Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism (not as a modification but as an emphatic) it would be oppositional. If criticism is reducible neither to a doctrine nor to a political position on a particular question, and if it is to be in the world and self-aware simultaneously, then its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method. In its suspicion of totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impatience with guilds, special interests, imperialized freedoms, and orthodox habits of mind, criticism is most itself and, if the paradox can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the

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moment it starts turning into organized dogma. "Ironic “is not a bad word to use along with "oppositional."” Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic'

The late 1960s early 1970s as a serious time for film criticism; a time of serious political and aesthetic debate concerning film culture; a revolution in thinking about film criticism as practice: ‘The question of cinematic culture’ was being reevaluated (Ellis) “This included the attempt within the British Film Institute Education Department (of which the Society of Education in Film and Television was then an autonomous part) to launch a serious debate about film culture. This led to a direct confrontation with the BFI Governors, who saw the department’s role as one of the servicing the existing needs of teachers rather than trying to develop film theory as the basis for furthering film education” (Ellis); (to see more on this see Screen vol. 12 no 3)

All of this was a result of a number of events taking place during this time:1. The influence of Structural-Semiotics on British intellectual thinking (Barthes S/Z, Levi-Strauss, Althusser--For Marx and Reading Capital); a ‘rethinking’ of Marxist ideology; Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (a ‘rethinking of auteurism in light of structuralist and semiological theories of the production of meaning); This ‘project’ was also occuring in France at the same time2. Movie (‘championed auteur theory) ‘ceased production’; Cinema and Afterimage were introduced3. A ‘critique of established critical approaches was taking place’ (criticism, contenents analysis) and concepts (realism, auteurism) [Realism ‘as the dominant aesthetic practice of the bourgeois cinema’] 4. The nature or specificity of cinema was also under evaluation (‘technological determinations’)5. The development of a ‘theory and articulation of cinema/ideology/politics’6. A reexamination of 1920s Russian cinema as example of revolutionary cinema7. An examination of cinematic practices (France, Britain, American)---canonization

“One may well ask whether oppositional criticism is at all possible in a society that generally ignores intellectual impulses from its academic institutions, that appears to have an endless tolerance for cultural critique and a predilection for government by consensus. How then can a critical practice be "something more than liking or disliking some intellectual orthodoxy now holding sway over a department of literature"?5 Ideally, it should project a consciousness of the issues that currently divide the human race and threaten its survival; that is, criticism that claims to be anti-establishment cannot afford to ignore the sociopolitical foundations of the arms race, racial injustice, poverty, or the destruction of the environment. It should demonstrate that discourse based on the vocabulary of "timeless values" is in fact provincial rather than universal and-intentionally or not-ultimately imperialistic.5' The foundation of such a methodology cannot be simply political opinion but sound historical analysis, which can indeed be effective against entrenched misinformation and bias…Moreover, we should continue to study how our discipline has reacted and continues to react to social and political change. Such an analysis would, under the best of circumstances, bring us face to face with ourselves-for to be true to its premises, oppositional criticism ought to be more than an intellectual pursuit; it should determine one's stance toward professionalism. The most compelling definition of it that I have heard consists of two words spoken by Hortense Spillers at a Society for Critical Exchange panel at Indiana University in 1983. In response to the

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somewhat embarrassed question of what sort of oppositional stance against the academic establishment a white, male, tenured professor,I nfected with privilege, might adopt, she said: "Marginalize yourself!" What this signifies in a particular context is a matter of individual interpretationand a lesson from the Nazi period-individual responsibility” (Schmidt 1987: 304-305)

Oppositional Criticism as a term coined by Edward Said? (The World, the Text, and the Critic)

What is? Left-ist, anti-fascist criticism?

Criticism's oppositional ' can stance' can make the film take on a different meaning and function

Question: Was criticism being screened during the red scare in order to affirm national policy and ideology?

Criticism as a form of dissent (hold or express opinions that are at variance with those previously, commonly, or officially expressed )

The act of oppositional reading allowed for a certain 'freedom' of 'thought beyond state control'

'Politicizing a literary text'

Subtext of the films as political, in need of exegesis---when was it done? (ideological criticism???)

The journalistic traditions recourse to a sort of 'humanistic idealism' as a way of skirting claims of its political intentions; "pure" "non-ideological research"

"Scholars could thereby justify their continuing productivity by claiming to occupy an ideology-free, morally neutral position, which allowed them to uphold the values of the "other German' by shielding the unspoiled, eternal German Geist of the classics from Hilter's Staat" (Schmidt 295)

'The threat or retribution for outspokenness'

'The impact of McCarthyism on academic life' (or criticism)

The role of Brecht in all of this, and his affinity with communism?

“ ‘Ask yourself whether a WORKING MAN or a PEASANT with a serious interest in the cinema could understand everything you write’ (extract from a reader’s letter). As it is the aim of our enterprise [Cinéthique No 5, Sept-Oct 1969] to combat the obscurantism and dogmatism rife in contemporary cinema criticism, we have to nip a reputation for being esoteric in the bud. It is easy to see where the accusation that we are writing for

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an elite comes from: our critics have refused to confront the question inherent in the reader’s letter: what kind of cinema [or criticism, for that matter] can, in the society where we are writing and filming, best serve the interests of the Revolution, and, in the first instance, those of the working class? And inherent in this question is another (which bourgeois criticism leans over backwards to ignore): what form does capitalist exploitation take in the cinema?” (Leblanc 1977: 12) [trans.]; “Putting the question that way obliges one to recognize that a film is a product of work”; This perception is met with resistance: “In the first place people say, a film isn’t a product; it is the ‘creation’ of an ‘author’ who ‘expresses’ his ‘world-view’ in a ‘work of art.’ (a ‘quasi-mystical’ (IDEALIST) relationship ‘between, author film and spectator’ (Auteur Criticism); aesthetics are linked to ‘talent’ or ‘genius’; Like any other cultural product, film is a driven by profit-seeking motives (this cannot be forgotten); the auteur is a part of this; Leblanc reminds us, that even in social realist cinema, which ‘might seem revolutionary to tackle a subject at all, using the same form “used to express the dissent view is just the same as the bourgeois cinema used to present its own view: the same linear presentation of plot, the same dramaturgy; the same use of actors; the same ‘realism’; ‘film itself is a consumer product’; film is illusory; realism in cinema “does not come easily into existence and that existence cannot be realized (by exhibition on the screen) except under certain conditions. If we define these conditions we shall discover what the bourgeoisie does not allow in the cinema, and then we have a blueprint for a revolutionary cinema, for once we know what we are not allowed to do, we can start doing it.” (Leblanc 1977: 14); “And yet the bourgeois method of filming looks so innocent and natural. All you need to produce an ‘impression of reality’ is allow the camera to follow the ideological bias built into its mechanism. But this very impression of reality enables the audience (and of course the ‘creators’ of the film before them) to project their fantasies and desires (sexual, emotional, political, metaphysical, etc.) into the realm of imagination” (15); revolutionary cinema (and revolutionary criticism) ‘breaks down this idealist cinema’; this ‘naturally determined’ cinema is ‘ideologically biased’; a revolutionary cinema is no longer about content (showing what has never been shown)---it must consider form---this is thus what radical criticism must consider as well; Narrative; illusion: “the true interest of the bourgeoisie is that he cinema should make up for what people do not have in life. The pseudo-satisfaction they find there may be sexual, political, emotional or metaphysical, there is something for all the different kids of alienation engendered by capitalism” (15); what are ‘the formal procedures that encourage this ‘natural aesthetic’? (depth of focus, says Leblanc, for one); there is no division between ‘realism’ and the ‘expressionistic’ in terms of aesthetic categorization—they of the same vein (‘third dimension’); cinéma direct is not revolutionary, says Leblanc, as “The very dimensions of the traditional screen are designed to fit the audience’s field of vision, so that they cannot perceive the work that has gone into framing the picture, and have the impression that the world is appearing before their eyes in its natural state…cinema direct augments the impression of reality” (15-16); “…cinéma direct reinforces the cinema’s constitutional idealism. It brings up to date the ‘metaphysical lucubration’s’ of the Andre Bazin school. (The critical edifice of Cahiers du Cinema still rests on his shoulders): the idea that the cinema is a means of discovering the truth about man, of revealing the secrets of his being and the world. It brings back the theology of the third dimension” (Leblanc 1977: 16); ‘There needs to be a new critical understanding of idealist films’; a transcendental reality: ‘By effacing all trace of the work tha tproudced the images and sounds of a film, its makers are able to reproduce a reality extrinsic to (transcending) those images and sounds.’

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REVOLUTIONARY CINEMA: “These films do not offer the audience any pseudo-satisfactions; instead they take the entirely new step of inviting them to stand on the same footing as the makers of the film and take a conscious part in the work that produced (and through them, continues to produce) the images and sounds. In these films, images and sounds at last no longer deny the process by which they came to be imprinted on the film stock. The work embodied in the film becomes scientific in the measure to e which it puts on the view the ideologies struggling to penetrate the signs (bodies, faces) and abstract them from the economy of the film. This break is materialism. ON of its effects is to permit anew critical understanding of idealist films” (Le Blanc 1977: 16)

“In capitalist society, a film is first and foremost a commodity (either popular—normal cinema-chains, or select—art houses), a commodity manufactured in a form and according to an ideology dictated by the ruling class. When the ruling class attempts to sell such a product to the people they exploit, the latter can and ought to refuse to buy it. The first step is understanding how the bourgeoisie abstracts the film/commodity from its conditions of production: they promote it as ‘entertainment’ (low-brow films) or ‘culture’ (high-brow films). Their purpose in making a film, they would like us to believe, is not to realize profits (by the exploitation of technicians) form a capital investment, and later re-invest part of them in more films; it’s humanitarian: making people laugh, thrilling them, promoting culture, etc.” (Leblanc 1977: 17)

“Our work takes the form of a magazine. We should now examine its conditions of production; (see page 19-20 for elaboration); “The text of the magazine often needs to be supplemented by the spoken word---explained. Direct contact with the interested public at the place where a film is shown (in film clubs, outside cinemas, demonstrations of other kinds) is irreplaceable. That is why we sell in the street: we reach the readers in person” (Leblanc 1977: 20); “The people we want to reach should be able to see the films which we think effect the ‘break’ and contain the potential for bringing about a total reassessment of the cinema. They are not distributed by the traditional commercial circuits. We distribute them, and will do so everywhere we can”; “a revolutionary magazine”; “We can see the limitations of these films, and consequently want to make more. How we manage to finance them, the films themselves will reveal, among other facets about their existence. We are trying, and will keep on trying, to get the money from the inside the system by exploiting its contradictions”

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1. SCREEN READER 1 (1977): CINEMA/IDEOLOGY/POLITICS. ED. J. ELLIS Collection of texts from Screen vol. 12-13 (1971-1972); a decisive point in the history of the journal; a changing of the guard (‘inaugurated under the editorship of Sam Rohdie); “Before the Spring of 1971, Screen’s approach to the problems of screen education had been pragmatic, undertaking the ‘practical criticism’ of films and of British cinema’ (Ellis); A rejection of practical criticism for “the ‘development and criticism of theoretical

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ideas’”; Screen’s new aim was “to establish a theoretical foundation for the development of film study” (Rohdie in Ellis); a science of criticism was developed;

2. WHAT IS OPPOSITIONAL CRITICISM? (1987) H. SCHMIDT: need to do a footnote referencing inspiration

3. Edward Said: The World, the Text, and the Critic

Is Red Letters a journal?????

4. Leblanc “Direction” [Cinéthique No 5, Sept-Oct 1969] in SCREEN READER

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