Saturday, July 23, 2011

A plug for good writing on popular films

As a reviewer – and before that, as a reader of literary and film criticism – one thing I’ve learnt is that it’s more challenging to write intelligently about a popular work (whose artistic merits are forever under question, or rarely discussed at all) than to write about a book or film that has already found a place in the canon of Cultural Respectability. You need a highly original mindset to begin with. (There’s bound to be so much existing criticism on the “respectable” works that it’s easy to fall into the trap of subconsciously borrowing ideas from other writers, or simply going with the accepted wisdom.) You also need the courage to disregard the bullying of people who think certain types of films or books can only ever be endorsed as mindless entertainment – that it’s a waste of time to engage deeply with them. ***

This is one reason why I have so much admiration for writers like Danny Peary, whose wonderful Cult Movies books are marked by accessible, open-minded yet always insightful writing on a huge range of films – including popular movies like The Terminator and Where the Boys Are, and “disreputable” underground hits like Cafe Flesh and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And this is also why I encourage you to read Abhimanyu Das's fine weekly columns in The Sunday Guardian. Among other subjects, Das has written about the glory days of Eddie Murphy, an early Kathryn Bigelow film that reveals the "action director as auteur”, the TV series Friday Night Lights, a Sid Vicious biopic, and thoughts on the art-vs-entertainment debate. There’s a consistently interesting sensibility on view here, and I look forward to seeing more film writing – including long-form writing – by him.

--------

*** Consider Pauline Kael berating younger critics like Peter Bogdanovich, V F Perkins and Andrew Sarris in her seminal essay “Circles and Squares”:

If they are men of feeling and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to be a little ashamed of their ‘detailed criticism’ of movies like River of No Return?

Now I love Kael, but such views – and, more generally, her airtight distinctions between “great trash” and “art” – have not dated well, to put it mildly. Though she remains the standard for film criticism today, I think her refusal to acknowledge the deeper resonances of popular cinema slightly undermines her legacy.

12 comments:

  1. Jai, can you include a link to his (Abhimanyu Das's) blog? (if it exists)

    Also, I am still waiting for your review of Delhi Belly...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the big up, Jai!

    @rantings: I do not have a personal blog at the moment.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rantings: no blog, as Abhimanyu says. Also, the Sunday Guardian website doesn't have a proper archiving system yet, which means there's no way to access his pre-June columns unless you know the individual URLs. (The search facility doesn't work with a columnist's name.) Hope they get the site sorted out soon.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks Jai. Also, have been meaning to thank you for linking Trisha Gupta's brilliant review of SKD, though her other reviews have been a tad generic :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Rahul: Trisha's piece in the Express, which I linked to, wasn't a review so much as a discussion built around a specific aspect of SKD. She does weekly reviews for the Sunday Guardian - if you find those generic, I think it may have to do with the space constraints; 300-350 words really isn't adequate space for a good, writerly review. (On the other hand, here is a really long, solid piece on screenplay writing in Hindi cinema, which she did for Caravan.)

    ReplyDelete
  6. The visit was useful. Content was really very informative. From www.rightbooks.in

    ReplyDelete
  7. Is it just me or that you have stopped doing book reviews? Sea of Poppies ? Last Man in Tower two of the hottest books of the year..yet we have not heard from you; You have been doing a lot of film related posts; but as some one who generally does not like reading writing on films and has zero interest/knowledge in polish/french/spanish cinema etc etc i incredibly miss your book posts..please resume soon

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anon: as you can probably tell from the two books I've done recently, my focus has shifted towards film writing (cinema being my first love, etc). But the occasional book reviews are still happening. In fact, I'll have 4-5 book-related posts up in the coming fortnight, because some of the book reviews/essays I've written in the past month are all appearing in print around the same time.

    That said, I'm generally not so interested any more in writing about (or in some cases even reading) the "hottest" books of the year, so don't expect many of those posts!

    ReplyDelete
  9. That was a really "solid" piece by Trisha, as you say. I think she has displayed wonderful journalistic dexterity in cramming so many wonderful ideas in that piece. I think this topic and the depth of her research deserve a book.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hey Jai. Just a bit on the Kael point. She does tend to get a bit carried away with her criticisms in "Circles and Squares", but here, I think her irritation was more with the fact that the auteur theory bestowed a certain refracted royalty even on the lesser works of a (sarris/bogdanovich) favoured filmmaker. Kael was usually pretty good at recognising the worth in films that were merely deemed 'popular' - Blackboard Jungle, The Warriors, early Spielberg - even though, as you pointed out, the 'good trash' argument did tend to confuse things.

    @Abhimanyu: Nice to see someone writing with love about Point Break. Love the film myself. Would take it over Hurt Locker any day.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Kael was usually pretty good at recognising the worth in films that were merely deemed 'popular' - Blackboard Jungle, The Warriors, early Spielberg - even though, as you pointed out, the 'good trash' argument did tend to confuse things.

    Uday: the "good/great trash" argument more than just confused things. As I think we've discussed before, Kael had a huge mental block when it came to attributing artistic merit to popular filmmakers/films - and (much like Satyajit Ray, who could be hugely condescending to old Hollywood films even as he claimed to love so many of them) she never "got" what the young critics of Movie magazine - Sarris, Perkins, etc - were really trying to say. We also know now how wrong she was about the authorship of Citizen Kane. In the disproportionate credit she tried to give to Herman Mankiewicz, I think we can see someone who empathized and sympathized so much with writers that on some level she couldn't deal with the idea of a director as a film's principle creative talent.

    That River of No Return quote I mentioned above really says it all - it's utterly ludicrous to suggest that there are certain films/types of films that simply shouldn't be subject to detailed criticism (which might, of course, include detailed negative criticism). And in fact Kael has said similar things about much more highly regarded works, like Hitchcock's Notorious and the von Sternberg-Dietrich films.

    ReplyDelete
  12. "...it's utterly ludicrous to suggest that there are certain films/types of films that simply shouldn't be subject to detailed criticism"

    It's funny she says that actually, because Kael hardly did any criticism other than the detailed kind. I think her refusal to see the auteur theory as anything other than a whimsically derived formula compromised parts of "Circles and Squares". She makes a couple of valid points - on Huston's exclusion from the higher circles, for example - but you get the feeling she's trying to refute every single choice the auteurist camp has made. I'd love to read the Sarris rejoinder to this that you'd mentioned.

    "Kael had a huge mental block when it came to attributing artistic merit to popular filmmakers/films"

    That might be a bit strong. Kael was actually one of the earliest critics to challenge the mindset of deifying the faux-European "art films" of Hollywood in the '50s. Where she differed from the auterists is that she loved selectively - His Girl Friday yes, Only Angels Have Wings no; Jules and Jim yes, Two English Girls no.

    ReplyDelete