Edward Copeland's Tangents

"What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? For I am not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how. What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary — a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary — for forms. The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.…
Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. This seems even harder to do than formal analysis."

"Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience.…
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art — and, by analogy, our own experience — more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."

(1) “Why does Movie X work for me, but not for Critic A or others?” Because something “working” is a two-way street between the text and each member of the audience. We all have movies we love that we know we shouldn’t, and we all have movies we greatly admire but dislike. There’s no accounting for taste.
(2) “How can a director…have either fans who think he walks on water or people such as myself who mock him mercilessly but seemingly few who look at him dispassionately from the middle ground?” In the case of Lars von Trier, it’s because he’s an agitator; his work is designed to provoke extreme reactions, and he wants you to either love or hate his movies — and I think he’d actually prefer you hate his work. (I’m actually on the dispassionate middle ground with him.) And remember that critics have agendas, too; some are simply provocateurs. More generally, directors/authors make connections with some people and not with others.
(3) “Does the magic reside in the movies or within ourselves?” Yes! The best critics don’t merely provide summary judgment; they show you how something worked or didn’t work for them. Essentially, they’re articulating and supporting a deeply personal reaction.

"I, too, like Last Year at Marienbad. I like Delphine Seyrig. The formal garden. The chorus line of cypresses. It had the order and mystery of a de Chirico painting. I've often wondered why Pauline Kael and Manny Farber were so tough on it. But I saw it in the '70s, when it was an artifact of another civilization and not an expression of contemporary weltanschauung.

"When Pauline begged to be disinvited to the "Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" and Manny described the star of La Notte as 'Monica Unvital,' they were fighting a stealth battle against the New York intellectuals who assumed that film art came from Europe. (Manny and Pauline both grew up in the Bay Area and were somewhat suspicious of East Coast intellectuals. They saw art in American movies. My hunch is part of their irritation at the more Symbolist of the French and Italian new wave was because the intellectual quarterlies didn't respect American movies. Interestingly, Susan Sontag — who was raised in North Hollywood! — was one of those NY intellectuals they railed against.)

"As to the basic question: When we go to films we project ourselves and values on the screen. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

"Malick represents pure visual storytelling, which I find exciting as long as there are no lava lamps or dinosaurs."

"I was once in a play called Slow Love. It was written by an Australian man who had epilepsy. He envisioned his work to come in a series of staged images that would be framed by lights up — some kind of abstract action — blackout. This would repeat maybe a hundred times to make up the content of the play. Of the many referenced works in the play was Last Year at Marienbad, which was quoted throughout. I think in the play it was meant to mirror what the writer was feeling, about the echoing of brief but substantial, memorable images. I suppose that film, therefore, does much of what every other art form does — it can be both abstract and entertaining. I think ultimately there is some kind of deeper meaning people take from even the most abstract works. It probably isn't a shared experience, the way it would be with a more accessible, universal story. In the end, I think it comes down to you, on that day, as to whether the film will piss you off or pull you in. I was far more moved and intrigued by what Von Trier did in Melancholia that what Malick did in Tree of Life, perhaps because Tree of Life felt like a singular experience of a certain kind of family — whereas Melancholia (Take Shelter, too) was closer to what I think life is really like in 2011.

But I guess I'd have to say that, ultimately, the magic resides within us — and depending on how much energy we have that particular day to struggle with a meaningless film. This year seemed to offer up many fairly abstract, challenging stories that sort of meant what you wanted them to mean. But too many of those and you tune them out, reaching instead for the ones that tell stories that aren't open to interpretation. Marienbad stands out because it was one of a kind. It's hard to find anything that is one of a kind now.

The great thing about it all, I guess, is that there is room for both — frustratingly opaque art and pleasingly transparent entertainment."

"At the risk of polarizing some people here, I'm one of those biased moviegoers who thinks movies always need to be entertaining and — for the most part — have a plot, in order for me to be invested. At times I'm willing to bend the rules, of course; whenever kids at my college campus tell me they can't finish 2001 because it has no story, I always try to tell them that the film is meant to be an experience, full of ideas, and that a plot doesn't emerge until two-thirds into the movie…but at least it's telling a story. On second thought, I guess Killer of Sheep didn't really have a story at all, but you know what? Burnett still drew me into that world. I got a feel for that environment. So, I love that movie too.

Again, though, being — for the most part — a proponent of movies with stories, I do have a bit of problem with movies that are all about exercises in style. This is why I have a more difficult time appreciating Godard than some of my peers in the blogosphere, or why I can't watch Soderbergh's Ocean remakes. The actors are clearly having fun on the screen, but I'm not having any fun watching them.

Again, though, there's always that Killer of Sheep-style of filmmaking: slow, slow case studies of slow characters. Uncle Boonmee and Gus Van Sant's Last Days both come to mind, and I love those movies, too. But those are the films in which all entertainment value derives from exploring those slow, introverted characters through repeated viewings. I had an even easier time appreciating Melancholia and Tree of Life because they have more of a narrative to them, though they're clearly also exercises in style.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: if I were a director, I'd want to be a storyteller, first and foremost. Have a good style, sure, but good substance first. Some of you guys are bringing up Howard Hawks, whom I do like, but the fact that most of his movies *are* mostly just full of talky sequences of camaraderie and bonding without much plot to them is probably the reason why you don't hear me raving about his work as much as others. Maybe that's why I enjoy John Ford's movies a little more.

"The great revelation for me had been the cinema: I felt particularly marked by the films of Godard and Bresson. I wrote more about cinema than about literature, not because I loved movies more than novels but because I loved more new movies than new novels. Of course, I took the supremacy of the greatest literature for granted. (And assumed my readers did, too.) But it was clear to me that the film-makers I admired were, quite simply, better and more original artists than nearly all of the most acclaimed novelists; that, indeed, no other art was being so widely practiced at such a high level. One of my happiest achievements in the years that I was doing the writing collected in Against Interpretation is that no day passed without my seeing at least one, sometimes two or three, movies. Most of them were 'old.' My gluttonous absorption in cinema history only reinforced my gratitude for certain new films which (along with my roll-call of favorites from the silent era and the 1930s) I saw again and again, so exalting did they seem to me in their freedom and inventiveness of narrative method, their sensuality and gravity and beauty."

"So I can’t help viewing the writing collected in Against Interpretation with a certain irony. Still, I urge the reader not to lose sight of — it may take some effort of imagination — the larger context of admirations in which these essays were written. To call for an “erotics of art” did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to, then, as 'popular' culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its burden of seriousness, of depth. I thought I’d seen through certain kinds of facile moralism, and was denouncing them in the name of a more alert, less complacent seriousness. What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) is that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, 'unrealistic,' to most people; and when allowed, as an arbitrary decision of temperament, probably unhealthy, too."

"The joke is that no one wanted to buy Marienbad! The producer decided that the film would never be shown, that it insulted and mocked the public, that it meant nothing. I was in a particularly awkward position, since I was “the bad Alain Robbe-Grillet” who had corrupted “the good Alain Resnais.” So for a year the film lay fallow. By chance, the Venice Film Festival saved it, and the absurd, idiotic film became a roaring success overnight."

"Inevitably, the authors were pressed to disclose the 'meaning' of the film. Among the possible solutions suggested have been the Orpheus-Eurydice myth; a visualization of the process of psychoanalysis (Giorgio Albertazzi as doctor pushing patient Delphine Seyrig to go deeper); Albertazzi as Death; or the whole as a kind of stream of consciousness of a single mind, presumably the woman’s, encompassing truth, lies, and visualized what-ifs, all taking place within a few seconds of 'real time’…(As if to illustrate the general ambiguity, at one point in the film a prominent statuary group elicits three different, equally convincing, interpretations.) To this day, the authors have studiously avoided endorsing any single interpretation."

"Be prepared for an experience such as you've never had from watching a film when you sit down to look at Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, a truly extraordinary French film, which opened at the Carnegie Hall Cinema last night. It may grip you with a strange enchantment, it may twist your wits into a snarl, it may leave your mind and senses toddling vaguely in the regions in between. But this we can reasonably promise: when you stagger away from it, you will feel you have delighted in (or suffered) a unique and intense experience. And that, it appears, is precisely what M. Resnais means you to feel — the extreme and abnormal stimulation of a complete cinematic experience. For this is no usual movie drama that he is dishing up from a script of radical construction by Alain Robbe-Grillet. This is no lucid exposition of human behavior in terms of conventional dramatic situation, motivation and plot. This is an eye-opening example of the use of the cinema device — the machinery of visual image-making, conjoined with musical sounds and the contrapuntal assistance of vocalized images and ideas — to excite the imagination as it might be excited by a lyrical poem, or, better, by the tonal colorations and rhythms of a fine symphony."

"The mood of the protagonists, if we can call them that, is lassitude; there is almost no conflict, only a bit of struggling — perhaps squirming is more accurate — amid the unvoiced acceptance of defeat.…It's easy enough to say ‘They are alienated; therefore, they exist,’ but unless we know what they are alienated from, their alienation is meaningless — an empty pose. And that is just what alienation is in these films — an empty pose; the figures are cardboard intellectuals — the middle-class view of sterile artists. Steiner's party from La Dolce Vita is still going on in La Notte, just as the gathering of bored aristocrats in La Dolce Vita is still going on in Marienbad."

"Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, Spira’s last companion, found the lost work hidden in the back of a basement and gave it to Alain Robbe-Grillet, who had written Marienbad’s original screenplay. A few weeks before he died [in 2008], Robbe-Grillet passed it on to Olivier Corpet’s Institut Mémoires de l’édition Contemporaine, with the rest of his archives, and Corpet, in turn, gave it to me to broadcast on the website of my review, La Règle du Jeu."

“Look at Marienbad honestly. What is it? It’s just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork. There is nothing clever about confusion.”

"Yes, it's easy to smile at Alain Resnais' 1961 film, which inspired so much satire and yet made such a lasting impression. Incredible to think that students actually did stand in the rain to be baffled by it, and then to argue for hours about its meaning — even though the director claimed it had none. I hadn't seen Marienbad in years, and when I saw the new digitized video disc edition in a video store, I reached out automatically: I wanted to see it again, to see if it was silly or profound, and perhaps even to recapture an earlier self — a 19-year-old who hoped Truth could be found in Art.
"Viewing the film again, I expected to have a cerebral experience, to see a film more fun to talk about than to watch. What I was not prepared for was the voluptuous quality of Marienbad, its command of tone and mood, its hypnotic way of drawing us into its puzzle, its austere visual beauty. Yes, it involves a story that remains a mystery, even to the characters themselves. But one would not want to know the answer to this mystery. Storybooks with happy endings are for children. Adults know that stories keep on unfolding, repeating, turning back on themselves, on and on until that end that no story can evade.
…
"'I'll explain it all for you,' promised Gunther Marx, a professor of German at the U. of I. We were sitting over coffee in the student union, late on that rainy night in Urbana. (He would die young; his son Frederick would be one of the makers of Hoop Dreams.) 'It is a working out of the anthropological archetypes of Claude Levi-Strauss. You have the lover, the loved one and the authority figure. The movie proposes that the lovers had an affair, that they didn't, that they met before, that they didn't, that the authority figure knew it, that he didn't, that he killed her, that he didn't. Any questions?'"

“The chief difference between Marienbad in 1962 and Marienbad in 2008 may be how many people are willing to tolerate that distress and walk into the theater in the first place. To revisit Marienbad today is to glimpse a vanished moment when American audiences drank in European films not because they were universal or ‘relatable,’ but for their otherness, their impenetrability, their defiant contrast to the simplistic and elephantine Technicolor epics that much of Hollywood was then embracing.
By March 1962, when Last Year at Marienbad opened, the pump had been primed; New Yorkers were ready, even eager to wrestle with pictures from abroad that tested their ability to ‘read’ a film. In the preceding 12 months moviegoers had had their first encounters with L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni’s story of a young woman’s disappearance that seemingly abandoned its own interest in her halfway through; with La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s more user-friendly take on sexually charged European ennui; and with Ingmar Bergman’s stern, uningratiating spiritual meditation Through a Glass Darkly.”

The people who walked out (literally) of INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch’s Marienbad-influenced 2006 film, saying 'What was that all about?' will find similar though more elegantly concise cause for discomfort here.