76 - The World Through a Lens

The World Through a Lens
By James M. Wall

FILM CRITICISM is beginning to win its long struggle for acceptability in academia. Writing about works of art that make millions of dollars through ticket sales has given many film critics a sense of inferiority, but this is giving way now, thanks in large measure to the growth of an approach to film criticism that relates to the medium in auteur terms.

The word is French, and literally means "author," but writers in the French publication, Cahier du Cinema, began using the term in the late 1950's for film directors, whom they described as the true creative talent behind films. Andrew Sarris popularized the term in American criticism, and Pauline Kael has done what she could to discredit it. Use of the term persists, giving the critic a convenient handle for examining films at greater depth than we had originally thought possible.

Evaluating a film in terms of its creator, however, is not as easy as the original Cahier critics would have had us believe. Now that we have lived with the term for over a decade, it is established enough for us to place qualifications upon it.

I

A film by Ingmar Bergman, such as his most recent and brilliant Cries and Whispers, can be considered purely in auteur terms. Bergman writes and directs, and he has developed a corpus that make it possible to watch for themes, touches, and style that recur within his work. He is, by all standards, a true auteur of his films. Francois Truffaut, whose work as a critic in 1959 did so much to popularize the term, is another genuine auteur. His most recent film Two English Girls, must be seen in the context of his eleven feature and two short films. Thematically he has ranged from murder mystery to light comedy, but his vision that life is joyful but tragic remains consistent.

But many films simply will not yield to a simple auteur analysis. This is especially true of those pictures that are adapted from the stage, or of those dominated by screen personalities such as Barbara Streisand, John Wayne, Steve McQueen, or Robert Redford. In

James M. Wall has recently been appointed editor of The Christian Century. Prior to assuming his new post, he served as editor of the Christian Advocate, official magazine for Methodist church leaders. His undergraduate and theological degrees are from Emory University, and he holds an M.A. in religion and personality from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Church and Cinema (1971) and coordinator for Film Information, a National Council of Churches publication of film reviews.

77 - The World Through a Lens

such cases, the auteur of the film must be considered as a mix. Consider Director Sam Peckinpah's most recent venture into philosophical violence, The Getaway. Steve McQueen stars, and as in all his recent pictures, maintains considerable creative control over the finished product. For this reason it is generally believed McQueen did some re-editing of the Peckinpah work, making the film more a star vehicle for McQueen than a true effort by the director. Certainly The Getaway, with its confused purpose and weak character development of McQueen and his sour wife (Ali McGraw), doesn't compare in brilliance and sensitivity to Peckinpah's earlier Strawdogs, which stars Dustin Hoffman but which clearly serves to project the Peckinpah vision rather than the Hoffman image. Both The Getaway and Strawdogs (as well as such earlier Peckinpah works as The Wild Bunch, Major Dundee, and Ride The High Country) reflect a preoccupation with violence. While the released version of The Getaway seems merely to utilize violence to complete the plot, violence in Strawdogs is artistically utilized to project a vision.

II

This distinction between the ingredients of a film used to tell a story or utilized to project a vision serves as one way to identify the auteur at work. It is by no means the only way, and it certainly won't work in every case, but as a bandy reference it is a beginning. A film like Jeremiah Johnson needs to be seen as the work of an auteur director, Sidney Pollack, whose previous work includes an ambitious examination of life on a dance floor (They Shoot Horses Don't They?), and a light look at racial harmony in the west (Scalphunters). His latest film stars Robert Redford and could at first glance appear to be another star vehicle for Redford, whose handsome face and quiet manner have made him an important marquee name. But Jeremiah Johnson is Pollack's film, a majestic rendering of an era, the early west, before the white man applied modernity to the untamed wilderness. In They Shoot Horses, Pollack used the metaphor of a '30's dance floor to project the vision of the closed world, with the dancers locked by fate within the confines of that gaudy space. Jeremiah Johnson reverses the metaphor, taking the viewer into the vastness of Utah's mountains, placing a lonely "mountain man" in the context of living off the land and surviving the hostility of the land and the natives. Pollack uses film to create a sense of man isolated in space. Frequent shots of Jeremiah dwarfed by mountains or wide valleys communicate visually that survival is difficult under the best conditions, almost impossible under the worst.

78 - The World Through a Lens

What unfolds in Pollack's film is not a story about a mountain man who receives an Indian wife as a gift and incurs the wrath of another tribe for violating their burial ground, but a vision of what it means to be human, utilizing the "aboutness" of the plot to convey this vision. This point, so quickly accepted in novels and poetry, has to be reemphasized when discussing film because as a commercial and entertaining medium, film is often dismissed by the more sophisticated among us. As with poetry, film as art should not "mean" but "be."

Cinematically, Jeremiah Johnson visually reveals few facts about the hero's background. His military pants suggests the traditional heritage of western heroes, but nothing further is "said" about him. That he is a novice in the wild is quickly indicated by early faltering efforts at fishing, cooking, and hunting. These scenes have a documentary flavor, deliberately so of course, because Pollack doesn't want to simply tell the viewer that his hero is inexperienced in the wilderness; be wants us to feel that inexperience. We also feel the cold, the fear, and even some of the lighter moments, as when an older mountain man brings a bear into the cabin for skinning.

The mystical-or at least the mysterious unknown-is introduced into the viewer's awareness when Johnson leads a troop of soldiers through an Indian burial ground. It is obvious that Johnson regrets this violation and attributes the murder of his family to it. However, this "fact" is more than logically shared with the viewer. An eerie mood is created as the troop rides past dead bodies; and when Johnson returns to the same space, he suddenly senses that some horror awaits him. This is conveyed by music, lighting, camera angles, and editing. As a point of plot development, it is important. But more importantly are the layers of mood and texture the sequence reveals. At the very least Pollack is sharing his vision that there are dimensions to our existence that do not hold still for logical treatment.

III

In contrast to Jeremiah Johnson's cinematic style, Elaine May's second directorial effort, The Heartbreak Kid, projects a vision through acting and dialogue. The script is by Neil Simon, but the darker vision of cruelty belongs to May, conveyed through the performances of Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, and Jeannie Berlin (Elaine's own daughter). The director's background in extemporaneous cabaret theater is evident in the series of small vignettes through which she tells the tale of a bridegroom who picks up his second wife on his first honeymoon. Grodin is unspeakably insensitive to anyone but himself, the absolute egomaniac taking

79 - The World Through a Lens

youthful hedonism to its logical conclusion. It is his logic that his own happiness has to be perfect and when he is happy, ergo, those around him must become happy. When his bride proves to be a boor, be grabs for Cybill Shepherd, an icy Minnesota beauty who equals him in self-centeredness. A painful scene occurs in a restaurant when Grodin tells his bride he is leaving her for Cybill. The material is the second step beyond the dark humor Elaine and Mike Nichols do so well in their skits. Grodin wants her to be "happy," which is to say he wants things to conclude on a pleasant note as he merrily drops her for another. Jeannie Berlin is superb in her moments of discovering her world fall apart. The scene is directed and acted as a set piece on a stage; that is, its power belongs to the stage medium, rather than to film. This does not detract from its merit; it is merely to properly identify it for critical purposes.

With only two films to her credit Elaine May is not yet available for extensive auteur probing, and when this does come, it will have to be in terms of her direction of performers rather than in her skills with film. Authorship of The Heartbreak Kid must also be shared with the performers and with Neil Simon who wrote the original script. This again is not to the film's discredit, but is a way of suggesting that analysis of the picture must take into consideration much more than the director's efforts.

IV

In considering auteurs, the critic must also be free to accept the director's work in the terms in which it is submitted. Thus, a highly entertaining commercial success like The Poseidon Adventure deserves praise for what it is, and not for what it is not. It is a formula film that rises above its own limitations, entertaining us with stock characters in Grand Hotel fashion, with a story of escape with an easily predictable outcome. It works, however, because the characters are etched a bit more finely than usual in such fare, and because Producer Irwin Allen has the ability to present films that stay within reality but stretch imagination to its limits. His background in television indicates that be had a flair for entertainment which respects the audience's desire to enjoy, enjoy. In the case of Poseidon, Allen, the producer, is the nearest thing to an auteur in the film because it is his "vision" that prevails.

Obviously, with Poseidon as an example, the film's vision does not have to be profound for it to be probed. What is important in film criticism is that we identify the vision in cinematic terms.