Kristin here–

The Festival de Cannes has been around since 1946, so a sixtieth birthday party this year might seem a bit belated. The festival got off to a rocky start, however, and lack of funds forced its cancellation in 1948 and 1950.

There have been many forms of celebration, but one that is likely to endure is Kieron Corless and Chris Darke’s new history, Cannes: Inside the World’s Premier Film Festival. We picked up a copy in Auckland. The book, published by Faber and Faber this year, is not currently available in the U.S. but is on offer from Amazon’s U.K. branch.

As the authors themselves note, “This is not one of those anecdotal and slightly self-indulgent Cannes memoirs, of which there are several available in English and French” (p. 3). Instead, they avoid the gossipy approach, trying “to redress the balance and probe beneath the surface by telling another story—a counter-history of Cannes, if you will” (p. 2). This is not to say that Cannes is a dry, pedantic look at the event. I found it an absorbing read during the long plane trip from Auckland to Los Angeles. Who wouldn’t enjoy a book whose first chapter begins, “It is tempting to imagine the first Cannes film festival as a Jacques Tati film”? And I wouldn’t call it a counter-history. It’s a solid historical study, well-researched and just the sort of study that any major festival warrants.

The approach is not chronological, though the authors segment the festival’s history into three phases. The first, stretching from 1946 to early 1968, saw Cannes as a platform for international politics, beginning with the Cold War and stretching into the “start of sixties libertarianism.” This period saw the rise of the great auteurs, such as Bergman, Fellini, and Buñuel, whose international reputations owed much to their exposure at the festival.

The second phase begins with the 1968 festival, where the political upheaval in France was enough to close the event down in midstream. In the years that followed, the festival’s organizers strove to become more inclusive, opening up to Third World films and inaugurating the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs to provide a venue for younger, more innovative filmmakers.

Corless and Darke see this phase as ending in 1983, when the opening of the new Palais des Festivals. That event ushered in an era of greater commercialism, more courting of the media, and the introduction of a film market alongside the festival. This third era continues today with the Hollywood studios’ increasing use of Cannes as an opportunity to launch blockbusters shortly before their summer releases.

Although the overall trajectory of the book follows these three phases, the chapters are organized primarily around thematic topics. For example, “Sacred Monsters” examines the increasingly provocative nature of some of the films shown at Cannes in the late 1950s and especially the 1960s. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Rivette’s La Religieuse created scandals, and the authors use these to show how Catholic censorship affected the festival and how the titillation of more daring subject matter became a means of promoting European films in the U.S.

There is no shortage of anecdotes and discussion of the splashy, glamorous aspects of Cannes. Brigitte Bardot’s 1953 appearance, clad in a bikini and frolicking on the beach, is assessed partly in terms of its impact on her (and Roger Vadim’s) career. But the authors also show how in general starlets manipulated their interactions with more established stars (Kirk Douglas in Bardot’s case) to boost their own publicity value.

One major strand running through the book is the political pressures that frequently underlie the programming at Cannes. A festival launched in the immediate post-World War II years inevitably became a platform where the various countries jockeying for power could display themselves internationally by means of their films. The inclusion of Soviet Russian and later Eastern European movies became a delicate balancing act. The long love-hate relationship between France and the U.S. is traced. Determined to preserve its own culture in the face of competition from the dominant Hollywood product, the French also loved American films and desired the glamour they brought to the festival.

The authors also stress how Cannes’s organizers had to be forced to recognize filmmaking outside the U.S. and Europe by the traumatic shutdown of the 1968 festival. In 1969, Glauber Rocha won the Best Director prize for Antonio das Mortes, Fernando Solanas showed Hour of the Furnaces in the Critics Week program, and Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev—not the official Soviet entry—won the International Critics prize. In 1972, the system of allowing countries to choose their own films for competition was abolished in favor of selection by festival programmers.

A parallel strand considers how conservative Cannes has been through much of its history, both artistically and politically. In early decades, competition programming was done by allotting countries, primarily the U.S. and European nations, a certain number of slots. The countries then chose which titles they would send to fill those slots. Hollywood may have gained a surprisingly prominent place among Cannes’s screenings in recent years, but its films were a major part of the program in the early era as well. Multiple awards were given out in 1946, and honorees included Disney’s The Music Box and Wilder’s Lost Weekend. Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion, of all things, won the Palme d’Or in 1957.

Another sign of conservatism was the fact that major auteurs like Fellini and Bergman did not figure significantly at Cannes until they had already established their reputations. Only in the 1970s, with the post-war generation of filmmakers dying or retiring did the emphasis shift in part to discovering and launching young, unknown directors. Even then, though the book does not mention it, Cannes programmers largely overlooked the emerging 1990s East Asian cinema with China’s Fifth Generation, the New Taiwanese Cinema, and such current Cannes darlings as Wong Kar Wai.

Corless and Darke cannot cover every major event in a complicated history, but they are adept at choosing their case studies to provide a broad overview of the most important trends. Their concluding chapter deals with the immense growth in the number of film festivals and the consequent development of an alternative distribution market apart from theatres. They zero in on Abbas Kiarostami, arguably one of the greatest filmmakers working today but also the perfect exemplar of the “festival film-maker” (pp. 216-227).

The authors have an immense respect for the artistic value of Kiarostami’s work, but they also are clear-eyed in tracing the director’s dependence on Cannes and other festivals. Festivals have allowed him to keep directing in a country where his films have had little local acceptance, either from the government or from audiences. This section also offers an excellent summary of how the vibrant new Iranian filmmaking was brought to the world’s attention through Cannes and how other filmmakers, like Samira Makhmalbaf, have followed in Kiarostami’s wake.

This final chapter goes on to a case study that deals with how dependent on recent American independent cinema Cannes has become. Naturally the authors single out the Weinstein brothers and Miramax, which had their first big hit when sex, lies, and videotape won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1989. As the authors say, “‘Miramax’ also denotes a particular savvy commercial exploitation of independent or art cinema, whose cultural legitimacy and stamp of quality is conferred to a large extent by marketing exploitation of awards scooped at Cannes, which became hugely important to the Weinsteins” (p. 228).

The authors are film journalists and critics of a particularly serious bent. Corless is the deputy editor of Sight & Sound and writes for a variety of English magazines. Darke writes for such outlets as Film Comment, Sight & Sound, and Cahiers du cinéma. Given the drift toward pop entertainment coverage evident in those journals in recent years, the pair are to be congratulated on presenting substantive historical material in such a clear and readable fashion.

Apart from researching the written and filmed record on Cannes, the authors conducted interviews with a wide variety of Cannes organizers, attendees, and commentators. These range from Kiarostami to Tony Rayns to Gilles Jacob (general administrator from 1978 and president from 2000) to Rita Tushingham. (Mike Leigh’s comments are particularly trenchant and revealing, as when he describes Arnold Schwartzenegger’s stealing the spotlight by sweeping up the red carpet at the Cannes screening of Naked—and then disappearing through a side door before the film began.)

The only complaints I have about the book are some lapses in proofreading and a paucity of illustrations. Given the complaints about physical appearance of the 1983 Palais des Festival (nicknamed “the bunker”), it would be helpful to have a photo of it. That could easily have replaced the cluster of director portraits that ends the meager picture gallery.

Film festivals have become crucially important to both the art and business of the cinema, so Corless and Darke’s insights into how Cannes operates are most welcome.

Some jottings from DB:

Continuity Boy meets Badgers

Tim Smith, who studies how we perceive film, recently visited our department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His talk was splendid.

Tim studies the ways we scan shots and shift our attention across cuts. His talk was illustrated with film sequences showing little yellow dots swarming around the frame; these indicate the points in the image where his subjects’ glances landed. Tim shows pretty conclusively that there’s a consensus about where viewers look during a shot (faces, movement, the center of the frame) and that classical continuity cuts can push our attention to and fro with remarkable facility. One of the most surprising findings was that viewers are often starting to shift their attention to a new frame area just before the cut comes. Why? Tim has some intriguing suggestions.

Tim also showed some remarkable effects of what I’ve called “intensified continuity,” the fast-cut close-ups that characterize so much current cinema. Because these passages leave no time for visual exploration, viewers seem to revert to a cursory test for the shot’s basic point, usually at the center of the frame. Tim’s examples from Requiem for a Dream were fascinating, showing how real viewers are playing catchup in very fast-cut sequences.

This is rich and promising research, showing once more that Leonardo da Vinci, Eisenstein, and a few others were right to think that many creative choices in the arts can be studied with the tools of science. It also shows that filmmakers, like other artists, are seat-of-the-pants psychologists, achieving complex effects through decisions that “feel right” and that they have no need to explain theoretically. That’s our job.

For Tim’s narrative of his visit, and a lot more about his research program, go here. For something not quite completely different, about eye-tracking, print ads, and crotches, go here.

Six more from RKO

The enterprising folks at Turner Classic Movies have discovered six RKO films that have been missing for many years. It’s a harvest of 1930s titles, promising some intriguing situations (e. g., Ginger Rogers as a telemarketer) and carrying the names of directors like William Wellman, John Cromwell, and Garson Kanin.

A Man to Remember (1938; at the top of this page), Kanin’s first film, is the only one of the batch I’ve seen so far. One of the New York Times‘ ten best films of 1938, it went virtually unseen until a print surfaced at the Netherlands Filmmuseum in 2000. A Man to Remember is a portrait of a small-town doctor who tends to the poor and lets others, chiefly a cadre of corrupt businessmen, take credit for his good works.

It could all be mawkish, but Edward Ellis plays the doctor as a testy guy who levels with his patients and wins the town’s respect through quiet cussedness. The performance echoes Ellis’ crabby but likable inventor in The Thin Man (1934). Dalton Trumbo’s script has an intriguing flashback structure, less bold than in The Power and the Glory (1933) but still ambitious for a B project.

The six RKO discoveries are screening on April 4th as an ensemble, then they’re scattered through the rest of the month. All should be worth checking out. Once more TCM proves itself the film-lover’s channel of first choice.

Bambi or kitty?

Two recent books support the claim that New Hollywood, or New New Hollywood, is at bottom in debt to old Hollywood. (The full case is presented in The Way Hollywood Tells It and Kristin’s Storytelling in the New Hollywood.)

David Mamet’s Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business (Pantheon) is as pungent and eccentric as you’d expect, but also deeply traditional in its storytelling advice. A movie’s characters must have goals, and over the course of three acts they achieve them, or definitively don’t. The Lady Eve is Mamet’s model of this construction. Furthermore, three questions structure every scene: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now? In wide-ranging essays, Mamet pays tribute to the craftsmanship of below-the-line talent and celebrates movies as various as The Diary of Anne Frank and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (whose protagonist is remarkable for “his personification of enigma”).

Mamet adds a fair amount on editing, supplementing the remarks in his Pudovkin-flavored On Directing Film. For instance: “At the end of the take, in a close-up or one-shot, have the speaker look left, right, up, and down. Why? Because you might just find you can get out of the scene if you can have the speaker throw the focus. To what? To an actor or insert to be shot later, or to be found in (stolen from) another scene. It’s free. Shoot it, ’cause you just might need it.”

Mamet bemoans the script reader, whose motto must be Conform or Die. By contrast, Blake Snyder makes conformity seem fun and–well, if not easy, at least attainable. His Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need (Michael Wiese Productions) bulges with formulas, recipes, and gimmicks.

Like Kristin and me, Snyder treats the Second Act as really two sections, broken by a midpoint. But for him three acts are just the beginning. He demands that there be an Opening Image (on script p. 1), Theme Stated (p. 5), Catalyst (p. 12) and on and on until we get the Finale (pp. 85-110) and the Final Image (p. 110). This is the most strictly laid-out cadence I’ve seen; it would be fun to see if actual scripts adhere to it. In addition, you get catchy tips like Save the Cat! (show the protagonist doing something likable early on) and the Pope in the Pool (burying exposition). Snyder includes a list of the most common screenplay errors. An enjoyable read with some hints about construction I hadn’t encountered before.

Speaking of screenplays….

J. J. Murphy is an old friend (we went to grad school with him in 1971) and colleague (he teaches in our department). Renowned as an experimental filmmaker, he has turned his attention to American indie cinema. His new book Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work offers an in-depth analysis of several recent films. J. J. shows how they obey mainstream conventions of construction while still innovating in other ways. I especially like his discussions of Hartley’s Trust, Korine’s Gummo, and Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. I think it’s a book that everyone interested in current American cinema would find stimulating.

You can find out more about it, and read an excerpt, here. Congratulations, J. J.!

Why are Americans polarized between francophobia and francophilia? Some people mock the French for liking Jerry Lewis, when most French people probably don’t even know who he is. Others think that France is the repository of world culture and represents the finest in writing about the arts, even though the Parisian intelligentsia can be pretentious and hermetic.

But we must face facts. When it comes to cinephilia, the French have no equals. They grant film a respect that it wins nowhere else. Spend a year, or even a month, in Paris, and you will feel like a Renaissance prince. This is a city where one lonely screen can run tattered prints of One from the Heart and Hellzapoppin!, once a week, indefinitely.

My first trip was too brief, only a week in 1970, but my second one—four weeks of dissertation research in 1973—left me exhausted. Reading Pariscope on the way in from the airport, I learned about a Tex Avery festival. I checked into my hotel and Métro’d to the theatre, where I and a bunch of moms and kids gazed in rapture upon King-Size Canary. Another time, also coming in from the airport, Kristin and I passed a marquee for King Hu’s Raining in the Mountain. Next stop, Raining in the Mountain. My memories of The Naked Spur, Ministry of Fear, Liebelei, Tati’s Traffic, and Vertov’s Stride Soviet! are inextricable from the Parisian venues in which I saw them.

Sound like a lament for days gone by? Nope. You can find the same variety on offer today. Of course the two monthlies, Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, have to take a lot of credit for this. Add Traffic, Cinéma, and several other ambitious journals, and you get a film culture unrivalled in the world.

Critics from Louis Delluc onward have led thousands of readers toward appreciating the seventh art. Historians like Georges Sadoul, Jean Mitry, Laurent Mannoni, Francis Lacassin, and others have enlightened us for decades. Academic film analysis would not be what it is without Raymond Bellour, Noel Burch, Marie-Claire Ropars, Jacques Aumont, and a host of other scholars. Above all stands André Bazin, the greatest theorist-critic we have had.

And the books! Arts-and-sciences publishing receives government subsidies; the French understand that books contribute to the public good. There are plenty of worse ways to spend tax dollars (e.g., trumped-up military invasions). The French, like the Italians, have created an ardent translation culture too. If you can’t read something in Russian or German, there’s a good chance it’s available in French.

I was reminded of the glories of Gallic film publishing when the mailman tottered to my door this week with twenty-two pounds worth of recent items I’d ordered. I haven’t even read them yet; otherwise, they’d be filed with Book Reports. Instead I want to spend today’s blog celebrating them as fruits of an ambition that has no counterpart in English-language publishing. All are grand and gorgeous and informative to boot.

Daniel Taillé, Léonce Perret Cinématographiste. Association Cinémathèque en Deux-Sèvres, 2006. 2.5 lbs.

A biographical study of a Gaumont director still too little known. Perret was second only to Feuillade at Gaumont, and he performed as a fine comedian as well. His shorts are charming, and his longer works, like L’enfant de Paris (1913), remain remarkable for their complex staging and cutting. After a thriving career in France, Perret came to make films in America, including Twin Pawns (1919), a lively Wilkie Collins adaptation. He returned to France and was directing up to his death in 1935.

Although the text seems a bit cut-and-paste, Taillé has included many lovely posters and letters, along with a detailed filmography, full endnotes, and a vast bibliography. It compares only to that deluxe career survey of the silent films of Raoul Walsh, published by Knopf. . . .Oh, wait, there’s no such book. . . .Think there ever will be?

Il était une fois Walt Disney: Aux sources de l’art des studios Disney. Galéries nationales du Grand Palais, 2006. 4 lbs.

A luscious catalogue of an exposition tracing visual sources of Disney’s animation. Illustrated with sketches, concept paintings, and character designs from the Disney archives, this volume shows how much the cartoon studio owed to painting traditions from the Middle Ages onward. It includes articles on the training schools that shaped the studio’s look, on European sources of Disney’s style and iconography, on architecture, on relations with Dalí, and on appropriations by Pop Artists. There’s also a filmography and a valuable biographical dictionary of studio animators.

Some of the affinities seem far-fetched, but after Neil Gabler’s unadventurous biography, a little stretching is welcome. This exhibition (headed to Montreal next month) answers my hopes for serious treatment of the pictorial ambitions of the world’s most powerful cartoon factory. The catalogue is about to appear in English–from a German publisher.

Jean-Pierre Berthomé and François Thomas. Orson Welles au travail. Cahiers du cinéma, 2006. 4 lbs.

The authors of a lengthy study of Citizen Kane now take us through the production process of each of Welles’ works. They have stuffed their book with script excerpts, storyboards, charts, timelines, and uncommon production stills.

The text, on my cursory sampling, will seem largely familiar to Welles aficionados; the frames from the actual films betray their DVD origins; and I would like to have seen more depth on certain stylistic matters. (The authors’ account of the pre-Kane Hollywood style, for instance, is oversimplified.) Yet the sheer luxury of the presentation overwhelms my reservations. A colossal filmmaker, in several senses, deserves a colossal book like this.

Alain Bergala. Godard au travail: Les années 60. Cahiers du cinéma. 2006. 5 lbs.

In the same series as the Welles volume, even more imposing. If you want to know the shooting schedule for Alphaville or check the retake report for La Chinoise (these are eminently reasonable desires), here is the place to look. Detailed background on the production of every 1960s Godard movie, with many discussions of the creative choices at each stage. Once more, stunningly mounted, with lots of color to show off posters and production stills.

Anybody who thinks that Godard just made it up as he went along will be surprised to find a great degree of detailed planning. (After all, the guy is Swiss.) Yet the scripts leave plenty of room to wiggle. “The first shot of this sequence,” begins one scene of the Contempt screenplay, “is also the last shot of the previous sequence.” Soon we learn that “This sequence will last around 20-30 minutes. It’s difficult to recount what happens exactly and chronologically.”

Emrik Gouneau and Léonard Amara. Encyclopédie du cinéma du Hong Kong. Les Belles Lettres, 2006. 6.5 lbs.

The avoirdupois champ of my batch. The French were early admirers of modern Hong Kong cinema, but their reference works lagged behind those of Italy, Germany, and the US. (Most notable of the last is John Charles’ Hong Kong Filmography, 1977-1997.) More recently the French have weighed in, literally. 2005 gave us Christophe Genet’s Encyclopédie du cinéma d’arts martiaux, a substantial (2 lbs.) list of films and personalities, with plots, credits, and French release dates.

Newer and niftier, the Gouneau/ Amara volume covers much more than martial arts, and so it strikes my tabletop like a Shaolin monk’s fist. There are lovely posters in color and plenty of photos of actors that help you identify recurring bit players. Yet this is more than a pretty coffee-table book. It offers genre analysis, history, critical commentary, biographical entries, surveys of music, comments on television production, and much more. It has abbreviated lists of terms and top box-office titles, as well as a surprisingly detailed chronology.

Above all—and worth the 62-euro price tag in itself—the volume provides a chronological list of all domestically made films released in the colony from 1913 to 2006! Running to over 200 big-format pages, the list enters films by their English titles and it indicates language (Mandarin, Cantonese, or other), release date, director, genre, and major stars. Until the Hong Kong Film Archive completes its vast filmography of local productions, this will remain indispensable for all researchers.

Mme. Edelhaus was my high school French teacher. A stout lady always in a black dress, she looked like the dowager at the piano during the danse macabre of Rules of the Game. She was mysterious. She occasionally let slip what it was like to live under Nazi occupation, telling us how German soldiers seeded parks and playgrounds with explosives before they left Paris. When I asked her what avant-garde meant, she replied that it was the artistic force that led into unknown regions and invited others to follow–pause–“in the unlikely event that they will choose to do so.”

For three years Mme. Edelhaus suffered my execrable pronunciation. When I tried to make light of my bungling, she would ask, “Dah-veed, why must you always play the fool?”

I suppose I’m still at it. But thanks largely to her I’m able to read these books as well as look at them. She opened a path that’s still providing me vistas onto the splendors of cinema.

Road to Morocco.

From DB:

On one shelf, close to my desk, I keep books of essays that have satisfied me across the years. Lined up across about four feet, these remind me of the virtues of critical prose. Shaw, appropriately I suppose, sits on the far left, followed by Dwight Macdonald, Jacques Barzun, Gore Vidal, Robert Hughes, Christopher Hitchens, Frederick Crews, Kenneth Tynan, Susan Sontag, and a few others. Picking up any of these and rereading an essay pushes me to try to write more pungently and think more clearly.

I know nothing about jazz, but decades ago I enjoyed reading Gary Giddins’ Weather Bird column in the Village Voice. Then I picked up his 1992 essay collection, Faces in the Crowd and immediately he won a place on my shelf. His buoyant essays are compulsive reading. His piece on Jack Benny, “This Guy Wouldn’t Give You the Parsley Off His Fish,” kicks off the volume, and I think it’s a masterpiece. After reading it, you want to watch a string of Benny TV shows. It’s followed by another triumph, Giddins’ dynamic case arguing that Irving Berlin more or less invented American entertainment. This brace of pieces is just the start. As you’d expect, Giddins spends time on musical greats, from Billie Holliday to Larry Adler, but he shows a fine range, discussing Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Myrna Loy (in an essay titled “Perfect”), and writers from Faulkner to Elmore Leonard.

In an era when journalistic criticism is identified with either puffery or deflation, Giddins is the master of unabashed, admiring appreciation. His judgments are balanced, but he almost never resorts to the swordthrust beloved by his mentor Macdonald, who wrote some of the funniest and most insulting passages in all of American film criticism. You sense that if Giddins dislikes something, he’d rather not write about it. The French call it “the criticism of enthusiasm.”

When he likes something, he can merge dissective intelligence, subtle distinctions, and unfussy prose as very few writers about the popular arts can. Not for him the turbocharged syntax and hyphenated adjectives of fanboys. One word or phrase does the job. Watch how he brings Jack Benny before us, linking him to a tradition of comic types that is even echoed in the turns of the sentences:

The character he created and developed with inspired tenacity all those years–certainly one of the longest runs ever by an actor in the same role–was that of a mean, vainglorious skinflint; a pompous ass at best, a tiresome bore at near best. To find his equal, you have to leave the realm of monologists and delve into the novel for a recipe that combines Micawber and Scrooge, with perhaps a dash of Lady Catherine De Bourgh and a soupçon of Chichikhov; or better still, a serial character like Sherlock Holmes, who proved so resilient that not even Conan Doyle could knock him off.

Benny as Micawber plus Scrooge: perfect. At near best: perfect. And if you worry that “a soupçon of Chichikhov” teeters on pretentiousness, the “knock him off” at the end makes the sentence snap shut, reassuring you that Giddins writes in that American demotic which is our birthright.

The Benny essay is reprinted, justly, in Giddins’ 2006 collection Natural Selection: On Comedy, Film, Music, and Books. This book is twice as long as Faces in the Crowd, and it’s a feast. We get fine pieces on Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and the Marx Brothers, and sensitive celebrations of Antonioni, Lang, Doris Day (he loves her), and Harold Lloyd, along with in-depth studies of many classic films. “Cowardly Custard,” a sketch of Bob Hope, rises to the level of the Benny apologia. If you don’t rush immediately to see a Hope film after reading it, you’re not the man or woman I think you are. I turned to The Ghost Breakers and was rewarded with the moment when Hope peers around a pillar at Paulette Goddard and asks with a hesitant leer, “Am I protruding?”

Lucky for us that The Perfect Vision, The New York Sun, and other venues have opened their doors to Giddins’ film writing. (For a sample, along with lots of other material, visit his site.) Although he occasionally scolds, it’s the criticism of enthusiasm that reigns. When he started to write about jazz clubs, “I could focus on what I admired–on what I wanted you to admire or at least know it existed.”

In his music criticism and biography (the wonderful Bing Crosby life Pocketful of Dreams), Giddins interweaves technical details, anecdotes, and thoughtful commentary. In writing about films he does much the same, blending observations about form and craft with insinuating evocations of how a movie plays on the screen. Not many film critics today would notice how the first shot of Lloyd’s masterful Girl Shy unobtrusively sets up its climax. He writes of The Letter:

From the opening nighttime pan of a rubber plantation, interrupted by a gunshot and fluttering cockatoo, and finished with an inexorable closing in on Better Davis, who has followed her victim on to the verandah and pumped five more bullets into him, you know you are in the hands of ardent filmmakers and can only hope that they sustain the inspiration for another 90 minutes. They do.

Or this:

Eyes without a Face begins with a lengthy traveling shot, as Alida Valli races through the night with a crumpled corpse in the backseat, enclosed by an endless line of skeletal trees and accompanied by Maurice Jarre’s funhouse score–imagine Philip Glass programming a carousel.

Giddins has an unapologetic respect for African American performers in studio movies. Of Ivie Anderson’s “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm” in A Day at the Races, he notes:

This scene was cut from TV for years and decried as racist by sensitive white liberals. They are free to skip it; the rest of us can head straight for DVD chapter 22 to see Anderson in clover. Racism manifested itself less in Catfish Row stereotypes than in the failure to cast her in other movies.

On Sammy Davis Jr. Giddins mixes sober praise with sorrow:

Davis had once been renowned as a performer of spectacular gifts who could do everything. Sadly, “everything” usually proves to be the most evanescent of talents. His early appearances were virtuoso displays of dancing, singing, and mimicry that defied indifference; he would stop at nothing until he brought the audience into his fold. . . . Davis’ besetting sin was not extravagance, philandering, imbibing, or reckless optimism concerning a president. It was trying to live life as if color did not matter. He was a naïf savant.

For Giddins fans who are cinephiles too, there’s a quiet satisfaction in learning from the autobiographical sketch that launches Natural Selection that he started as a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter. Of course he continues to write about music and literature, and his essay on Classics Illustrated comic books will tingle every baby boomer’s spine. Still, by circling back to movies, Giddins shows himself one of the great contemporary American film critics. In his hands criticism finds its justification as subtle, eloquent admiration.

P. S.
The Good German finally made its way to Madison, and so I’ve posted a quick postscript to my earlier blog on the film’s attempt to recapture 1940s film technique. Nice try, but….