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Introduction

An Invention without a Future

The cinema is an invention without a future.

Attributed to LOUIS LUMIÈRE, 1895

In twenty-five years there will be very few scoffers at the movies; in fifty years the most cultivated men will be reading movie literature; in a hundred years such men as von Stroheim and Murnau will be spoken of as reverently as Mozart or Dickens are today, and The Last Laugh will be as enduring a work of Art as Vanity Fair.

JAMES AGEE, “The Moving Picture,” Bulletin of the Phillips Exeter Academy, 1926

Until such time as there is a past of some sort . . . a past which has been examined, has been subjected to a critical, a theoretical analysis, there can be no future. . . . This body of material, whatever it is, then imposes upon us the responsibility of inventing it.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON, “The Invention without a Future,” 1979

In the past seventy-five years we have seen the end of Hollywood’s classic studio system, the rise and decline of network television, the development of tent-pole exhibitions and huge marketing campaigns, the emergence of digital cinema, and a variety of ups and downs in the world of independent and international art films. As the millennium arrived, the U.S. film industry found new ways of controlling production and exhibition, digital technology altered the look and even the physical basis of cinema, most people watched movies at home, and the Internet was on the verge of supplanting all delivery systems for words, sound, and images. Film study in the academy had grown significantly, but universities were replacing aesthetics with sociology or anthropology and had become preoccupied with “new media.” The deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in 2007 seemed to put a full stop to what had been a period of intense cinephilia, and there was widespread discussion of “postcinema” or the death of cinema, as if feature-length movies were going the way of God and the novel (whose obituaries were premature).

The titles of several recent essay collections—David Denby’s Do the Movies Have a Future?, J. Hoberman’s Film after Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?, Dave Kehr’s When Movies Mattered, and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia—are symptomatic of the times. Also symptomatic was the 2013 symposium sponsored by the Slough Foundation entitled “The End of Cinema and the Future of Cinema Studies.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of the featured speakers, offered a sort of counterlecture entitled “The Future of Cinema and the End of Cinema Studies.” I’m in sympathy with him: cinema isn’t ending, but academic specialists sometimes appear to be trying to kill off both it and themselves.

In recognition of such events, this book, which is preoccupied at various points with themes of death, takes its title from a remark supposedly made by Louis Lumière in reference to the motion pictures he and his brother exhibited in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. Many cinephiles, among them Jean-Luc Godard, have attributed the statement to Lumière, but there’s no evidence he actually said it. The attribution nevertheless persists, linking cinema from its beginnings with death (for commentary on the phenomenon, see Cahill, 19). And yet the statement has a proleptic and ambiguous quality: it suggests that a work in progress was already accomplished, and its definition of cinema is unclear. Does it refer to the cinematograph, which indeed had a relatively short life-span, or to moving images in general? If the latter, history has proved its author laughably wrong. By 1926, thirty-one years after the first Lumière films, motion-picture technology and its various uses had developed to such an extent that a movie-mad, sixteen-year-old James Agee, quoted in the second epigraph above, could rhapsodize in his prep-school magazine about the glorious future of a new art form. A year afterward, silent films began to give way to talkies. Agee’s prediction came true, but the cinema he described was nearing its death; it survives only as a “legacy” form and an important part of artistic history, worthy of preservation and occasional imitation.

The third epigraph, from a 1979 Whitney Museum lecture by Hollis Frampton first published in a 2004 issue of October, has the benefit of a broader historical perspective. The topic is early cinema, but Frampton spends much of his time speculating on the future of the medium, which was confronting the rise of videotape and computers. Frampton argues that the invention of cinema needs to be seen in the context of an ongoing process of industrial revolution, and that cinema’s traditions and monuments are constantly evolving and being reshaped, not only by individual talent but also by changes in technology. The cinema persists, he suggests, but not always in its original form.

At the time of Frampton’s lecture, the silver nitrate used for early photographic prints was in short supply, and “what was once seen as a copious popular art” had become “paradoxically fragile, rare and bounded in time” (72). Scarcity enabled certain movies to return to what Walter Benjamin had termed the ritual basis of older arts, especially in museum retrospectives of rare films, which, Frampton observes, acquired their aura because “film and its allied arts of illusion are at once limitlessly plentiful and painfully fugitive” (72). A certain kind of movie was in fact dead or dying, but in his lecture Frampton confesses that he’s puzzled by the so-called Lumière statement, for which he offers two possible explanations, neither having to do with the end of cinema. The first he dubs the “Person from Porlock” explanation, which takes its name from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s story about the composition of the fragmentary “Kubla Kahn.” Coleridge had been inspired by a drug-induced dream, but when he began writing the poem a man from the nearby town of Porlock knocked at his door and caused him to forget how the dream ended. The cinema, Frampton proposes, might be regarded as an incomplete dream vision (perhaps not unlike Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu, named for Kubla Kahn’s pleasure palace) that has yet to realize its full potential. His second possible explanation, which doesn’t contradict the first, is quoted in the epigraph above: the cinema didn’t have a future in Lumière’s day because it didn’t yet have a past. Whatever the cinema is, and whenever it began, it can be “invented” only by its ongoing history—or historie(s), as Godard might say.

One of Frampton’s most admired films, the thirty-eight-minute Nostalgia (1971), can be related to some aspects of this argument. The film is structured by Frampton’s recollections of a group of still photographs he made before turning to cinema, plus one found photograph. We hear what seems to be his voice (actually the voice of Michael Snow reading Frampton’s words) commenting on the history of the photographs, which an offscreen hand holds up one by one and then drops onto the hot element of an electric stove. As each photograph incinerates, it leaves behind a unique pattern of carbon residue, a fragile ash that looks as if it would dissolve at the touch of a breath. Meanwhile, the offscreen voice grows increasingly out of synch with the images and we begin hearing descriptions of pictures that haven’t yet appeared.

Nostalgia can be viewed as an experiment involving personal memory, real duration, and cinematic time, but it’s also a film about perishability and remediation. Unattractive as this last word might be, it’s the best way I know to describe such things as a live symphony hall concert broadcast on the radio, a novel transformed into an audio book, a classic-era movie shown on television, and so forth. (For a broad discussion of remediation in today’s world, see Grusin and Bolter.) Frampton’s still photographs are fragile mementos preserved in a motion picture, but if he kept the negatives the photographs could be reproduced; if he didn’t, we could attempt to restore them by making still photographs from individual frames of the film—a process at one remove from the source and inferior in resolution. Hence the film shows the destruction of photographs, but it also partly saves them. A further irony is that with the passage of time Nostalgia, too, has been “saved” by remediation. Good 16mm celluloid prints of the film are somewhat rare, and the most convenient ways to view it today are on the Internet or on a DVD produced by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986. (A similar irony can be found in the 2013 Blu-ray release of Bill Morrison’s “Decasia” [2002], an avant-garde film composed of decayed footage from old movies.)

Frampton is correct that the history of cinema, understood as the history of moving images, transcends a particular technology (an argument similar to the one made by D. N. Rodowick in The Virtual Life of Film). There’s no way of saying when this history began: some trace it as far back as the twenty-six-thousand-year-old “animated” cave paintings in Altimira, Spain, and others say cinema’s oldest ancestor is the camera obscura, which was known to the ancient Chinese and Greeks as a means of studying light and was used in fifteenth-century Europe as an instrument for tracing images in perspective. It nevertheless seems safe to argue that the modern cinema’s so-called pre- and posthistory extends at least from the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century to the digital revolution of the present.

The motion pictures of the Lumières and their contemporaries were the most spectacular invention of what is sometimes called the second industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. This was the beginning of “modern times,” characterized by the advent of the electric light, the typewriter, the linotype, the transoceanic cable, the telephone, the phonograph, and so forth. The same period was the beginning of large-scale advertising and leisure activities that would ultimately constitute the modern consumer society and a new kind of mass culture. Whoever the masses were, the products and modes of production associated with them seemed American rather than European in origin, and the emergence of a critical discourse about them had something to do with the intertwined forces of industrialization and capitalism. These forces are still with us; in a sense, they have a need for cinema, which repeatedly adapts to new technical forms.

All this will seem cold comfort to those who love projected film on big screens. As I write, theatrical exhibition throughout the world is undergoing profound change, the ultimate consequences of which are unclear. The major Hollywood distributors have banded together and signed the Digital Cinema Initiatives, which, by the time this book appears, will make film prints unavailable for commercial theaters; projection will instead take the form of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP). Meanwhile, video notepads and computers are streaming motion pictures on demand, and people are watching movies on cell phones or the backs of airline seats.

The digital era, like modernity in general, is both catastrophe and progress. As a university teacher of film history who spent many years threading 16mm prints into projectors and who once thought that showing film on video in the classroom was a sin, I’ve become acutely aware that projected DVD and Blu-ray not only make instruction easier but in most cases give superior resolution and life to old movies. I also have the good fortune to live in Bloomington, Indiana, where the state-of-the-art Indiana University Cinema and its remarkable director-programmer, Jon Vickers, enable me to compare a wide range of motion picture technologies projected according to the highest standards (most commercial movie theaters project badly, no matter whether you are watching 35mm or digital). In that facility I’ve seen fifty-year-old home movies in 8mm, silent masterpieces with a live orchestra, rare 16mm prints, archival 35mm prints, wide-screen spectaculars, low-tech digital features by visiting directors Pedro Costa and Joe Swanberg, and 2k and 4k digital “restorations.” My experience convinces me that cinema today has a variety of technical formats offering rich artistic possibilities, none of which is inherently superior to the others. It also demonstrates that remediation isn’t evil. On a visit to Bloomington in 2012, Werner Herzog, who had several of his features converted to DCPs by Indiana University Cinema, announced with evident pleasure that the new process had made Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) look to him as if it had been made anew. It was no longer quite like a film of the 1970s; it lacked the grain and haptic markings of a celluloid print, but in some ways it was more vivid and exciting than the original.

Unfortunately, few of us have access to the kind of theater I’ve just described, and we’re entering a brave new world in which all movies, even when shot on film, will be viewed in the form of digital files. This change is more radical than any other in motion-picture history—quite different from the shift from silent pictures to sound, because in that case the photographic basis of the medium remained the same. Somebody once asked Mel Brooks what the most difficult aspect of making a film was, and Brooks said it was putting in all the little sprocket holes. The digital eliminates that problem; it’s a more convenient technology, and convenience trumps quality in the mass marketplace. The question then becomes whether celluloid (or Mylar) will survive at all; and if so, whether film projectors will have even as much future as vinyl record players and typewriters. I have no confident answer, but I recommend David Bordwell’s Pandora’s Digital Box (2012), available for digital download at www.davidbordwell.net, which offers a discussion of the changes we’re experiencing. As Bordwell points out, the DCP initiative consolidates the power of major distributors and threatens the survival of small theaters. It results in fired projectionists and junked projection equipment, and it will inevitably affect scholarship and formal analysis, making it nearly impossible, for example, to count frames on a film strip or choose an individual frame for reproduction.

For me, the biggest problem isn’t the loss of the film strip but the degree to which predigital cinema can be saved by remediation—which, since the 1950s, has been the chief way of making older films widely available. I can recall the period of Cinemascope and 3-D, when theaters were trying to compete with television; as a kid in those days, I saw many good films in the new formats, but I was even more fascinated by old movies from the 1930s and ‘40s that were becoming available at home on the late show. A good deal of my cinema education came from product that was dumped onto TV and interspersed with commercials. Today we have Turner Classic Movies on cable TV and DVD or Blu-ray offerings that greatly enlarge the common viewer’s knowledge of film history. But it remains unclear whether the business model for such things will survive in a world of streaming. As Dave Kehr noted in his New York Times video review column of December 2, 2012, “The major studios . . . have cut their full-scale releases of library titles to a minimum,” and “Any time a pre-2000 title makes it out of the vault is a cause for rejoicing.”

It is difficult to be positive about the changing mediascape without also being concerned about it. A wider range of movies is shown theatrically in the United States than ever before, but most independent and foreign films are seen in only a few big-city venues. Low-end digital technology has been used to superb effect by Pedro Costa, David Lynch, and Jean-Luc Godard, but the new cameras and digital editing equipment have also spawned hoards of lazily shot, slapped-together movies. Cinephilia is as alive as ever, but it no longer produces the kind of impassioned intellectual debate that went on in big-circulation newspapers and little magazines during the 1960s and ‘70s. Old films originally thought to have a short commercial lifespan are still reasonably valuable commodities; intelligent critical commentary on movies can be found in several places on the Internet; “orphan” movies and nontheatrical 16mm pictures are being digitally preserved; and, thanks to remediation, today’s students of cinema have much greater access to cinema. Nevertheless, more films have been lost than preserved, more films continue to be lost, and the potential death of the flexible film strip is leading to what Manohla Dargis has called “deep ontological and phenomenological shifts that are transforming a medium” (New York Times, September 9, 2012).

To my mind, just how transformative these shifts will turn out to be remains to be seen. Several critics and theorists, among them J. Hoberman, have argued that the death of traditional photography marks the end of André Bazin’s ideas about cinematic realism. The digital, this argument maintains, so greatly increases the tendency toward animation and so vividly creates virtual reality that it destroys our faith in the possibility of an indexical relationship between image and world and our faith in the difference between truth and fiction. But digital special effects aren’t always as invisible as they try to be, and truth and fiction have long been intertwined. From the time of Georges Méliès the cinema has been associated with optical illusions. Citizen Kane (one of Bazin’s touchstones of realism) is so filled with optical printing, lens distortions, black-art settings, painted backgrounds, and other visual tricks that it looks as if it aspired to the condition of an animated cartoon. A more neorealist film such as Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), now available as a Criterion DVD, gains charm and emotional power from nonprofessionals in minor roles and subtly romantic location photography by Erwin Hiller of the bombed-out town center of Canterbury, which the Nazis had nearly destroyed in 1942; it’s fascinating as documentary record, but it also contains visual tricks that most viewers probably haven’t noticed, including art director Alfred Junge’s remarkably convincing re-creation of the interiors of Canterbury Cathedral.

Photography is neither inherently deceitful nor inherently indexical, and the same can be said of digital video. One of the infinitely precious attributes of photography is its ability to preserve traces of history or moments of long-ago time: the early motion pictures of Queen Victoria in a parade and of ordinary workers exiting the Lumière factory transcend art and are arguably more significant than art. But there’s no reason why some of the amateur videos on YouTube won’t someday have a roughly similar effect. Motion pictures that tell stories have always depended upon a dialectical tension between visual realism and visual magic. Digital technology has vastly increased animation in big-budget Hollywood movies, but it has also made it easier for contemporary directors to create documentaries and neo-neorealist cinema.

The loss of the film strip nevertheless raises a problem for preservationists, because DVDs and Blu-ray Discs are said to be more unstable than film. If we want to save the past, the preferred way of storing it is on celluloid. (Ironically, there is now also a need to preserve VHS, because many movies in library archives can’t be seen in other forms.) For this and other reasons, I doubt that the old media will go away completely; indeed, many young filmmakers today are experimenting with 8mm and 16mm. We should keep in mind Raymond Williams’s argument that any given historical moment is compounded of dominant, residual, and emergent forms of culture—an argument that applies not only to technology but also to ideas. Around 1960, for example, the idea of the postmodern (with which the following book is sometimes concerned) was emergent in Western industrial society; it soon became a dominant idea in the world of art and architecture, but now it is becoming a residual or period term like any other. Modernism (equally important to this book), which is associated with formally innovative, relatively difficult art in conflicted dialogue with industrial modernity, has a much longer residual life-span. With some qualification, we can speak of post–World-War II neorealism and the 1960s European art cinema of directors like Bergman, Antonioni, and Resnais as a recrudescence of the modernist impulse often associated with earlier directors like Eisenstein and Welles. As I try to suggest toward the end of this volume, a modernist spirit also animates what is nowadays called “world cinema,” a phenomenon connecting Asian, Latin American, African, and Iranian films by such directors as Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abderrahmane Sissako, Abbas Kiarostami, and the late Raúl Ruiz. No matter what technology these artists use—usually it’s digital—they’ve established continuities with the past and made this a remarkable time for cinema.

In contrast, most of the films I discuss in this book belong to a dead cinema—dead not only because it was produced by an old technology but also because the institutional, economic, and cultural conditions that determined it are things of the past. But as long as we can still see older films in a good form of remediation, the past isn’t dead. Classic Hollywood films may not have the same significance or meanings for us as when they were originally shown (no matter how glamorized and studio-bound they are, they give us intriguing documentary evidence of a different America). Nevertheless, they’re important achievements in the history of a still-living art and are worthy of ongoing criticism and theory.

Somewhat like film, my career as a writer about cinema is entering a late, perhaps last, phase, and the essays assembled here are chosen to reflect my chief interests over the span of that career. Most of them were published originally in academic journals or anthologies, but I have also written several new pieces especially for this volume. All the previously published essays have been rewritten, some in minor ways and others substantially, to correct errors, take note of subsequent research, and reflect changes in my thinking. I’ve avoided reprinting material from the books I’ve authored, although the piece on Cabin in the Sky, to which I’ve added a few things, closely resembles what became a chapter in The Films of Vincente Minnelli (1993), and occasional paragraphs or pages elsewhere are derived from arguments in my books on other film topics.

The collection has three parts. The first consists of essays on general or theoretical issues and the second of case studies. An overriding concern with value judgment should be apparent throughout, and certain topics recur: authorship; adaptation; acting; modernism and postmodernism; observations on the relation between style and politics; and commentary on such figures as Hitchcock, Hawks, Minnelli, Welles, Huston, Kubrick, and other figures associated with classic Hollywood. The third and final section, consisting of mostly new material, is a defense of criticism and film reviewing in an era when print journalism is facing a death similar to film, and when the academy seems to be losing interest in questions of aesthetics, taste, or evaluation. It contains essays on four American journalistic critics who quickened my early interest in film and expanded my knowledge of film history. Appended to these is a sample of my work as a critic/reviewer between 2009 and 2011, when I wrote an annual “Films of the Year” roundup in Film Quarterly. During those years I was particularly interested in the aforementioned “world cinema” and in what some people have called “slow cinema,” which I would argue accounts for some of the most significant motion pictures in the past decade.

It remains for me to say a bit about my intellectual history and how it determines my approach to cinema. I’ve always been passionately interested in movies but never studied them in school. I majored in English and French at Louisiana State University, which was still under the influence of the New Criticism, and in English at the University of Wisconsin, where the department was organized by a “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” version of literary history. Much of my writing about film tends to be inflected by literary training and an early interest in literary modernism. Equally important, my university years coincided with the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. I became thoroughly politicized and was faced with the problem of how to reconcile my aestheticism with my politics. As a result, there’s a sometimes subdued, sometimes explicit political quality to most of my writing, expressed in two ways: an overarching concern with the relationship between politics and culture, and a belief that formal analysis isn’t enough; to slightly revise a remark by Lionel Trilling, I’m always asking what the text and perhaps the maker of the text wants, whether or not it is aware of it.

While in graduate school I was drawn to Madison’s vibrant, mostly off-campus or ad hoc film culture, and from the moment I began a professional career I felt an urge to write about movies rather than literature. Discussion of cinema was spreading among public intellectuals and academics, and the cinema itself seemed to be undergoing a kind of revolution. I had already read Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema and everything I could find by Raymond Durgnat and Robin Wood. And, like every academic cinephile, I was affected by waves of ideas about film from a variety of theoretical or politically activist sources, including feminism, structuralism, semiotics, and everything associated with European High Theory (which, despite its radicalism, drew mostly from a French tradition critical and philosophical aesthetics). But I didn’t jump from one paradigm to another. The ideas that shape my work tend to coexist, sometimes conflicting, sometimes interacting, overlaying one another like a palimpsest. The latest of these ideas grew out of academic cultural studies, which freed me from the sometimes puritanical doctrines of High Theory and fed my interest in the relations between “high,” “popular,” and “mass” art (terms I regard as discursive constructions rather than hard-and-fast categories). Even so, I’ve resisted what I see as a tendency in cultural studies toward populism, presentism, and relativism. Most of my work has been about classic Hollywood, and I’ve been more interested in films and critics than in audiences. I also have an ambivalent attitude toward the movie industry, a feeling of both fascination and anxiety.

Visual images have long been capable of provoking fascination and anxiety because of their power to shape beliefs and mass opinion: the Old Testament God forbade graven images, Protestant iconoclasts denounced the elaborate paintings and statuary in Catholic churches, and Marx and Engels compared bourgeois ideology to an upside-down picture at the back of a camera obscura. In the twentieth century, the “magic” of movies created both a sense of wonder and concomitant fears that dark forces are influencing the ignorant, complacent masses. Literacy rates actually rose during the first great age of cinema, at the moment when reformers and censors were condemning the medium’s evils; but another concern emerged because moving imagery was increasingly controlled by big business and government. Among intellectuals, this issue became especially evident during the U.S. economic boom of the 1950s, when I was still a child and when television began to displace the already powerful forces of classic Hollywood. Much of what was produced in those years by movies, radio, television, and Henry Luce’s slick magazines filled with photography was created by a factory system whose product was designed to appeal to as many social classes or class fractions as possible. Capital intensive and organized by complex divisions of labor, it was rationalized as entertainment and/or instruction rather than as art; by its nature, it tended to devalue originality and individuality, and it was usually supervised by committees and boards of executives.

The high modernists and the avant-garde constituted an aesthetic modernity in conflict with these developments. Of course, high modernism and the avant-garde sometimes blended with what Miriam Hansen has called “vernacular modernism”: see Busby Berkeley’s “Lullaby of Broadway” number in Gold Diggers of 1935, which is a breathtaking fusion of modern art, show-biz glamour, and pure cinema. There was nevertheless an inevitable tension between the movie industry and individual modern artists, nicely expressed by Orson Welles: “I love the movies, but don’t get me wrong. I hate Hollywood.”

I believe that the United States has by far the richest film history in the world, but from the end of World War II until the 1970s the most significant artistic movements in cinema—Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, the German New Cinema, the Brazilian cinema of poverty, the Los Angeles school of black filmmakers, and the various “third world” cinemas—were developed more or less in reaction against dominant forms of U.S. mass culture. Despite the familiar argument that postmodernism has ended the tension between high and low or resistant pop, this tension remains. Andy Warhol may have become a fashion celebrity, but his films were never commercial rivals of Hollywood, and his art shared with the old avant-garde a use of mechanical reproduction to shock and unsettle the values of established museums. Late-twentieth-century novelists such as Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Roberto Bolaño will never be adapted into movies, at least not in ways that closely resemble their fiction.

For these reasons, there’s a paradox in my writing, which originates in a longstanding and deep love of both classic Hollywood and high modernism. Exciting movies continue to appear today, sometimes even as blockbusters, but in my view and that of many others, the most consistently good mainstream cinematic entertainment produced in the United States is found in long-form or series cable TV. The contemporary marketplace is fragmented, under the control of corporations yet more niche oriented, less “massified” than it once was. Hollywood’s money-making hits have bloated budgets, saturation booking, and inescapable ad campaigns aimed at a young, mostly male demographic; and Hollywood’s Academy Award contenders, aimed at an older audience and scheduled for December release, are seldom of great consequence. Nevertheless, in the year and a half in which I was completing this book, I saw a number of fine English-language pictures, among them Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, Richard Linklater’s Bernie and Before Midnight, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, and Robert Zemeckis’s Flight. The pictures I saw from other parts of the world were even better: Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Kid with a Bike, Kléber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. I would conclude from this exactly what could have been said at several points in the history of the art form: A certain kind of cinema is dead. Long live cinema.