The root cause of the critical condition of English film criticism is the old triple threat. Matthew Arnold outflanked the philistines by selling culture to the agnostic puritans as something next to cleanliness but more deeply interfused that rolls through all things. Since then a high moral purpose has become the homegrown equivalent of the deep symbolical meaning beloved of our Teutonic cousins; and D. H. Lawrence joins the Puritan's Committee of 100, along with John Calvin, John Knox, William Prynne and other founder-members of the Lady Chatterley fan-club. The second stab in-the-back comes from the literature courses at university where 18-year-olds are required to turn out weekly essays in each of which they solemnly "evaluate" Wordsworth, Milton, Webster, etc., and often from the vantage-point of, society hopes, total virginity where sex, violence, death and even barrack-room camaraderie are concerned, discuss whether the "texture" of Fielding, Hardy or Baudelaire "reproduces the authentic density of lived experience". Not surprisingly the victims, who also have exams to worry about, study the critics and skim the texts, which are apt to be confusing. Nor are the disciplines of criticism furthered by the more dogmatic Leav(is)ites who by confusing democratic with demotic imagine that all culture is for all and that you don't need background knowledge to understand Shakespeare, Dante or "Finnegan's Wake". All it needs is the grandiose claim to be "objective" in one's aesthetic responses for a total collapse of criticism into a collection of schools which not only can't communicate, but can't even disagree without jeering.

The last twist of the knife is that as the Anglo-Saxon culture puritan braces himself against the temptation to relax in the opium-dens of light entertainment, he treats all entertainers and artists as putative drug-peddlers whose work has to be carefully scrutinized before it may be allowed to communicate. In fact, the more earnest a critic is, the more incapable he tends to become of seeing a moral or a meaning unless it's so crashingly simple that any artist above the level of hack would have thrown it away before he began. Hence English arty criticism noodles endlessly round foredoomed attempts to equate "good" style with "true" (i.e., good) attitudes to life and bad with bad. And, my word, there's plenty of bad - what that Satan gets up to! he's got that entertainment industry sewn up tight! Who but Screwtape could have inspired the virtuous Anglo-Saxon working man to prefer entertainment to high seriousness, and pushpin to poetry.

THE ABSENT MINDED PROFESSOR

Deplorable as this preference may be, it's hardly as deplorable as the gulf which these cultural assumptions themselves created between the lowbrow public and the university educated art world and artists. It's hardly as deplorable as the assumption that no man of good taste would prefer the joie-de-vivre implicit in B.B's and b & b's to hearkening un: o the Messianic wailing and moaning of T-for-Tiresias S. Eliot, O.M. And it's hardly as deplorable as the solemn charlatanry of the Hoggartites, who purport to survey the mass media and whine for censorship without a good word for Jerry Lewis, Bugs Bunny, "Mad", "Galaxy", Humph, Thelonious Monk, Bootsie and Snudge, singers like Eartha Kitt, Edith Piaf, Cleo Laine, songs; like "September in the Rain" or "Tell Laura I Love Her", etc., and, to put it mildly, etc. In a word the present generation of British left-wing intellectuals have never so much as dreamed of founding their cultural attitudes on left-wing attitudes, but have fallen hook, line and sinker for the petit bourgeois notions picked up in the sixth forms of grammar schools whose main purpose is still to segregate the white collar workers of tomorrow from those rough, swearing working-classes; notions fatally reinforced by thoughtless theories of "objectivity" popular at university, where adolescence inevitably seeks something which will combine the certainties of both science and religion while necessitating no discipline of one's own whims and prejudices.

AND SONS OF FLUBBER

To this tradition the reigning house at Dean St. is heir. That the best of intentions, and a sincere belief that their personal response were the absolute cat's whiskers, go with it, we do not deny, indeed, we are anxious to stress, nor are these attitudes peculiar to "Sight and Sound". Only in the writing of Peter John Dyer did they become so marked as to be unpleasant. Apparently incapable of using critical techniques so as to clarify, deepen, explore a film's meaning, he seemed, and seems, totally unaware that an artist is something more than an examinee being given a credit, a passmark or a whigging. When in one notorious article he applied the terms "exhibitionism", "obsessions", "consulting room horrors", "sexual fatality" to films by Bergman, Chabrol, Truffaut, Bolognini and Visconti, it became apparent that his main concern was to punish an artist for portraying (or having any sympathy for) the sort of weakness which (a) he, P.J.D., felt he was himself far above, and (b) which wasn't freely confessed in Surbitonian chit-chat. Had he said "These films upset me" or "I don't like these films" or "We don't wish to know that" or even "My experience of rape, murder, sexual perversity and consulting-room horrors is so wide that I know these films don't show what really goes on" we could have respected him, but his own delicate prudery consorts strangely with the trenchancy of his vocabulary. Anyway, as Peter John Dyer said of Ingmar Bergman, "As Ernest Bevin said of George Lansbury, "He's been a martyr carting his own faggots around quite long enough. It's time someone obliged with a match?" When a match was applied, in the pages of "Film", Mr. Dyer went up with a whoosh.

THE SAME OLD NEW STAGGERERS

But there is more than one strand of cultural tradition involved in the evolution of the Dean St. clique. Ever since the oft-lamented departure of Gavin Lambert, "Sight and Sound" has been a son of pushmi-pullyou, with the editorial office straining to a sort of middle-of-the-road Lib-Lab culture, and the Red Flaggers tugging it towards notions of commitment in the narrowest and most puerile sense. Between 1955 and 1960 the paper had talked itself into misinterpreting and dismissing English and American films with something of the self-defeating bigotry which had characterized "L'Ecran Francais" in its Stalinist days. There were exceptions, of course: musicals - which can be enjoyed without having to sort out one's ideas (even here it was following a politique des auteurs laid down in the Gavin Lambert days - it missed "Give A Girl A Break" because it was directed by Donen who according to its theories was only Gene Kelly's sidekick). Anything by John Ford, even "Mogambo" with its difficult-to-obtain shots of gorillas was - - - well; one can't say that "The Wings of Eagles" is NOT a glorification of American militarism but then, there is something so healthy about all those open-air Westerns, isn't there? There's no connection, of course, between the individualism, the expansionism, the violence of the old-fashioned, pre-"Broken Arrow" Western and brinkmanship? no connection, in the American mind, between the bugles-and-flag ethos of the U.S. Cavalry and the U.S. Marines? or to come down to more recent times, no significance in the fact that John Ford lent his old Commie-baiting pal John Wayne a hand in cutting "The Alamo", where the Mexicans are undoubtedly the Communists and maybe the massacre is nuclear war? I'm not saying John Ford is a Fascist, I'm not saying he never made "The Grapes of Wrath" (21 years ago), I'm saying he's an American patriot and hardly anti-militarist. So why were S & S so upset over the spate of war films during the '50s? if John Ford can make "They Were Expendable", can't we all? To be "against" war films as such is fatuous unless you are also against (a) fighting Nazism and (b) fighting back in Korea. But the general public has never wanted war films which attributed some courage and dignity to the sacrifices which they made.

The first article I ever cut out for my scrapbook, in 1938, at the tender age of 5, was "Will the Bomber Always Get Through?" By the age of 8 I was sleeping through the Blitz, at the age of 12 the German atrocity stories were in full flood and Vansittart was saying "Geld the lot", at about l3ish I was being V-I'd and V-2'd, at the sophisticated age of 14 I saw the Belson shots in "The True Glory" (shown free and compulsory in schools), and the news of the first atomic bomb gave this avid s-f fm an eerie frisson. At 20 I was bayoneting straw men and enjoying the refined moral influence of the barrackroom (which was hardly coarser than that of at least 3 of the schools I'd been to). So exactly how is the X certificate coarsening my sensibilities?

The truth is that there is no logic at all, either aesthetic or Socialist, in the "Sight and Sound" horror at war films. It's sheer Lansburyism, the pacifistic reflexes of middle-class "refinement", like its perpetual obeisance to censorship. What masquerades as vaguely leftish goodness is really middle-class fear of the brutal and licentious proletariat. Only today there is a still more specific subsection - - - working class youth.

The examples of committed criticism vouchsafed us in S & S (and for that matter "Definition") were depressing in the extreme. Lindsay Anderson sang a revivalist hymn, "Stand up, stand up for Jesus, Ye soldiers of the cross, Lift high his royal banner, It may not suffer loss," and sang it in close harmony with the Sons of the U.S. Cavalry.

One only wishes he hadn't also aspired to be the Sankey and Moody of film criticism, and it's not surprising that he got his ideological wires crossed in every one of his Free Cinema films which has any ideological significance. When at a rally of the Joint Council for Education Through Art a friend of mine rose and suggested that on the evidence of "O Dreamland" Mr. Anderson hated and despised the workers there was a good solid round of applause from the hall - - - in which I didn't join, but which I understood. As for "Every Day Except Christmas", Captain Anderson paints so glowing a picture of the jolly. hardworking British squaddie, always grumbling and rough with his tongue, but loyal at heart, so loyal that as he drives his lorry down the rolling English road he switches on the radio to listen to the Epilogue and God Save the King (or did we have a Queen already?), then, without a doubt, the Conservative government, the capitalist system and Fords of Dagenham, whose contented employees are currently bleeding them to death, have done the proletariat proud. All it needed was the Blessing of the Trucks by Father Karl Malden. Lindsay Anderson has produced at least one classic, "Thursday's Children", his Aldermaston film is deeply moving and we have a high opinion of "This Sporting Life". If the New Left hadn't been so sanctimonious about Free Cinema already we'd write an article in its praise. But while on the subject of Free Cinema, let's face it, "Nice Time" with its distaste for all those nasty X-certificate films was about as left-wing as a pep talk by Lord Hailsham. Even when Free Cinema got down to direct propaganda it could do so only by discreetly twisting social realities. "We Are the Dear Little Lambeth Boys" might have been subtitled "I Was A Teen-Age Little Lord Fauntleroy". At least it has like "Momma Don't Allow" the elementary merit of spoofing the toffs, but even Norman Wisdom films do that, and in any case MDA, while a fair enough picture of the "Fishmonger's Arms" isn't typical of the wider jazz movement, which was pushed just as hard by grammar school boys, as by working class youth, who, on the whole, preferred and still prefer those trashy pops (and don't come the old Acker with us, mate). I quite admit that it was a tour de force to get those earthy workers faces on the screen, more like themselves than they ever had been in those Grierson Instructionals, and that Free Cinema prepared Messrs. Reisz., Richardson et al. for the big break which they seized with both hands and of which they made splendid use. I still don't want to see those Free Cinema films unless I have to, and it's not because they're badly made but because I can see how neatly the directors have squared them with middle-class prejudices.

By and large, committed critics show very little interest in how accurately the films they criticize reflect society. The refer films to their own broad slogans, not to the realities which the films purport to reveal. Lindsay Anderson goes haring away after so idiosyncratic an interpretation of "On the Waterfront" that the next issue of S & S abounded in counter-interpretations (well, three, anyway); and one suspects that Mr. Anderson under the guise of attacking the last reel is really attacking the last reel but one in which Terry alias Elia turns stoolie and squeals to a certain Congressional Committee. His main criticism of the film is that if it had been truly Socialist it would have shown the dockers banding together to right their wrongs. But one of the disturbing features of the New York waterfront racket was the extent to which the men connived or were cowed into conniving with the union's attempt to keep the racketeers in power; in fact (after the film was finished) despite the efforts of an uncorrupt union, and of the government, and of the press, the men voted the corrupt officials back into power, where they remain. The points of detail which outraged Mr. Anderson were quite correct: there was not just one Mr. Big but many of them (the shipping companies), a Catholic priest did take a conspicuous part in exposing the racketeers. I suspect, though I don't know, that why Terry had to turn to the government was that if his fellow-workers had turned out to be noble savages and righted their wrongs for themselves, the film might have been seen by American audiences as yet another proof that there's never any need for government interference in industry. Terry has to face Friendly afterwards to prove to the dockers that he still is, and acted as, one of them; his sacrifice will, it is hoped, inspire them to become conscious of themselves as a class, to the solidarity which they haven't got. The film is not a study in Fascist leader-ship, but in martyrology - - - just like "Earth", Johnny is the audience - - - identification figure: "this is what you must do, you must stand up for Jesus." Why is the great gate so forbidding at the end? Because Kazan wants to remind us that the bosses are no more the dockers' friends than Johnny Friendly is, that work isn't always such fun as it is in "Every Day Except Christmas".

Undoubtedly there's a romantic streak in the film; I maintain there is a romantic streak in Mr. Anderson, but that wouldn't justify my calling him Fascist, disgustingly cynical, or even, really, deviationist. It would incidentally have been nice if someone on S & S had noticed that "Wild River" has an open justification of "Socialistic" planning.

Why do we bring up so old a criticism? Because examples of "social" criticism by "committed" critics have been so few and far between, and because this particular artic1e established the New Left's tradition of denouncing films, not by reference to their actual social accuracies or inaccuracies, but by their relation to a set of dogmatic slogans about what left-wing orthodoxy was. To be sure, S & S ran an effort vaguely focusing on, yes, of course, what else is there, The Youth of Today, with its alarming Method acting, its evil motorcycling and rock 'n' roll; which Nannie Don't Allow (1).

IF IN DOUBT SLOGANISE

Even more depressing, though, is one's suspicion that even when our "committed" critics do have a direct acquaintance with social reality they sloganise everything into a caricature of itself. "Definition" ran a long art1icle asking itself whether Flaherty wasn't a bit of a romantic really (no prizes offered for the correct answer) and characteristically it didn't do so by comparing (say) "Nanook of the North" with how Eskimos live, or "Moana" with how South Sea tribes live, but by comparison with theories elastic (i.e. vague) enough to cover all these forms of social organisation. Even more typical, alas, was an article on ''Look Back in Anger", where Stuart Hall argued that "The film is not about the sex-and-love life of the James T. Porters and the occasions when Jimmy threatens to bash Alison over the head far outweigh and out-number the tight cliches"; and implied that the publicity still which implied that was a typical film industry lie. But the simplest spectator knows enough about Strindberg-type-love-hate to resolve this ludicrous dichotomy between bashing and clinching - - - or they wouldn't be able to make head nor tail of David O's "Duel in the Sun". "The sexual and human relationship between Jimmy and Alison is a metaphor for the social re1ationship between Jimmy and the world." By "world" Mr. Hall presumably means the upper-middle-class ethos, which must of course have weighed pretty heavily on Jimmy down in the market-place sweet-stall. But if we rule out the love-story, what are the social significances of Helen and Clift? what class significance can Mr. Hall find for such little details as the fact that Jimmy is more contented with Helena than with Alison but loves Alison more than Helena? Of course the film is about class and of course Mr. Hall is justified in reacting when critics try to dismiss a play or film because they don't like its protagonists (a fault from which left-wing criticism is hardly immune). But Mr. Hall seems to grudge the film its non-political meanings. The still which said "Look Back In Anger" was a love story was absolutely right. One reason why "Look Back In Anger" was the best English film since goodness knows when (and maybe still is, though We don't claim to have seen every English film made since goodness knows when - - - we mean this like other critics decide on the Ten Best Films Of All Time), it's because it frankly admits that Porter is his own co-executioner (with society) and that one of the obstacles to his finding a cause to fight for is the closed-shop insularity of the English working-classes. It is because the film has all sorts of themes, political, social, emotional, that it is so splendid and true. Not that it hasn't a snide defeatist streak - - - Alison's miscarriage brings it within the atmosphere of gynaecological moralising accepted by Schlesinger and quietly left ambiguous by Reisz - - - while like Celia Johnson and Alan Bates our old friend. Mr. Porter sees the moral light on a railway station, which is nothing to do with nationalisation (Enter" Dr. Beeching, pursued by a diesel). It's a thousand pities that since "The Entertainer" Osborne himself has capitulated to the left-wing moralists and produced a thin and sour strip-cartoon ("Paul Slickey") and a thin and solemn one ("Luther"), as if bidding for the title of the neurasthenics' Al Capp (The second play does have the merit of a timid return to ethical complexity; it goes without saying that we like "Under Plain Cover'" better than the B feature). But the reader can see why we have looped our way from criticism criticism into film criticism. The "chastening" of all our working-class heroes by the desire for affluence (Heather Sears, Shirley Ann Field), by the equation of working-class wisdom with fundamentalist moralising ("Right's right and wrong's wrong and all this tones-of-grey nonsense is self-indulgence" as the Peggy Mount surrogate booms in "A Kind of Loving"), and by a private stoicism and loyalty (Jimmy Porter) all this is the artists' honest acknowledgement of the bankruptcy of Socialist-puritan fundamentalism in our period when the working-class is being (relatively) emancipated. The New Left's sudden recrudescence of hymn-singing, its desperate attempts to reduce Osborne's play to the pious simplicities of a Wayside Pulpit are just what they seem; a regressive revivalism.

For the same reason committed critics relish the flags and bugles of a Ford picture while shuddering at the truly contemporary bitterness of "Run of the Arrow". It is the committed critics who are unable to grasp that Ray's films are worth noticing carefully not only because of their plastic language but because of their concern with man in society ("Rebel Without A Cause", "The Savage Innocents"). Just because of their intellectual fundamentalism they are constantly attacking, despising, ignoring film-makers who in some ways at least are on their own side (e.g. 'On The Waterfront', 'Kiss Me Deadly', 'La Loi', 'On the Beach', 'En Cas de Malheur', 'Notte Brava', all Losey's British films until 'The Criminal').

The only way one can tackle the issue of commitment, or even clarify the disagreements, is by starting from the ground up, e.g. what is culture for anyway? has it a moral duty to be propaganda, or is it highbrow beer-and-skittles, or is it anti-propaganda in the name of that refractory thing, human nature, or what, or all four together or at different times, and if so, when is it which? Maybe Socialists should make a point of seeing films which view the world through Tory eyes? maybe their opponents have some useful things to teach them? Why shouldn't Socialists be interested in, and sympathetic to, Tory or Fascist or Buddhist or Eskimo artworks for the same reasons that we hope Catholics are interested in Protestant films or modern democrats in Elizabethan drama or the Tories in what we think? Why shouldn't Socialists say to one another or to the world at large, "Do go and see "Triumph of the Will" again ,and again and again, you've never seen such a persuasive account of Fascist idealism, now at last we can really feel Fascism from the inside?" Ergo, "Triumph of the Will" is a great film - whether Your interest in it is one of "Quicquid agunt homines", of "There, but for the grace of God, go !" or of psychological espionage or self-enlightenment. There is our attitude, we may be wrong, but instead of discussing issues S & S promptly took refuge in a smokescreen of insults ("cultural gauleiters") and Bloomsbury woolliness. "The governing characteristic of English critical writing, seems to be its empiricism, its innate distrust of theory, and reluctance to draw, dividing lines." But the governing, characteristic of Dean St. critical writing is that it never sees the necessity of theorising because if hasn't yet grasped that attitudes other than its own merit the courtesy of consideration.


THE CASE OF THE BLOODSTAINED BATHTUB

Faced with the challenge of new ideas, Nannie's instinctive reaction is to shut the door quick. "Nicholas Ray or Satyajit Ray? Samuel Fuller or John Ford?" she asks. Answer: why not both? You might as well say "Soup Or sweet" or "Laurel or Hardy" or "Sight or Sound" (as critics did in the thirties) or "painting or literature". S & S's inability to think is bound up with its inability to adjust. Because its thoughtless responses are its guide, a different response is felt to somehow undermine its authority. It can't conceive that another critic might like Fuller for some reasons and Ford for other reasons. Miss Houston scathingly cites an "Oxford Opinion" remark: "In "Party Girl" there is a shot of a girl lying with her hands dangling in a bath full of water which is red from the blood of her slashed wrists. Even by Ray standards it is outstandingly beautiful" Oh how morbid. But if you turn to the next article in the same issue of S & S what do you find? Richard Roud is attacking Fereydoun Hoveyda's criticism of "Party Girl" and writes: "Every remarkable shot is mentioned though not curiously enough, the one I consider the most beautiful... The camera frames the wall at eye-level and then slowly descends to the girl, whom we see bent over the tub, her hair and arms streaming down into the blood-filled bath." One would have thought that Miss Houston would have discussed the issue with her collaborator. "I know that unlike those horrible Teddy Boys from the dreaming spires of the Oxford liberal magazine you are not hungry for kicks at any price, so would you explain to me where the sublimity of this shot lies for you?"

But no. Her colleague's opinions are a closed book to her, and when they are expressed by the "wrong" side they are, it is discreetly implied, ludicrous and disreputable. (Mr. Roud, trying to outsmart Hoveyda, falls into another naivety: he raises his discreet eyebrows because Hoveyda doesn't rhapsodise over his own favourite bloodbath). The trouble with the S & S non-theory is that it is an assortment of prejudices and habits which thinks it is the broadest possible, the biggest and best range of tastes. Actually, its scope, minimal in the first place, is, not increased, but diminished by the play of the contradictions beneath the mask of tolerant eclecticism. The "form or content" debate exemplifies the process. Penelope Houston, reasonably, insists that the cinema is about human relationships NOT spatial relationships. One gathers that she would also subscribe to Mr. Roud's contention that content is "like" literature and ideas, while form is "like" painting. One more effort and S & S would have hauled itself out of the form-or-content quagmire altogether. Form is "like" painting; but painting has a "content", and this content is carried in the form (shapes, colours, etc) so that in a painting the "spatial relationships" may well "be" the human relationships. Similarly, in literature, literary meanings often depend on the form of the phrases (rhythm, alliteration, etc), so that, there too, form = idea. The form of a phrase is itself a phrase inflecting the phrase. Ideational and formal content interinfluence each other and both are content. Form is part of the content and "content" is only part of the "content". Abstract painting and music are both "pure form", the ideational content may be absolutely nil. According to the Houston-Roud non-theory, they have no content at all and are presumably insignificant, as being only about spatial and harmonic relationships.

The only formulation which begins to make sense is to say that the "spatial relationships" in Ray, Lang, Antonioni, Mizoguchi et al are the human relationships in metaphor; and that spatial metaphors are no more recondite and baffling than saying, with W.C. Fields, "He has apple cheeks, cauliflower ears and mutton-chop whiskers." But for Mr. Roud the camera-movements in "L'Avventura" are just "patterns in the carpet". In an article article called called "Novel Novel Fable Fable" he turns his back decisively on the only possible solution to the "form or content" debate (a solution which admittedly solves nothing but at least has the merit of opening a new avenue of questions); and discovers that not all stories are novels: One of these days literary critics will stumble on "The Canterbury Tales", "The Decameron", "Le Morte d'Arthur", "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", and, as for that strange work "Gulliver Travels", it can safely be said that its author, Dean Swift, may yet turn out to be the Samuel Beckett of the New Wave. In fact, of course, a look in 90% of films films for what Mr. Roud looks for in novels novels is as silly as looking for impressionism in Henry Moore or for Rembrandt character in "Tom Jones".

Take away the simplistic distinction between "form" and "content" and the whole 'Sight and Sound' aesthetic collapses. Even Mr. Roud's attempt at compromise inn "The French Line" is left with its literary ideas on the one hand, and its patterns in the carpet on the other, and never the twain shall meet. A film critic without something of a painter's eye is like an opera critic who's tone deaf. But like so many people who can only visualise things in terms of words and ideas Mr. Roud can't steer clear of a solipsistic and jeering verbal tone (= style = content) which amounts to a caricature of the "line" which he purports to be (a) describing and (b) criticising. For example, after noting that French critics are generally kinder to many the American films than English, he proceeds, "It may be a difficult for English people to think of Detroit as EI Dorado, but it is undeniable that American life in all its forms exercises a very strong hold over the present-day young French intellectuals." Leaving aside for a moment the hold it exercises over present-day young English intellectuals (and the function of "trendhounds" as the Kremlinologists of demomocracy), our main point is Mr. Roud's snide gibes: he caricatures the French interest in America as a gullible Utopianism ("'El Dorado...") and mysteriously sums up "American life in all its forms" as Detroit" (why not "New Orleans" or the "West Coast"?). He seems incapable of seeing things in a direct, neutral way: "French intellectuals are interested in America because in American films they recognise predicaments akin to their own and respond with sympathy and insight to the attempted solution." Hence, French Marxists ("'Positif") are as interested in American films as the critics of "Cahiers". Mr. Roud's way of putting things is as ludicrous as insinuating that Lindsay Anderson thinks capitalism is Heaven on earth because he enjoys films about U.S. Cavalry. His own spotty grasp of social realities is revealed by his attempt to attribute the French interest in America to a 20th-century reaction against Cartesianism, which he equates with restraint, rationalism and moderation. Not a word about the French Revolution, the Paris Commune and other little "Cartesian" tiffs. For Mr. Roud history is philosophy. And this one-for-one relationship between culture (i.e. taste) and politics turns up again when Mr. Roud concludes that Michel Mourlet is crypto-Fascist (and slightly nutty) on the grounds that Mourlet (a) thinks Charlton Heston has a splendidly male screen personality and (b) admires Lang, Losey (who is a left-winger), Preminger, Walsh, Cottafavi and Don Weis. Mourlet writes: "Charlton Heston by his existence alone gives a more accurate definition of the cinema than films like 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' or 'Citizen Kane'" and Mr. Roud thinks this is very peculiar. But Mourlet is right and Mr. Roud is the eccentric. Since about 1910 the aesthetic of the commercial cinema has been based on the star, on personality and, far from being an invention of the Mammon Studios this developed first in Italy and independently in India and Japan. By what process of thought Mr. Roud equates male strength with Fascism I hate to think - - - I should have thought such an equation was just what "Triumph of the Will" wanted its audience to make, and if something about Charlton Heston is Quasi-Fascist, the Western is quasi-Fascist. But Mr. Roud can't say about Mourlet's opinion, simply, "I don't agree, I think it's mistaken", he has to accuse Mourlet of having a swastika embossed in his soul. Cripes. My all-time favourite film star is Lillian Gish in Griffith's early films, presumably this makes me on honorary member of the Ku Klux Klan.


SENSE AND SENSUALITY

All this politicization of taste got so ludicrous that, of course, we have been witnessing over the last two years, the fighting retreat of S & S from the bloody crossroads of semi-commitment, to and plumb in the slender arms of "Lola". After giving "Cahiers" a few gratuitous kicks (for all the wrong reasons) S & S sets about imitating it. First, the heavyweight intellectual quotes (Aristotle, Thomas Mann, Balzac). Then, the blobs-and-stars on the back of the MFB. The Catholic streak of "Cahiers" is a bit much, and its addiction to woolly Hegelian dialectics are, as they say in the trade, inimitable, fortunately - - - I thought we were in for it when we were treated to a comparison between Bergman and oxymoron. But anyway, S & S, after preening itself on its lack of cut-and-dried theories, duly came up with a cut-and-dried theorist, Eric Rhode, who saw films as paradigms of Augustinianism, humanism, existentialism and Rhodeism. At least he brought his basic principles out into the open and in his coldly spherical way ("Art is a cold sphere" as Fats Waller said to Dizzy Gillespie) he said some interesting things. But his tone of superiority, his way of allighting upon films from some private moral stratosphere, and a hypochondriac obsession with psychological "normality" accorded ill with the sympathy needed to respond to works of art, and which with the simple-minded muddle-headedness of his philosophical notions, augured more than a touch of Dyerism. At times he wrote like film criticism's answer to Colin Wilson. His notion of "Centrality" seems to equate humanism with some sort of classicism; he seem to think it entails or favours the well-constructed plot; he believes that the plot which contrasts "the stable world" with "some disruptive force" and then shows the world returning to "its natural harmony" was and in some ways still is particularly useful or true; and seems vaguely to connect that sort of plot with "humanism" whereas the other sort of plot is linked to existentialism (which, for good measure, is demonstrably psychotic).

Yet the notion of the world not having an inner core or "essence" isn't peculiar to existentialism at all, it's also built into the assumptions of English pragmatism and scepticism - - - you wouldn't call Hume or Russell or Ayer "existentialists" at least not without remarking that you are playing musical chairs with conventional terminology. It's equally quaint to imply a “comparison between something called Naturalism” (which doesn't mean as you'd think, realism, but determinism) and "riotous fantasy" of the mind (All those Surrealistic dancing-girls). But what do all these huge notions mean when you get down to cases? I call myself a humanist critic and indeed a scientific humanist critic and I tend to translate existentialism back into pragmatism (i.e. paradox into compromise), an English tendency, but I don't and never did believe that the plot which contrasts "the stable world" with "some disruptive force" and shows the world returning to "its natural harmony" was more useful or true than any other, in fact I'd say it's a conventional wish-fulfillment. Now I come to think of it, I have always presumed that "the stable order", far from being "harmonious" was naturally an unstable equilibrium of any number of diverse forces, hit on by chance, and of no metaphysical permanence i.e., I believe that it is in the nature of Nature not to be bothered about what man wants, and that often the happy end to one's life's story comes in the middle, or at the beginning, or not at all. So I suppose I am a stoic scientific humanist critic, except that I'm a hedonist in the vulgar and materialistic (i.e. Bertrand Russell) sense, and as at the drop of a hat I'll set about having a bash at psycho-analysing a film and feeling I'm doing something vaguely interesting, and as I regularly vote Labour and my immediate target would be to see Britain run on Swedish lines politically, you'd have to say I'm a Socialist Freudian Epicurean stoic scientific humanist critic. So much for philosophical pigeonholes; you need at least 57 holes to hold one pigeon, and I haven't even begun to tell you what a loveable character I have.

Of course "A Bout de Souffle" is full of "discontinuities" if you're looking for "continuities" resembling the assumptions of the eighteenth-century neo-platonist parish-plump. Yet the action and plot of Godard's film makes perfect sense; so far as theme, relationships, motivations and narrative determinism" are concerned the film is absolutely conventional, as straightforward as "Quai des Brumes".

Philosophically, Mr. Rhode's standpoint is that of arriere-garde neo-platonism onto which psycho-analytical terminology has been grafted. The attempt is frequent these days, and the graft won't last. While it lasts, the effect is of super-Augustinianism: the inquisitor can psycho analyse his victim and condemn him for his "repressions". A cerebrality like Manicheanism appears again in Mr. Rhode's solo effort on eroticism, which "proved" by a couple of twists of phrase that only death gives sensuality its meaning. This profound sentence makes just as much sense back to front ("only sensuality gives death its meaning") but you might just as well say "only death gives language its meaning" or "only death gives pickled onions their meaning". What he seems to be trying to say is, "Don't believe all this superficial rubbish about breasts and bodies, that's all very unhealthy, we're all thoughtful skeletons really." It's an eerie article on the erotic that mentions neither dispassionate love nor reproduction, which in the human species is sexual - - - the death instinct's little joke, presumably. He mentions four films as being sensual (and says he's only seen one or two more): "Ossessione" (yes, I had a crick in my neck too, when I came out), "Casque d'Or", "Que Viva Mexico", "Le Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe", and writes, "Only in Eisenstein's case is it fairly certain that he was not primarily motivated by nostalgia". But if Marie Seton's biography is anything to go by then Eisenstein was the most likely to have been motivated by nostalgia - I don't suppose it's necessary to dwell on the homosexual elements in Eisenstein's and Visconti's films?). Mr. Rhode's non-reaction before the scene of Nadia Gray on the fur, in "La Dolce Vita" is peculiar - - - I saw the film twice and both times the audience "felt" the fur - - - it's Mr. Rhode who doesn't, because in the cinema, as feelies haven't been invented yet, sensuousness is in the mind of the beholder, just as in literature it's in the mind of the reader. But how can you react sensuously to a film when all the time you're worried about whether it's healthy or what philosophical football team the director plays for or whether the jump-cuts are psychotic or not?

Mr. Rhode's interest in personal hygiene even leads him to say, about Visconti, "There is something wrong somewhere when a nobleman makes a film entirely about Sicilian fishermen and the fault doesn't lie only with social conditions and the desire to expose social wrongs. I feel that Visconti (though perhaps to a lesser degree than his contemporaries) is trying in his work to escape from the complex issues from the uses of intelligence". There's no possible defence, of course, against a suggestion so vague that it might as well apply to Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, or anybody who comes from one class or country but habitually makes films about people from another. If Eric Rhode doesn't diagnose directors as sick because they don't put their own problems on the screen, Peter John Dyer will diagnose them as sick because they do.

In "The Listener" Mr. Rhode's view of human nature has gradually become less hypochondriac and mellower: his "Sight and Sound" period illustrates puritanism's last stand; it becomes agnostic and philosophical and talks about "maturity" when it means "salvation". Mr. Rhode's articles were interesting and his departure leaves S and S without a thinker, sinking slowly back to safely non-philosophical. non-committed earth, in short, to Bloomsburyite waffling about aesthetics-qua-aesthetics of which there is a delicious specimen in an article with a sensitively twee bit of anti-syntax en tete, "How Art Is True?" (How true is art, how is art true, is? true; how, art! - aw, shucks) (1).

And then who, as they say in the grunt-and-groan racket, will unmask Arkadin the Mystery Man of Semi-committed criticism? "Movie" thinks it's John Russell Taylor, but we don't mind who it is. Anyway impregnable behind his anonymity, he remarks, "surely it is an unhealthy sign when those who are ostensibly criticizing a film devote so much of their space instead to criticizing other critics." Touche, Monsieur Pussycat. and et tu, brute, come to that, you've just had a delicate go at John Coleman, Isabel Quigley, Dilys Powell and several others. We haven't a clue as to why you do it, but we do it because: - - -

(1) Too many of the critics criticised make the bland, and, alas so often unconscious assumption that the relationship of critic to film-maker is that of examiner to examinee. Fellini is such a bungling idiot that he can't even stage a strip-tease excitingly, Brooks, Aldrich, Losey, Fuller, Minnelli, never try to do anything that a critic can't sum up off the cuff, the critic may have moral ideas about a film but there are rarely moral ideas in a film, Visconti and Bergman are just walking about waving their sores in the air, etc. This assumption of superiority leads inevitably to a critical negligence whereby these critics restrict their responses to the run of films to a level of sophistication below that of the average film director, to the level of the least intelligent spectator. Superior in depreciation, they are far and away inferior in appreciation to Mr. and Mrs. Bloggs.

(2) We must head off the inevitable smear that this is an attack on film criticism. The Dean St. clique still thinks it is film criticism generally despite accumulating evidence to the contrary. So accumulating that even S & S finally blossomed out in highbrow Quotations (just like "Cahiers") has contrived to discover Hawks and Losey (just like "Cahiers"), Frank Tashlin (in time for "Bachelor Flat", that is, ten years after the first really glorious Tashlin film, "Susan Slept Here"), has asked "Why don't we take horror films seriously" (the answer is, we always have), and then, aghast at its own daring covered up quickly with "but not seriously seriously" (as you were) has given a Fuller film two stars. But if anyone else does it, they're hungry for kicks. . .

(3) It's very odd how the whole commitment debate went through without reference to "Positif'. One would have thought that on strategical grounds alone "committed" critics (or their half-hearted champions) would have been grad to direct attention to the work of their French comrades-in-arms. But of course, sneering at "Cahiers" (even while you emulate its "confusionism") is much easier than seeking to understand one's allies. Above all, one is never in danger of not feeling superior, is one? "Positif' calls itself "la revue du cinema la plus aggressive": being openly rude, it manages to be less offensive than S& S. Sometimes, we feel, it is to quick on trigger. Its sometimes very sharp divisions between "left" and "right" attitudes cannot really be applied in Britain, although "Positif" may well still dislike our feeling that there are right-wing critics whose opinions interest us more, land to whom in many ways we fed nearer, than those on the left. We don't think of film criticism as a form of political activity, but are committed in the sense that we have opinions, and see no reason for not bringing them to bear on films. We cite "Positif" because it is (a) committed and (b) its cultural equipment enables it to grapple with contemporary films of all kinds. Opening past issues at random we find incisive and enthusiastic reviews of: "The Girl Can't Help It", "Odds Against Tomorrow", "La Dolce Vita", "Crime Without Pity", "Il Conchechito", "Rocco and his Brothers", "Peeping Tom", "Look Back In Anger", "Le Bel Age", "Strangers When We Meet", "The Bells Are Ringing", "The Virgin Spring". If S & S do after all still want to be committed they might with advantage take lessons from "Positif" (and from "La Methode", "Premier Plan", "Contre-Champ") and forgo their opportunistic derivations from "Cahiers".

(4) It's high time our highbrows dropped their supercilious (S & S) or paranoid (Hoggart) attitude to the mass media land mitigated their lofty disinterest in what the general public wants and why.

(5) We believe there is a necessity for critical disagreements, counter-interpretations, cross-purposes, debates. We are not quibbling with S & S because they didn't enthuse over the films we liked. Nor have we merely culled a Golden Treasury of Howlers - - - which no critic can altogether avoid. We are saying that as "Definition" killed committed criticism, so "Sight and Sound" with its unique prestige has over the last ten years done more to keep English film criticism naive than no criticism at all would have done.

If it now wants to take notice of any of these criticisms, it's very welcome. Noone will be more pleased than we will.

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The cover of the Spring '63 is obviously neo-"Movie", suggesting another fashionable shift of emphasis: if you can't sneer 'em out of court, imitate 'em. As always, the "outside" contributions are the most interesting: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith not only grasps some of the basic issues in the "S & S"-"Movie" needle-match (nth round) but actually contrives to treat "Movie" with courtesy. Arkadin, the Doctor Death of film criticism, gets submission grips on a couple of obvious deadbeats, but his try at reconciling his rationalist principles with out-Cahiering "Cahiers" in uprooting adorable turnips is feeble because he still hasn't grasped the rules of the game and still can't decide whether or not to take himself seriously. A survey of "Blockbusters" tries to be toughly practical about the trade, but can't make it because neither of the authors has a clue as what or why or how the public "sees" films. For example: of "Spartacus": "the audience responded to the well-staged gladiatorial contests and left "the moralising to look after itself." Not at my local Odeon they didn't; they responded to all the moral climaxes and cheered two of them. The British public isn't as stupid as "Nice Time"-besotted "intellectuals" seem to imagine.

(1) The post-Dyer M.F.B. veers to the more genial but pays for it by inconsistency. Worse, the anonymity of many reviews makes it impossible to make allowances for critics' idiosyncracies.

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© Copyright Raymond Durgnat Estate 1963. No part of this article may be reprinted without permission.
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