BOOK REVIEWS
Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film
by Dudley Andrew. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
409 pp., illus. Paperback: $24.95.
Vital Crises in
Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics by P. Adams
Sitney. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995. 239 pp.,
illus. Paperback: $17.95.
That now almost extinct species, the moviegoer looking for an
alternative to the Hollywood movie, looked chiefly to French film
in the Thirties and to Italian film in the years after the war.
Promotion and distribu- tion had something to do with it - the
remarkable Japanese cinema of the Thirties, for example, remained
unseen in the West - but the quality and appeal of the films
themselves surely entered into it as well. France before the war
was a nation soon to be defeated; Italy after the war was a nation
emerging from defeat. Yet they tri- umphed in their filmmaking. Art
- even the art of the lone unappreciated genius, Emily Dickinson or
Vincent van Gogh - is made in society and under the conditions of
society. In principle we can all agree that only in a certain kind
of society will a certain kind of art be made, that only under
certain condi- tions will a certain sensibility be formed and find
expression - that Quai des brumes could have been made nowhere else
than in France in the late Thirties and The Bicycle Thief nowhere
else than in Italy in the late Forties. But in practice the
specific relation between an art and a society and culture is a
complex and often tangled matter calling for attentive study. The
two books under review are attentive studies by two prominent
scholars who shed much light on French film of the Thirties and
postwar Italian film.
Dudley Andrew and P. Adams Sitney deal with rich periods of
national filmmak- ing, and each takes as his central focus a per-
ceived culminant moment in that filmmak- ing - two culminant
moments in Sitney' s case, or "vital crises" as he calls them, bor-
rowing Pasolini's term for the first of these moments, the moment
of Italian neorealism right after the war. Sitney' s second vital
cri- sis is the moment of the Italian "economic miracle" of the
late Fifties and early Sixties, a moment that produced a cinematic
miracle in works by Antonioni and Fellini and Vis-
conti, Olmi and Pasolini and Rosi. Andrew's culminant moment is
the style known as "poetic realism," which he regards as the most
distinctive fruition of French filmmak- ing before the war. Rather
than style, or genre, Andrew prefers to use the term optique , his
adaptation to cinema of Roland Barthes's concept of criture : "The
term optique involves a study of elements of style and of genre,
but goes beyond these in aim- ing to distinguish the specific type
of experi- ence offered by a set of films to the public." I'm not
sure I agree with the choice of cul- minant moments Andrew and
Sitney make: poetic realism seems to me neither artistical- ly nor
socially the most important mode of prewar French filmmaking; and
in a discus- sion of postwar Italian cinema I wouldn't have skipped
the Fifties, the years that yield- ed such works as Umberto D. and
Voyage to Italy y The White Sheik and Le Amiche. But with their
choice of focus Andrew and Sit- ney give us informed and perceptive
studies and I'm not going to complain.
What was poetic realism? The French Kammerspiel , one might
answer, looking back to the gloomy everyday dramas of Ger- man
silent cinema. The French film noir , one might answer, looking
forward to the murky crime movies of Hollywood in the Forties.
First used in reference to Pierre Chenal's 1933 la Rue sans nom ,
the term ralisme potique , though sometimes loosely applied to all
French cinema of the Thirties, properly designates a group of
atmospheric and fatalistic films made mainly toward the end of the
decade. In his endeavor to char- acterize the optique of poetic
realism, Andrew examines what surrounded it on all sides, what came
before and what followed it, and what else was being done at the
time. Poetic realism was bounded on the poetic side by the more
inward cinema of the impressionist school and the avant-garde, more
concerned with subjectivity and the
Marcel Carn's le Jour se lve (1939) (photo courtesy of
Photofest)
imagination; and on the realistic side by the more outward
cinema of Jean Renoir, more concerned with the social and material
envi- ronment. Ren Clair and Jean Vigo in some ways anticipated
poetic realism but Clair was too detached and ironical and Vigo too
surreal and spirited.
Most of all Andrew contrasts poetic real- ism with the
"theatrical model" that gained ascendancy after the coming of
sound: "If you let yourself be inundated with French films of the
1930s, you will remember pri- marily the actors that come back film
after film.. .Scrutinizing a randomly chosen film, or calculating
the global effect of hundreds of them, you can be charmed or
annoyed by the egregious manner with which they play up to the
audience." Poetic realism doesn't play up to the audience; as
Andrew sees it, it is the opposite of what Tom Gunning calls the
"cinema of attractions." And yet, if you look at a few of its main
works, you will be struck by an actor who comes back film after
film: Jean Gabin. Poetic because he is beautiful and realistic
because he is the pro- letarian, Gabin is not only the hero of
poetic realism but its walking definition.
Gabin doesn't play up to the audience: like other great movie
stars, he seems scarce- ly to be playing at all, the kind of actor
who doesn't reach out to us but draws us in like a magnet. To draw
us into the mists of an alluring and elusive world, to envelop us
in an atmosphere of seductive gloom, is the characteristic effect
of poetic realism. For Andrew this is a novelistic rather than a
the- atrical effect: novelistic, he argues, because it is an effect
of point of view, of our being limited to the perspective and
perceptions of the Gabin hero. But it is no less, I would argue, an
effect of acting and mise-en-scne , a theater that may not play up
to the audi- ence but a theater all the same. The "imagi- nary
signifier" that Christian Metz theorized for all cinema, the
illusion of oneness with a world that is not there, Andrew applies
specifically to the optique of poetic realism. It is, as he sees
it, an optique of identifica- tion, of our drive to identify
ourselves with the other, to fuse with the film screen as once upon
a time we fused with the mother: "the classic poetic realist texts
take identifi- cation as both means and end." Hence the doom that
awaits the Gabin hero in Pp le Moko and Quai des brumes , la Bte
humaine and le Jour se lve: for the driven pursuit of an ever
unattainable oneness can only end in death.
Marcel Carn, the director of Quai des brumes and le Jour se lve
, the most charac- teristic works of poetic realism, preferred the
term fantastique social for his work and saw its orientation as
social rather than psy-
54 CINEASTE
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chological. But both Quai des brumes and le Jour se lve set up a
triangle composed of the Gabin hero, a woman very young and very
pretty, and an unaccountably sinister older man: a triangle one
needn't take oedipally to be tempted to interpret psychologically.
And both films have something murky at their center, something that
resists understanding (why does Jules Berry, the older man in le
Jour se lve, go to Gabin's room and all but ask to be killed?) and
invites excavation of hidden meaning. "To say that fathers and
adolescent sons struggle for survival in these films, and do so
with the fate of vulnerable young women in their hands, may open up
a crude sociology of the period," writes Andrew. "Uncomfortable in
viewing films as direct reflections of social conditions," he opts
for a more formal analysis, which he carries out with notable
acumen and feeling for these films, and which yields significant
insight into their use of the medium and their way of engaging the
spectator.
What of nition,
his
was
discerning Sitney neorealism?
states book,
It at eludes the declining
outset defi-
nition, Sitney states at the outset of his discerning book,
declining
the attempt to provide one: the term for him is merely a label
that "has stuck" on some "remarkable films and novels... crudely
sub- sumed under [it]." Neorealism did produce some remarkable
works, but even more remarkable is the influence it has wielded not
just in Italy but on films everywhere - on almost everything
important that has happened in films subsequently. Neorealism was
fthe cinema of the Italian liberation, and its call to take the
camera out into the streets, to take the risks and make the dis-
coveries of the world out there, has inspired cinematic liberation
internationally. (Carn too had called for the cinema to "go down
into the streets," but that was as a critic, and as a filmmaker he
had the streets built in the studio.) Sitney nods to the recent
film schol- arship that "has emphasized the continuity between the
Italian cinema before and after the war, in a laudable effort at
demytholo- gizing the neorealist revolution. If I seem to run
against that current here, it is not that I contest that thesis;
rather, it is because my emphasis is ultimately more esthetic than
sociological." The continuity is incon- testable but so is the
change - and not only the esthetic change, the fact that the
Italians made better films after the war than they had under
Fascism, but also the changed social purview and purport of those
better postwar films. In his book Sitney judiciously documents the
circumstances and apprecia- tively elucidates the achievements of
the lib- eration that was neorealism and of another flowering of
Italian cinema that ensued a decade later.
Like every liberation that has so far come to pass, neorealism
was more an aspiration than an attainment. Sitney quotes Pasolini,
who said as much in his first essay on the subject of film, a note
on Nights of Cabiria written in 1957:
Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948) (photo courtesy of
Photofest)
It is useless to delude oneself about it: neorealism was not a
regeneration; it was only a vital crisis , however excessively
opti- mistic and enthusiastic at the beginning. Thus poetic action
outran thought, formal renewal preceded the reorganization of the
culture through its vitality (le s not forget the year '45!). Now
the sudden withering of neorealism is the necessary fate of an
improvised, although necessary, super- structure: it is the price
for a lack of mature thought, of a complete reorganization of the
culture.
After the war the Christian Democrats, in concert with the
Catholic Church and the United States, managed to keep in place
much the same ruling class that had ruled under Fascism. So there
was, as Pasolini says, no regeneration of Italian society, no true
reorganization of the culture. But an art responds not only to the
conditions but also to the aspirations of a society and culture,
and the vitality of neorealism, the change it enacted in art even
if no such change was coming about in life, responded to the vital-
ity of those aspirations in postwar Italy.
Sitney's second "vital crisis" was more continuous with
neorealism than he some- times allows. Antonioni and Fellini both
came out of the neorealist movement and, though they significantly
departed from it, their films are of a piece with it at least up to
The Red Desert and 8xi2' and the early films of Olmi, Pasolini, and
Rosi (Il posto and The Fiancs , Accatone and Mamma Roma , Salva-
tore Giuliano and Hands over the City) took up the neorealist
tradition and revitalized it. In his astute analysis of La dolce
vita Sitney discusses the film's episodic construction: "Fellini
elaborates an epic vision of the deca- dence of the capital, using
for the first time a modernist, paratactic structure... The film's
thirteen episodes are so autonomous that they seem outside of
sequential time.. .Fellini and his scriptwriters abrogated the
conven- tions of plot development and suspense."
This accurately characterizes the uncon- ventional narrative
structure Fellini employed in La dolce vita. But not for the first
time: he employed a similarly episodic construction in his prior
work, in I vitelloni,
La strada, Il bidone , Nights of Cabiria. And Fellini's episodic
plotting is not eccentric to the neorealist tradition, where (even
if one leaves aside the several films made up of separate episodes,
like Paisan or Love in the City) an episodic narrative structure is
not the exception but the rule (one need go no further than The
Bicycle Thief). I suspect Sit- ney's reading has to do with his
wanting to divide modernism from realism, but that cannot be done
in any clear-cut way. Sitney is a penetrating critic of modernist
and avant-garde cinema, and his eye for innova- tion and
longstanding concern with experi- mentation serve him well in his
scrutiny of the groundbreaking cinema of postwar Italy.
Iconography, stylistics, politics: the sub- title of Sitney's
book gives a fair summary of his approach. His discussion of Open
City cites a little-known text Meyer Schapiro wrote at the time the
film came out, responding to an article in which James T. Farrell,
writing for the Trotskyist New Inter- national, had construed the
film as a Stalin- ist work. Schapiro argued against that view and
noted the film's religious slant, pointing out its use of the
sacraments and the way its two martyrs, the priest and the
Communist, "recall the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in Rome."
Taking his cue from Schapiro, Sit- ney systematically examines the
film's sacra- mental imagery and Christian iconography together
with its picture of the Italian resis- tance and the politics of
the immediate aftermath. The joint consideration of iconography and
politics is an enlightening specialty of Sitney's book. La dolce
vita is another film read in this manner both as a kind of
Christian allegory, a modern Infer- no, and as a political parable
about the temptations and the dangers of neo-Fas- cism. Sitney may
have an esthetic bias but he aptly fills in the social, cultural,
and political context of the films he values esthetically.
For a long time the esthetic and the social have by and large
been treated as separate, even antithetical concerns. Dudley
Andrew's and P. Adams Sitney's books are both admirable examples of
a salutary approach that brings the esthetic and the social
together where they belong. Both are books that serious students of
film will want to . read and to possess. - Gilberto Perez
The Graham
Greene Film
Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories Edited by
David Parkinson. New York, NY: Applause Books, 1995. 738 pp.f
Hardcover: $35.00.
Analyzing a sequence in Stagecoach in his fine monograph on the
film in the BFI Clas- sics series, Ed Buscombe pauses for a rhetor-
ical question: "Who, shooting a Western in
CINEASTE 55
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Article Contentsp. 54p. 55
Issue Table of ContentsCinaste, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1995), pp.
1-64Front MatterEDITORIAL [pp. 1-1]LETTERS [pp.
4-5]INTERVIEWSBeyond Neorealism: Preserving a Cinema of Social
Conscience: An Interview with Gianni Amelio [pp. 6-13]
CLUELESS KIDS [pp. 14-16]BULLETS, BALLOTS AND BIBLES:
Documenting the History of the Gay and Lesbian Struggle in America
[pp. 17-21]HOW CLEAN WAS MY VALLEY: Todd Haynes's Safe [pp.
22-25]INTERVIEWSFilming the Chicano Family Saga: An Interview with
Gregory Nava [pp. 26-28]
SPECIAL REPORTThe Writers Guild of America vs. The Blacklist
[pp. 29-29]Lawrence of Arabia: Elements and Facets of the Theme
[pp. 30-32]Apologia [pp. 33-34]
Contributors [pp. 35-35]RACE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CINEMA:
PART 5Disney's 'Politically Correct' "Pocahontas" [pp. 36-37]THE
LONG MARCH: From Wong to Woo: Asians in Hollywood [pp. 38-40]
INTERVIEWSAn Incredibly True Cinematic Adventure: An Interview
with Maria Maggenti [pp. 41-42]
FILM REVIEWSReview: untitled [pp. 43-44]Review: untitled [pp.
44-45]Review: untitled [pp. 46-46]
HOMEVIDEOCinema of the New Deal [pp. 47-49]DISC AND TAPE
REVIEWSReview: untitled [pp. 50-51]Review: untitled [pp.
51-51]Review: untitled [pp. 52-52]Review: untitled [pp. 52-53]
BOOK REVIEWSReview: untitled [pp. 54-55]Review: untitled [pp.
55-57]Review: untitled [pp. 57-58]Review: untitled [pp.
58-58]Review: untitled [pp. 58-59]Review: untitled [pp.
59-59]Review: untitled [pp. 59-59]
FESTIVALSThe Montreal World Film Festival [pp. 60-61]
FILM GUIDE [pp. 64-64]Back Matter
