If future historians need to look for signs of virtuous defeatism in advance of the victory, I Hear Huckabee and Sayles’ “Silver City” are the right place to start.
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Never in American history was an art form and its film critics so closely united with the audience as in the late 1960s (confused society and values, confused movies).
The intellectualization of film: the New Cinema demanded new kinds of critics to referee/create a new kind of dialogue between art and audience.
Critics like gatekeepers of culture, illuminating 81/2, moralizing Blow-Up, politicizing “Bonne and Clyde.”
Roland Barthes about Chabrol’s Beau Serge: “What’s terrible about the cinema is that it makes the monstrous viable.
But it does so with wit, finesse, imagination, or just plain willful and calculated.
The most powerful and disturbing element of movies is its ability to put the audience in almost any physical setting, and do it immediately.
Released from the normal limitations of our physical bodies, the camera, boosted by editing, can range around, through and over a familiar world to show the variety of POVs in quick succession.
Film is unique because itis different from other arts.
It surpasses the forms it resembles.
The unique properties of film.
How it transcends the limitations of other forms.
American films that disclose subtle details and subcurrents with each subsequent viewing:
Psycho: first hour
Sweet Smell of Success:
The Wild bunch
Kael
Americans confuse morality and art to the detriment of both
Among the educated, morality tends to mean social-cnsciousness, explicit, machine-tooled, commercialized social consciousness (the claim that L’Avventura is not “saying anything”
Our movoes are the best proof that Americans are at their liveliest and freest when their filmmakers dont take themselves too seriously.
Sometimes, more life comes through in routine thrillers, prison dramas, and comedies than in prestige, important, serious films like Best Years of Our Lives, or A Place in the Sun
American versin of self-conscious imitations of European art
Or Gentleman’s Agreement, with the indigenous paralysis of Hollywood problem picture, which is morally solved in advance.
