Falling Behind

[poliphilo]

I do try to keep abreast of the culture, but it's hard: so much product, so little time- not to mention the huge backlog of older stuff I've never got round to grappling with- Beowulf for instance. Right now I'm trying to catch up by reading some modern novels. I just read The Kindly Ones and The Ghost- both excellent in their different ways. Next up I'm going to nibble at some Donna Tartt.

I try to watch the happening TV shows, but I seem to have lost touch with the cinema. I read the reviews, but I don't go to see the movies. I like to think it's a blip- and somewhere down the line I'll lay in a store of DVDs and get myself back up to date- but I suspect I'm kidding myself.

One area in which I've long since given up is music. Music- and I mean popular music of course- is made for the young by the young- and I'm in late middle age and just don't care any more. I'd like to care, but I don't. Of course I hear tunes I like in passing but the last time I felt involved with the scene was when the Sex Pistols gobbed all over it- and the only artist whose albums I regularly attend to is Bob Dylan.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Welles and Bunuel were always a minority taste- and the movies have always been about telling exciting stories. I don't think today's blockbusters are any improvement on the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood (with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.)

I agree about 3D. I read an advance review of Cameron's Avatar in which the guy said the constantly changing 3D perspectives made him sea-sick.

[sovay]

I agree about 3D. I read an advance review of Cameron's Avatar in which the guy said the constantly changing 3D perspectives made him sea-sick.

A couple of days ago, I came into possession of the second volume of Michael Powell's memoirs, Million Dollar Movie (1992). It turned up unexpectedly in a used book store; I have not read the first volume, although I do own his book on the making of The Edge of the World (1938; originally titled 200,000 Feet on Foula in reference to the amount of film shot, reprinted somewhat less evocatively under the same name as the film), but it starts with in 1948 with the aftermath of The Red Shoes and the filming of The Small Back Room and I am enjoying it very much so far, if for no other reason than I'm always curious to see how an artist views their own art. In any case, I just ran into this passage:

I saw a Hollywood film yesterday, January 31, 1984, with a contemporary theme and full of attractive people, talking Hollywood English. The current version is a funny sort of language. An Englishman might possibly understand one word in ten. I can imagine what the old-time film producers would have made of it: "I want to understand what I'm looking at. Take those actors away, wash their mouths out, spray their tonsils, fire the director. I don't want to see what they are saying. I want to hear it. Don't they realize that the British market is thirty-five percent of our European gross?"

The film was shot somewhere in the South, but it might as well have been Hollywood, for all the Spanish moss hanging on the trees. It has been so overdone in the past that it always looks to me as if the prop man has just nailed it there. Put it down as somewhere in a consumer society. The direction was sympathetic, but remained outside looking in. If I had been an American, I would have been very cross to think that this was the latest modern product of the Hollywood dream factories that had given us, in their day, films like The Best Years of Our Lives. This is what talkies and TV have done to the movies. The studio giants have gone, and their pygmy inheritors have taken us back to the 1930s, when two-dimensional images talked, and talked, and talked. And yet there are giants still, creative giants: the men who made Apocalypse Now, Reds, American Graffiti, Chariots of Fire, Mean Streets . . . all of them intensely personal films, but with a wild dissimilarity of budgets. It seems as if the film business has to burn itself out every twenty years or so, and start again. It seizes upon each new invention, gobbles it up, and is in its turn gobbled up by the invention: big screen, wide screen, triple screen; the tinted image, the hand-painted image, hand-painted color, Technicolor two-strip, Technicolor three-strip; CinemaScope, Todd-AO, Vista Vision—we have had them all, and looking back they seem to moviemakers to have been an enormous waste of time and money. The only invention that has justified itself—and it took years for the camera to regain its mobility—was the talking picture.

And I would not take Michael Powell as gospel—he thinks he failed completely to get his overwhelming love for the Kent countryside up on the screen with A Canterbury Tale; I don't think he could be more wrong about that if he'd practiced—but I thought of this conversation, and of you.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

A Canterbury Tale is a very personal film. I think Powell was far too close to it to see it clearly.

The first time I saw it I happened upon it by chance- flicking through channels- so at first I didn't know what I was watching- but even on the tiny TV I had then- with the image all grainy and snowy- it took me by storm. I think it's an extraordinarily beautiful film- both visually and emotionally.

I agree with him about the talkies. No other invention has changed the movies the way the coming of sound did.