Deadline at Dawn E-Book

Judith Williamson

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1993

Beschreibung

Judith Williamson takes herself to the movies, and this book contains the reviews she wrote as film critic for Time Out, City Limits, the radical alternative London weekly listings paper, and the New Statesman. This book contains her journalism, analysis of those times and her career as a journalist in a turbulent England with fierce labour relations raging, both in the NUJ, and during the Miner's Strike. The book covers most films on general release in these years, as well as esoteric foreign movies.

Leseprobe

JUDITH WILLIAMSON

DEADLINE AT DAWN

Film Criticism 1980–1990

Marion Boyars London • New York

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Where the columns and reviews in this book first appeared in magazines, their source is indicated by the following abbreviations:

N.S. (NewStatesman), T.O. (TimeOut) and C.L. (CityLimits).

Contents

Title Page

Author’s Note

Foreword:Deadline at Dawn

Introduction:Film Criticism

Viewfinder — The Short Goodbye

Ways of Looking

Symptoms

In Dreams — Hearts of Men — Above the World — Fear and Loathing — Male Order — Kookies Crumble — The Male of the Species — Fatal Strategies — Under the Volcano — Under the Hood — Diabolical Liberties — Having Your Baby and Eating It — Nightmare on Madison Avenue — Cutest Little Baby Face — Exorcism of a Nation’s Guilt — Carry On Up the Waterfall — Founding Father — Burnt Offering — Oh What a Beautiful Business — Man for Our Season — Up the Balls Pond Road — Appearances are Everything — And the Coloured Girls Go… — Soundtracks — Skin Trade

Strategies

The Interpretation of Dreams — Tricks of the Light — Pomp and Circumstance — Once More with Feeling — Into Africa — A World of Difference — Signs and Meanings — Riddles of the Robot — To Haunt Us — Pictures of Pictures — Dirty Linen — The Rules and the Game — Man, Myth and Maggots — In the Pink — Post-Sex Cinema? — Death in the Family Way — Short Circuit of the New Man — Permanent Revolution — Music While You Work — Career Opportunities — Arms and the Men — Let Their People Go — Do You Want to Know a Secret? — Causes Without a Rebel — Single Issues — Alain who will be 71… — Die Young, Stay Pretty — Out of Step — The Circus Comes to Town — Being and Nothingness — Head in the Clouds — Not New-Waving but Drowning — The Scissor-Men — Lean Cuts — Love or Money — Lights of the World

Ways of Showing

Presenting: Fatal Attractions

Sudden Fear — Farewell My Lovely — In a Lonely Place — Human Desire — Angel Face — Shockproof — The Lady from Shanghai — Build My Gallows High — The Dark Mirror

Programming: Epidemic Cinema

Panic in the Streets Season — Panic in the Streets — The Andromeda Strain — Bigger than Life — Survivors — Lifeforce — Shivers/The Fly — Parting Glances/The Ads Epidemic — Intimate Contact/Fatal Attraction/Bob Geldof on AIDS — Buddies — The Last Man on Earth/Doctor Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet — Sweet as You Are/No Sad Songs for Me — Invasion of the Body Snatchers — Day of the Dead

Programme Round-Ups

The Prison Film — Business Before Pleasure — Take a Letter Darling

Ways of Telling

Short Reviews

All that Heaven Allows — American Boy — Les Anges du Péché — A Propos de Nice/Taris/Zéro de Conduite/L’Atalante — L’Argent — Chronique d’un Eté — Citizens Band — City of Women — Coma — Destiny — Diary of a Chambermaid — Earth — El Salvador-The People Will Win — La Fiancée du Pirate — The Girl Can’t Help It — Italianamerican—Je, Tu, ll, Elle—Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000—Jules et Jim—Lady Chatterley’s Lover — The Leopard — Letter to Jane — The Little Foxes — The Lusty Men — Mädchen in Uniform — Man of Aran — The Men — The Milky Way — Model — Mother — Nanook of the North — News From Home — New York, New York — Nightmare Alley — Outland — The Philadelphia Story — Pickpocket — Pillars of Society — Raging Bull — The Reign of Naples — Rocco and His Brothers — Saturday Night Fever — Sisters or The Balance of Happiness — Slow Motion — Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — Song of Ceylon — ‘10’ — Voyage to Italy — The Woman in the Window

Ways of Speaking

Interviews

Who Is Truth, What is S/he?An Interview with Frederick Wiseman — Prisoner of Love:An Interview with Martin Scorsese

Discussions

Body Horror — Two Kinds of Otherness: Black Film and the Avant Garde

Index Section

Filmography

Bibliography

Reference — Fiction

Categorized Index

Studios — Directors and other Production Personnel — Actors and Actresses — Journals — Writers and Critics — Musicians and Composers

General Index

By the Same Author

Copyright

Foreword

Deadline at Dawn

This is a book not just about films, but about writing about films — something I have done for my living over many years, under circumstances suggested by its title. The contents have been structured, neither chronologically, which would make it a simple record of my own career, nor through categories of films, which might have made it appear more inclusive than it really is. Film criticism itself — types of approach, modes of writing — has been the ordering concept of the collection, and it is intended to raise questions about what film criticism can be and how it can function within a wider culture. The Introduction that follows goes further into this issue and offers a general critique of the field in which I have been working.

But the book can also be read along other axes. One is as a resource: I hope that the index, divided into a range of categories, will allow it to be used for reference, to be dipped into as well as read straight through. An index cuts through the text and allows specific threads to be pulled out — genres, social topics, works of individual directors.

Other threads, however, are more personal. In introducing each section below I have tried to give enough of its context to make sense of the work, without becoming too anecdotal or describing my feelings about every enterprise. What is personal is the work itself. It is impossible to write regularly, week after week, under intense pressure, without feeling that you are squeezing a little bit of yourself into it all the time. Being personal doesn’t have to mean being quirky. I live and work within the same culture that produces the films I write about; my feelings and reactions may be my own, but they are not necessarily only my own. I have never even tried to be impersonal in my writing, rather I have tried to make clear, as far as possible, where my personal reactions are coming from. The enormous response I have had from readers (whose letters would make an interesting collection on their own) suggests that, far from stressing one’s individuality, this approach allows people to make connections and find how precisely un-alone they may be in their responses to films. During my NewStatesman days, in particular, I received hundreds of letters from ‘single working women’ who swapped notes about many of the issues I was finding in those eighties films which became particularly preoccupied with that apparently neurotic figure.

Neurotic or not, that figure, or a version of her, was what I was during most of the time I turned out all this work. And since the foreword is the key to another axis of this book — my own life — I have chosen to outline briefly the sets of circumstances that were its backdrop over a decade.

At film school (The Royal College of Art) between 1977 and 1980, I had been working on a film about advertising funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain. By 1980 A SIGN IS A FINE INVESTMENT was shot, but only half put together, owing to a string of financial and production difficulties. On leaving college I had to get a job, both to pay my rent and to finish the film, and I applied for the post advertised as film critic and listings compiler on TimeOut magazine. Starting work there in the September of 1980 was a revelation to me. I had been an avid movie-goer all my life, worked on films — and directed my own — at film school, but never really understood the complicated network of their distribution, publicity and exhibition which I discuss in the Introduction. Much of my time was spent on the phone to cinemas and distributors, and even more of it was spent typing out listings (I compiled the ‘Independents’ section) and slowly learning the ways of a magazine office.

The TimeOut story will no doubt be written one day by someone else, but here is a short outline. In the spring of 1981 — when I had barely been on the magazine six months — we went out on strike in defense of our house agreement, an arrangement whereby every worker on the staff, from journalists through receptionists, typesetters, even the editor, earned the same salary. Obviously this was both fair, and made working relations far better than if we had all been on differentials, but the early eighties were a time of change in British business culture and the management wanted to drop the egalitarianism and introduce a pay hierarchy. At first the staff occupied the offices in protest — sleeping under your desk in a sleeping bag is a novel experience — and this in itself spoke of a commitment to the magazine: it was ‘ours’. After being evicted from the building we set up strike headquarters in the basement of a nearby theatre, and besides picketing, raising money and campaigning, we brought out our own, broadsheet version of the magazine, NotTimeOut.TimeOut then sued us for using their name, and after one memorable day when, following the court hearing, the entire staff spray-painted the words ‘Time’ and ‘Out’ off thousands of broadsheets, we carried on producing it as Not throughout the summer of ’81.

No matter what people may think to the contrary, being on strike is not an enjoyable experience. Financial difficulties and the disruption to one’s usual working rhythm can be an almost intolerable strain, though the sense of solidarity counteracts it to some extent. What the strike did bring out, though, was the relation between the magazine and its readers, to whom we distributed Not free, while collecting voluntary contributions around central London and on the picket line. (My rent was paid from money thrown into plastic buckets, something I recalled vividly a few years later when the miners were out.) Writing for Not, I was constantly aware of no longer being an anonymous commentator on movies, but being in a situation known to every reader of the broadsheet, and I learned one of the first lessons of journalism — your readers are real. They are actually there. You are not writing to yourself. There was a sense of liberation and for me, perhaps a loosening up of style and tone, which lasted through the rest of my time as a critic.

When it became clear that we were not going to ‘win’ the strike, the majority of ex-TimeOut staff decided to set up a new magazine, CityLimits, and this began in October 1981, in a building rented from the GLC in Islington. It was an unusual journalistic enterprise in a variety of ways. The film section office was furnished with chairs and rugs collected off skips, we built our own desks — rough benches round the room — and my work lamp was something I’d concocted from an old Ovaltine jar as a child. We no longer had access to the resources of back-reviews, film credits and pictures that had been on file at TimeOut, and still compiling ‘Independents’ I spent a day each week in the British Film Institute library looking up dates and credits of obscure films. We also had to review not only new releases, but all the older films playing in the repertory cinemas. I found myself knocking out, in an afternoon, brief reviews from memory of early Soviet films, Hollywood classics, documentaries — a sample of which is found in the third section of this book.

Post-strike debts meant I had to find a source of income besides CityLimits, where we earned a fraction of our old salaries, and so I also started teaching, in two different places, Maidstone College of Art and Middlesex Polytechnic. At Maidstone I became responsible for film studies, and found myself constructing courses which not only (I hope) educated my students in film genres and history but also educated myself. There may be no obvious trace of my years of film teaching in this book, except perhaps the occasional tendency to ‘lecture’, but it fed into my sense that explaining is a big part of criticism, that people should know a little more after reading a review, not just about the film in question but about film as a medium. I left Maidstone in 1986, after I was offered the job of film columnist on the NewStatesman (and after finishing my own film in 1983), but I still feel an enormous debt to all my students there whose interest and enthusiasm helped to fire my own.

Starting at the NewStatesman marked a big change in my position as a film critic. The arts editor, Harriett Gilbert, had previously been books editor on CityLimits (as had Malcolm Imrie, the deputy arts editor) and claimed, when she offered me the post, that it was on the basis of a peculiarly short and irreverent review of a Chantal Ackerman film, JE, TU, IL, ELLE, which is included in the section Ways of Telling, below. Whether or not this was entirely true, I was now being given a space to do more or less as I liked, and I did my best to transform the weekly cinema column from a straightforward review into a place to debate and discuss issues of contemporary film-making. I also (and this was hard!) decided to sacrifice a bit of my writing space to include a publicity box, in which I flagged upcoming events or screenings of otherwise under-publicized films. At first on the NewStatesman I was extremely nervous, but as letters from readers started to come in I again felt a sense of response and support which carried me like a wave through the most highly pressurized period of journalism I have ever known (or hope to know).

By this time I had left CityLimits but was teaching half the week at Middlesex Polytechnic (in Film and Contemporary Cultural Studies), spending every evening in preview screenings and writing on the weekend to meet my Monday deadline. I cannot imagine having survived this without the phenomenal support of three people in particular. Two of these were Harriett Gilbert and Malcolm Imrie at the NewStatesman, who bought me snacks and kept their tempers even when I was changing punctuation with a bike waiting to go to the typesetters, and from whom I learned something invaluable — how to edit my own copy. The first version you write isn’t necessarily the best, it can be improved, sentences can be reorganized; they taught me all this at the same time as encouraging me to use my own voice, a double lesson which has stayed with me ever since. I left the NewStatesman in 1988 when Harriett and Malcolm lost their jobs because I could not imagine working there without them.

The other person I cannot imagine that whole period without is Barry Curtis, with whom I taught — and still teach — film at Middlesex Poly. If he would ever have rather not been phoned up on a Sunday night to hear the final draft of a column, he never let it show; he accompanied me to endless previews, helped me relate the concepts we were teaching to my writing, and was indescribably generous with suggestions and comments.

That leads me to the main point of this foreword. Film is a shared medium; sometimes an audience response has been the basis for a review (cf. WISH YOU WERE HERE) and ideas about film are also shared, not owned. The work in this collection owes so much to discussions with, and the support of, other people, that I could often have footnoted the particular collaborations that fed into my arguments and conclusions. I have learned a lot about film editing from Brand Thumim and my brother, Trevor Williamson. I have benefitted enormously from my constant film-going companions: Chris Hale, with whom I have been going to movies for nearly twenty years; Mark Finch, with whom I also worked on the programme discussed in Ways of Showing; and many others, including Jane Root and Paul Kerr, who gave me air time on TheMediaShow, Jenny Turner, who often encouraged me to hold on to an unfashionable line, Geoff Andrew, who let me hang around the Electric Cinema at the peak of its rep days, Liz Wren and Peter Howden for allowing me the same state of grace at the Hampstead Everyman and Penny Ashbrook, at the Brixton Ritzy; Don Macpherson, my colleague and flat-mate during the strike and with whom I did the Scorsese interview in Ways of Speaking, my sister Janet, who came with me to the BBC for the filming of Fatal Attractions … I could go on and on.

And the compiling of this book, like every enterprise, would not have been possible without my friends. Christine Muirhead has given me constant support through every problem; Nigel Fountain has encouraged and commiserated through the ups and downs of production; and Petra Fried has immersed herself in the project for months, proof-reading, editing, researching, and helping to compile the index without which it would be a very different volume.

To all these people, I would like to say thank you, for helping me through countless deadlines at dawn.

London, 1992

Introduction

Film Criticism

When people find out you’re a film critic, the first thing they usually say is, ‘You get paid to watch films?’ Obviously, critics do more than just watch, and what this question (usually asked with varying degrees of incredulity and envy) really means is, ‘You get paid to say which films you like and don’t like?’

It’s a perceptive response because it concurs pretty accurately with most reviewers’ own conception of their jobs, though for ‘like’ and ‘don’t like’ they would probably substitute, ‘saying which films are good or not so good’. In this jump exists the greatest, gaping flaw in Western film criticism: its assumption of some scale of artistic merit which is too ineffable ever to be outlined or even discussed, except in relation to individual films, in which context good and bad do seem uncannily close to the ‘like’ or ‘don’t like’ of the particular reviewer. Popular ideas about almost any phenomenon are revealing because they often make explicit, assumptions that are implicitly held by more elite groups; and over the years that I have tried to bite back my irritation at being asked, ‘you get paid…?’ it has become vivid to me that certain ‘common sense’ ideas about film criticism are held by critics and their readers alike.

Film criticism seems self-evidently to be about films. But it is also about ideologies, taken-for-granted attitudes towards our society and its cultural forms. Further, it is linked into a very specific network of distributors, exhibitors and publications within which context a relatively small number of writers may be disproportionately influential on matters like which films get to be seen in a country at all. (Distributors have been known to seek critics’ approval before buying films.) But both the ideologies underlying film criticism, and the realpolitik of critical practice (‘if you plug our film then we’ll place an ad in your paper’) are hidden by the single, sweeping assumption that criticism is about individuals interacting with a particular ‘artistic’ work and then pronouncing on its merit. To discuss the criteria that determine such ‘merit’ would be impossible for most reviewers; a fact which then seems a measure of the profundity of their judgements, as though the less one were able to explain a choice, the more true, deep down, it must be.

The notions of individual taste and choice that underpin this critical perspective are deeply embedded in our society across a range of enterprises. You only have to examine the rhetoric surrounding the recent changes in Eastern Europe to realize that choice and taste are seen as the greatest guarantees of freedom Western capitalism has to offer. Taste, in the sphere of Art, is seen as something unspeakably profound.1 But it is also the ideological concept most at play when we celebrate the Market being thrown open behind the Iron Curtain, so that all those deprived people can choose other cars besides the Trabant. Choosing as consumers between products is supposed to be our primary means of expression as individuals, and so it is important that taste be seen as an entirely personal affair, not linked with class, education or other social factors. Any attempt to understand taste as more than an effect of ‘identity’ is dismissed as an attempt to reduce identity — alongside such grim limitations as only letting people buy Ladas.2

This may seem a very wide context in which to place film criticism, but it is the emphasis on individualism, choice and taste in the broader social arena which renders their ideological effects invisible in the narrower world of the critic. It is obviously irrational that taste should be seen as at once highly individual, and yet significant of deep value, but this is where the peculiar position of the critic comes in: someone whose ‘personal’ judgements represent something supposedly inherent in the objects of judgement (the films) themselves. Because the premises of traditional criticism are fraught with contradictions, it is a hard task to outline them simply; but to summarize, one could say that critics’ judgements are seen as at once totally personal, and yet — paradoxically — profoundly objective. I have tried to suggest that the ‘personal’, supposedly random nature of taste effectively depoliticizes it, takes it away from the realm of class. But the other side of this contradiction, the idea of inherent value, plays a key role in maintaining what amount to class divisions in the realm of Culture, where some products are seen as infinitely more ‘value-ful’ than others.

The dominant feeling about culture in our society is still that there is a ‘High’ and a ‘Low’ culture and these are still seen as roughly dividing into ‘Art’ and ‘Mass Media’. Most ‘serious’ film critics in our national press still have a vague notion of artistic worth that fixes more happily onto, for example, a Bergman film than a Hollywood blockbuster. It is interesting that the one piece of film theory absorbed into general critical use is the auteur theory, which views directors as ‘authors’ of films, thereby admitting them to the approved rank of artists, alongside the ‘high cultural’ figures of the past.

The same division works in reverse with a more populist approach, which will ridicule anything supposed to be ‘arty’ or pretentious, and thereby rules out taking seriously any more experimental or unconventional attempts at film-making. Anti-intellectualism is one of the strongest strands in British cultural life, and it takes a great many forms, from the snobs who disdain to discuss or explain an ‘artistic’ judgement, to the rabble-rousers who dismiss anything remotely ‘difficult’ or demanding on an audience. To side with one or other of these positions is to miss their complicity in denying people — audiences and readers — access to intellectual structures whereby they (the audiences and readers) might make their own critical judgements and decisions.

This enabling function of ideas and theories, which transcend individual examples, has been all but forgotten in a period which has seen the ‘theoretical world’ (mainly academia) move into an ever more baroque parody of itself, producing books, essays and journals that are almost incomprehensible even to those who want to read them. Theorists who set out, in the seventies, to change the world, have found themselves for the most part increasingly distant from a mainstream culture which, in the eighties, has been more in tune with popular anxieties and concerns than either left or right in the more overtly political arena. A whole edifice of ideas and theories about films grew up in the seventies around magazines like Screen and Afterimage, at a time when the Edinburgh Festival and the British Film Institute provided institutional foundations for important debates and developments of theory. Yet these have had, it now seems, little lasting impact on the broader critical scene, and it is important to ask why. Maybe the theorists were a little too ‘pure’, maybe a little too antagonistic to the mainstream, a little too unwilling to get their feet wet. Maybe the conventional critics — who have changed little, even in terms of personnel, over decades — were a little too threatened, a little too complacent, a little too lazy to re-examine their assumptions. But none of these factors can be as crucial as the way that, again, the two ‘opposites’ merely confirmed and strengthened one another’s positions, forming a complementary whole. If you want to put people off ideas, there is no better way to do it than by making them appear difficult, obscure, accessible only to a few dedicated brains. Some people are afraid of encountering ideas and theories, and some people are afraid of sharing them: the two go together. Thus a great many useful perceptions about film are unavailable to the film-going public, who continue to rely on the consumer advice broadcast by those few, and largely unchanging, arbiters of ‘taste’.

I have so far discussed the social, cultural and intellectual assumptions affecting film criticism today — but what of films? Are they ‘Art’ or ‘Entertainment’ — are they tools of the ‘dominant ideology’ or channels of subversion? Most criticism takes up one side or the other in each of these paired questions, thereby again pre-empting an examination of the polarities themselves. Usually up-market critics go with the ‘Art’ idea, but the form of ‘Art’ that film is most frequently treated as is literature. You could take the cinema columns of most daily papers and read the reviews in them as if they referred to novels: very often it is the ‘story’ that is being judged, not its visual rendering. Ours is a strongly literary culture and the number of British films based on novels is itself an index of our fear of ‘pure’ film. It is striking at the moment that novelists are seen as ‘natural’ choices for film reviewing, or even directing: as if all art or media forms were immediately interchangeable. Writers have suddenly become film ‘experts’ and are granted fellowships at the British Film Institute, or canvassed for their opinions on CITIZEN KANE in national newspapers. All this increases the sense that film is merely an adjunct of writing, and not a medium with its own, quite specific, modes of meaning. Those of us engaged in teaching film studies face an uphill task, as we teach our students to see film as film, only to have them go home and read or hear some novelist of the moment expounding their — usually non-visual — impression of cinema today.

The view of film as Entertainment perhaps comes closest to an acknowledgement of the place of cinema in social and cultural life: it engages with the notion of an audience’s enjoyment of, or at least ‘kick’ from, films, and also gets closest to linking consumption and production, which are — since film-making is an industry — intimately connected. Yet the ‘entertainment’ brigade usually use the prefix ‘just’ or ‘only’ as their particular device for avoiding closer examination of a film’s meanings. ‘Oh, it’s just entertainment’ someone will say, when you venture to suggest that some popular film is racist, or a Disney extravaganza reinforces gender roles. This attitude incorporates the phrase, ‘You’rereadingtoomuchintoit’ — an accusation which constantly crosses the path of any serious writer about popular culture. The fact that film as video is now a major part of home entertainment has remained largely unaddressed critically owing to a combination of the ‘just entertainment’ position on the one hand, and on the other, a dislike of the big screen reduced to the small which has prevented many of us from getting to grips with its ideological and commercial importance. (Sony bought up Columbia Pictures not to become film producers, but to control the software — film-as-video — that belongs with its own hardware — VCRs.) Entertainment as popular pleasure, and entertainment as commercial enterprise, are aspects of cinema, and now the film-video industry, that few critics have systematically investigated or engaged with.

Perhaps this is partly because critics’ own contribution to the commercial enterprise is often a source of hard-to-give-up glamour. How exciting to be flown out to Los Angeles to interview a big star! How impressive to be able to use directors’ first names casually in conversation! How clear that those intoxicating privileges would be withdrawn if they were to result in truly critical copy! Most of the critics on daily papers and TV film programmes work in close collaboration with film producers and distributors, a collaboration that works well for both sides. Critics provide punchy copy that can be used on posters — ‘A masterpiece’, ‘Best film of the year’ — while their names on the posters enhance their fame and reputations. The sycophantic attitude of most critics towards ‘big name’ actors and directors guarantees that in exchange for hobnobbing with these figures, critics will produce, if not wholly favourable, at least greatly softened critical appraisal. Anyone starting out as a critic — as I did on TimeOut in 1980 — is usually amazed at the close circle formed by film producers, makers, distributors, exhibitors and critics. (I remember being shocked when crates of wine and whiskey turned up in the film department at Christmas, ‘gifts’ from ‘independent’ distribution and exhibition groups; and I vividly recall being told off by my editor after a distributor claimed I had not said hello to her at a party.) If you decide to operate outside that circle, many doors will be closed to you, many film clips unavailable, many interviews denied. But most critics are critics precisely because they like to feel the glamour of the movie world rub off on them — a pathetic exchange of independence for vicarious fame.

But what of the ‘independent’ scene itself, the field of low-budget, non-commercial film-making, the experimental, self-consciously political arena? Here, perhaps in defense against a more powerful mainstream, the collaboration between film-maker and critic is equally tight and fraught with anxiety. The ‘alternative’ film culture that grew up (again in the seventies) around the Independent Film-Makers’ Association and the film workshops, has, on the whole, shown a depressing unwillingness to accept lively criticism, and many would-be left-wing critics are so frightened of seeming not to be right-on that they cannot bring themselves to point out serious problems with, not just individual films, but the atmosphere in this field overall. A discussion in the last section of this book touches more specifically on this area, one in which I have been engaged not only as a critic but as a practitioner. The great contribution of independent film-making has been to propose the notion of a film culture that goes beyond mainstream production and criticism; its shortcoming has been its inability, for a variety of reasons, to produce it. Important as this oppositional scene has been, it is even more important to ask what we can learn from its failures.

If I were to make one general, indeed rather ‘cosmic’, point about all this, it would be that the greatest enemy of thought is fear. Fear of being judged; fear of being rejected; fear of appearing stupid; fear of seeming reactionary; fear of losing connections; fear of being misunderstood; fear of ridicule; fear of not being glamorous; and so on. But the privilege of writing in the public arena should demand a certain kind of courage. Ours is in some respects a peculiarly ‘critical’ culture, partly because it takes less courage to imply something obliquely in terms of hidden criteria than it does to reveal what one actually thinks. The problem with almost all criticism today is that it does not reveal its premises, it projects a certain kind of view while giving readers and viewers no critical access to what that view is. Film writing could be a way of producing and distributing knowledge — to borrow terms from film-making itself — but it tends at present to obscure knowledge, to refuse access to ideas which people could use forthemselves. In this sense it reproduces precisely the political ideology we have habituated ourselves to in the so-called Western democracies whereby, as Marx once said, it is the arbitrary, inexplicable quality of events that guarantees, in our eyes, their unquestionable naturalness.

I have sketched rapidly across areas about which there is much more to say: to examine them fully would demand an entire book about film criticism, while this is, at its simplest, a collection of film criticism. Yet I hope it will function in some respects as a book about film writing, or, still more broadly, about the potential for a film culture, an arena consisting not just of films and critics but of informed audiences and public debate: an arena of development and change rather than assessment and critique.

I have organized the book very much with this aim in mind. All the original material — reviews, programme notes, transcribed debates — is passionately concerned with films themselves. But I have selected and structured the material not so much in terms of films — their content or genre, directors or themes — as in terms of formats and approaches: ways of discussing films. I hope that these ways go against the grain of the patterns I’ve described here, and that the formats show the range of contexts in which such discussions can take place.

I finish this introduction with two columns from the NewStatesman, a ‘manifesto’ written when I was a few months into the job, and a ‘farewell’ written when I was about to leave. Between them they summarize my own project in film criticism, and they mark out the ground for the next section of this book, Ways of Looking.

Viewfinder

During the recent London Film Festival I took part in a symposium on ‘The Function of Film Criticism’. Since the people most affected by my views on that subject are the readers of this column, it seems a good place to outline some of them.

The LFF debate was not as productive as it might have been because a dichotomy was set up from the start between ‘Artist’ and ‘Critic’. This polarized concept is never a very useful one, but in the case of cinema it is particularly unhelpful because planning, raising the money for and making a film is a very different process from, for example, writing a poem. The idea of an audience is built in from the outset, otherwise most films would not be funded: which means that films, perhaps more than any other medium, not only carry the particular obsessions of a single ‘artist’ but usually indicate some of the preoccupations of the society they’re made in, the audience they’re made for.

This is also true of film criticism itself. The criticism found in almost all the daily and weekly national press sees its role as assessing the latest releases: fitting seamlessly into the familiar structures of consumer choice by letting us know whether films are good, quite good, not very good, bad, and so on — in other words, whether they’re worth spending our money on. But what this liberal humanist criticism never asks is, good for what? Bad for whom? This form of criticism assumes a consensus which fails to distinguish different interests of different groups and the different functions of different films.

Perhaps the most pointless of all criticism is found in the TimeOut/CityLimits sloganizing — ‘unmissable’, ‘avoid’, ‘a must-see film’ (what precisely is a must-see film?) — pointless because the variety of reasons for which people go to see a film is completely ignored. Where the ‘miss/don’t miss’ formula coincides with a simplistic ‘right-on’ politics, it also obscures the ideological complexities of a film like, say, TOP GUN — the most popular film of the year in the USA, yet dismissed in one line by CityLimits.

At the other end of the spectrum from the Hit or Miss (‘I’ll give it five’) brigade there is the enormous body of film theory, developed through the seventies in journals like Screen and Framework, which has drawn on semiotics and psychoanalysis in an attempt to analyze films as ‘texts’, to understand the position of the viewer (‘reader’) of the text, and focusing on the ways that meaning is produced in the relation between the two, rather than simply being ‘put in the film’ by the director. These theories offer a completely different approach to cinema; given the similarities in the form of films and dreams, psychoanalytic theory in particular is very helpful in offering a perspective on mainstream movies like E.T. or RAMBO and their widespread appeal.

However, the biggest problem about most academic film theory is that it is often very hard to understand, partly because of the terminology used but also because most of its debates have remained sealed off in the academic world and there seems to have been little will to communicate theoretical ideas to a wider audience. It is true that the notoriously incomprehensible Screen has been turned into a more accessible journal under the current editorship. Yet there is still an enormous gulf between film theory and most film criticism.

I believe that this gulf is neither necessary nor inevitable. Film theory offers not so much comments on particular films, but ways of looking at films which can be used more than once, as it were, going against the grain of the consumer ethic. I would like to use this space to suggest ways of thinking about different kinds of film (as with the role of women in horror films, which arose recently with SMOOTH TALK1). Unlike many academic theorists I strongly believe that all really useful ideas can and should be expressed clearly. On the other hand there is a strongly anti-intellectual streak in our mainstream press; but the fear of ideas is only the other side of the coin from obscuring them.

One aspect of putting ideas forward is that you can no longer be the invisible arbiter but have to declare your position. It should be clear to anyone who has read this column over the last few months that I am writing with a feminist and a Marxist politics: though as a film school graduate and having worked as a film-maker before coming to this job I see no reason why a political criticism should preclude an enjoyment of cinema. But just as film theories can provide ways into the structure of films, so can a political view of cinema provide ways of questioning assumptions about the structure of society, of challenging what we take for granted.

I have already tried to move away from the old system of reviewing all the week’s new releases. While I do intend mainly to focus on current films, I will also, in future, discuss other films, not necessarily new — or kinds of films (as with the recent column on animation1).

In trying to provide a background to the film workshop movement, in last week’s column,2 I also became aware of the dearth of information in the press about the really thriving film culture in Britain — the infrastructure created by the workshops. Here is another gulf, between a whole area of activity and its near-invisibility in the mainstream press; one which I will also try to bridge in this space.

N.S. 12 December 1986

The Short Good-bye

Film is a unique medium. Writing about a film is different — or should be different — from writing about a book, or writing about a record. Yet our traditional film criticism, the kind familiar in the mainstream press, has always tended to treat films like novels: plot and characterization are assessed, themes drawn out and, by the more socially minded, some sort of Leavisite analysis of cultural and moral worth attempted.

Around the time I started this column in 1986 I wrote a ‘manifesto’ which was both a critique of what I call mainstream criticism and a laying out of guidelines for myself. I attacked the notion of films as discrete art objects that it is critics’ job to evaluate according to some supposedly objective criteria. The idea of the art critic responding in isolation to the individual painting and pronouncing its intrinsic worth, the film critic sitting in the dark and deciding which films are ‘good’ and which ‘bad’, ignores the extent to which meanings are determined by social context and also assumes that the critic herself has no position but is somehow ‘neutral’.

Against the backdrop of this evaluative criticism it has been an important project to place cinema in a social context and examine its meanings as part of a wider cultural currency. As I have frequently pointed out, to ‘work’ successfully (make money) mainstream films have to deal in some way, however oblique, with the concerns of their audience and thus function to some extent as a barometer of the social climate. It is possible to read films ‘symptomatically’ and such a criticism can be politically valuable for its diagnosis of ideological conditions.

Yet there is one phenomenon which worries me more now than it did in ’86 and that is the tendency to use this kind of ‘cultural criticism’ perspective to treat all media as interchangeable, all simply as channels for ideological messages or fashionable concerns — an approach which shares precisely the same premise as the more traditional criticism. Whatever the difference between treating films as pure art objects or as mere ideological symptoms, both approaches fundamentally ignore film as film.

A concern for the specific physical properties of film has always been a characteristic of the avant-garde — to the extent that some experimental film-makers have created works without even filming but by scratching the surface of the film stock — but it should not be a concern which is confined to the avant-garde. A materialist criticism which seeks to understand the real world (an unfashionable concept these days) must get to grips with the medium as something concrete, not just as a vehicle for ideas or meanings which can be extracted and then critiqued. What are the particular qualities of film? What can it do that other media can’t? How does film work, spatially, aurally, graphically? These are questions that film-makers must ask (not that they always do) — and so should critics.

However, they are not questions that are easily answered except through a lot of watching. There is no short cut to the experience of films, actually seeing them, seeing how they work, seeing how they work in different ways. And this is the other thing about both the traditional and, even more, the new postmodern approach: specific knowledge of film forms and of their history appears redundant.

Each film exists temporally on two axes: socially, culturally, politically, it is a part of the present in which it is made — but it is also a part of the history of cinema, belonging perhaps to a particular genre whose framework has developed over time, drawing perhaps on technical innovations that have produced specific visual effects, drawing, perhaps consciously, perhaps unconsciously, on the styles of films that are already a part of that history. This is not to suggest that cinema ‘progresses’: it doesn’t necessarily get better, but it does have a history (the two notions have been so mixed up in recent theoretical writings that history is rapidly becoming another outdated concept). And it does help, in understanding film, to know something of that history, to have seen films.

But knowledge, too, is becoming a dated category. It has never been all that easy to produce serious, informed journalism in a profession dominated by short deadlines and short memories. This is the last cinema column which I’ll be writing in this magazine; I hope that in the last two years I have done more or less what I’m talking about here.

N.S. 3 June 1988

1 I discuss this further in ‘But I Know What I Like’ in ConsumingPassions.

2 The Lada was the Soviet state-manufactured car, the Trabant its equivalent in East Germany.

1 See p. 39.

1 See p. 102.

2 See p. 116.

Ways of Looking

Even before ways of writing, speaking, informing about films, one needs ways of looking at them. How to see films both in relation to society and to the cinema itself, how to approach them both as works in their own right and as part of our wider history, how to enjoy them and at the same time to interpret or understand them — all these questions demand, not one single answer, but a sense of the different perspectives from which a film can be viewed. At the same time, there may seem to be so many of these that it can be hard to get an overview on the varied approaches, theories and positions available.

Very roughly and crudely, all these ways of looking at films could be seen as falling into two categories. These are not necessarily separate in practice, since a single film is always doing many things at once, and the tools for understanding what it’s doing may be drawn from a wide repertoire of conceptual frameworks — even if some of these are declared, by their most avid proponents, to be incompatible. There is not space here to discuss in detail Marxism, feminism, psychoanalytic theory, or semiotics, all of which offer useful tools for understanding cultural phenomena, and all of which I use to some degree in almost every piece of criticism. But in structuring this section I have, at the risk of oversimplifying, taken a wide sweep and outlined two broad and complementary approaches to film: you can see it as symptomatic, expressing, reflecting, deflecting — not necessarily deliberately — key experiences and concerns of the society that produces and consumes it; and you can see it as strategic, involving a deliberate use of, and engagement with, the cinematic medium, for some specific aesthetic and/or political purpose. The two approaches are obviously not alternatives; in looking carefully at any film one would expect to employ both. It is worth noting that one corresponds, very roughly, to a sort of ‘unconscious’ of film-making/popular culture: films may be barometers of moods and events whether or not their producers and makers intend this to be so. On the other hand, film-making is a process loaded with choices at every stage, and most films do have a definite project, even if it is simply to ‘be entertaining’ or ‘look good’. Examining people’s uses of the medium helps us to understand its specific properties and potential; while, interestingly, examining how films work as symptoms of issues beyond themselves also brings us round to these same properties and potential, by a different route.

Understanding how films work must be the primary aim of both film-makers and critics, and would liberate film audiences from being at the mercy of either.

This section consists almost entirely (there is one exception) of columns written for the NewStatesman between 1986 and 1988. Having a regular space allowed me, over those years, to develop approaches to film which I intended to be useful beyond the instance of any one movie: which could, in effect, be recycled. Because I wanted to suggest waysoflooking, rather than simply review new releases, the selection of films to write about each week was made on the basis of the issues they raised, as much as what I thought about a particular film itself. Similarly, the division of this section into two parts has been on the basis of the critical approach used in each column, rather than type of film, director, or theme.

Symptoms

Big budget films are expected to return money to their producers. To do this, they have to draw in large audiences, and to do that, they must appeal to those audiences, ‘strike the right chord’. Popular films always address — however indirectly — wishes, fears and anxieties current in society at any given moment. This is not to say that films can be designed to do this on purpose, otherwise producers would never make a loss; rather, that those which ‘hit’ (as GHOST did recently, breaking box-office records) must be touching on a nerve. Sometimes a spate of films, all on one theme, suggests a general concern: GHOST, to pursue this example, is one of about a dozen films (FLATLINERS, ALMOST AN ANGEL, etc.) concerned with an afterlife and with defying death. One could link this with a general interest in ‘New Age’ and spiritual matters at the moment and one could, more revealingly, see it as a deflected or re-worked concern about death just when the Aids epidemic is spreading to the so-called general (i.e. straight, white) population in Western countries. Anyone interested in the fantasies and fears of our culture should pay close attention to successful films, for their success means precisely that they have touched on the fantasies and fears of a great many people.

However, being a film critic and not a sociologist, I have to ask not only how films function symptomatically in relation to social concerns, but how they do this asfilms. The nature of the film medium makes it particularly apt for the articulation of wishes and anxieties, and the way the history of the medium has developed to produce highly formalized, repetitive patterns known as genres allows for the handling of often very difficult or disturbing themes within reliably familiar formulae. It is only by understanding how films produce meanings that it is possible to ‘read’ them symptomatically, to find out what they mean.

All films work on two axes, the temporal and the spatial. A film takes place in time: a plot unfolds, a story is told. But inseparable from the film’s constant narration of its story is the image, which is the means of narration, and which nevertheless has an existence, a capacity for meaning, not entirely harnessed to its narrative function. Usually it is what films picture, not what they tell us about what they picture, that stays in the mind. The way things are visually presented in a film is known as mise-en-scène: and this is a key element in producing meaning, ‘setting the scene’. We are all familiar with the kind of process where a movie will set up, for example, an image of glamorous underworld life where gangsters are sexy and get whatever they want — until they are killed or arrested in the last five minutes: early US gangster films were required to produce such endings to avoid illegal ‘incitement to crime’, but nevertheless the ending cannot remove the imagery that functions throughout the rest of the film. Equally, movies have traditionally brought us images of sexually desirable women while insisting — through the plot — how bad and undesirable they are.

The tension between plot and image is what gives film an enormous capacity for containing contradictions — a sort of having your cake and eating it process which is ideologically very effective. Films are, of all media forms, the closest to dreams, and Freud suggests that dreams function to re-work conflicts and anxieties which might otherwise disturb an individual’s sleep. Popular films re-work conflicts and contradictions within a wider cultural field; like other commercial media (e.g. advertising) they must be quick to address new experiences in their audiences (markets) while at the same time, no matter how frightening or disturbing those experiences, they must deal with them in a way that is bearable, even enjoyable (in other words, marketable). Just as Freud describes ‘overdetermination’ — the converging of several factors in determining an element of a dream, which will then serve several purposes at once — so films usually perform a variety of (sometimes contradictory) functions or address several apparently conflicting issues at once. Large as their budgets may be, mainstream films are, on the level of meaning, nothing if not economical.

None of this can be understood by thinking of films as if they were merely animated novels. Images have a visual grammar of their own, a language which is utterly different from verbal language. But over and above the visual language it shares with photography and painting, film has its own very specific ways of producing meanings and pleasures. In particular, music, movement and montage are three dimensions of film-making which can transform a written script. I have written at length about the visual and physical undercutting of a verbal script in an essay on ‘10’ in an earlier book, ConsumingPassions. In this book, an example where the physical dimension enhances, rather than counteracts, a film’s project is the movie TOP GUN: its flying sequences produce an actual sensation of movement which, allied with a powerful music track, work to create an extraordinary level of excitement. This film, however, is not without its contradictions; ostensibly a love story between the young flying recruit (Tom Cruise) and his instructor (Kelly McGillis) it functions visually as a romance between Cruise and his male opponent/alter ego (Val Kilmer). Their eyelines are constantly matched as the film cuts between glances from one to the other; tensions are created and connections made through editing, which function against the more obvious grain of the boy-woman romance. This level of meaning could not be found in the film ‘on paper’ and cannot be ‘seen’ in its dialogue: it is entirely visual.

Equally specific to film is the pattern of audience expectations constructed around genres. Genre is a means through which an audience bringsknowledge to a film: thrillers, westerns, horror films, comedies etc., provide frameworks in which the audience’s capacity to recognize certain stock elements of plot, theme and image creates the potential for great subtlety of meaning where these conventions may be stretched, played with or subverted. In the horror film, for example, it is a convention that a shaky camera roaming through woods or round a house represents the viewpoint of the monster — so expectations and suspense can be built up, exploited or exploded. Conventions from one genre can be used in a film that doesn’t initially appear to be within the category: I argue in this section, for instance, that FATAL ATTRACTION can be seen as a version of the horror film, and it employs the mechanism just described. Through use of genre conventions an apparently run-of-the-mill horror movie may speak eloquently about sexuality and the body, or a ‘second-rate’ thriller articulate widespread fears about knowledge and secrecy. Much has been written about genre — both general and specific — within film studies, yet it is striking how regularly genre films are ignored by most ‘highbrow’ critics. Many writers block off almost all popular genre productions from their critical interest by dismissing them as silly or nonsensical. I have repeatedly read critics on national newspapers dismiss out of hand some runaway success like PRETTY WOMAN or DIEHARD 2 without a glimmer of interest in why the film has been successful, what it has appealed to in so many millions of people. That position may be all right for self-confessed elitists, but not for those who think of ourselves as socialists. We have to take seriously the complexities of film language and not assume that things we don’t like or understand don’t make sense. The term ‘symptom’ itself is borrowed from psychoanalysis and it is worth remembering how radical was Freud’s perception, at the beginning of this century, that ‘symptomshaveasense and are related to [the patient’s] experience.’1 (My italics.) Films also have a sense, and are related to someone’s experience: the critic’s job is to find out what that sense is, and if possible whose experience it relates to.

The columns in this part of the section all, in various ways, look at films symptomatically, and certain concerns crop up again and again. Obviously issues of class, race and gender have been dealt with throughout film history, but I think it is possible to trace some new ways of experiencing them, new categories of experience, in these movies of the late 1980s, which tell us a lot about our own time. A key example is the Single Working Woman — the ‘SWW’ — a repeated and developing figure found in very many of the mainstream movies I viewed week after week. Eighties movies also articulated anxieties about the New Woman in a variety of ways, bringing us the nervous, sensitively goofy ‘New Man’ on the one hand, the iron-clad, baby-faced RoboCop and Rambo on the other. A fascination with femininity as dangerous, and with the mutability of the body, was linked to a voyeuristic fascination with the ‘other side of town’ — other for ‘yuppies’, that is: the side where working-class and black people live. An extraordinary number of films hinged round a trip of this kind made by white, middle-class men. Class is a political issue that has been grossly neglected by those in left-wing politics during this era, yet popular films have spoken vividly of class anxieties and the fantasy of permeable class barriers. The wish to escape class has been linked, in these movies, to an obsession with ‘lifestyles’, and more generally with social surfaces: clothes, furnishings, the trappings of social existence which, because they are trappings, can be easily bought, changed or exchanged (and are particularly vividly portrayed through mise-en-scène). Perhaps a certain class resentment and social outrage could also be read in the number of upwardly mobile interiors that got smashed up in the films of the 1980s. Popular films have also — at a time when left-wing theorists have been obsessed with the ‘personal’ — explored de-industrialization, the breakdown of city life, new financial markets, the growth of corporate power, corruption within big business and the collapse of law and order, in a series of dystopian scenarios that have used genre formulae of the thriller or PREDATOR-type horror pic to full-blown effect. Urban decay, deep racial anxieties, the aftermath of colonization, a search for the ‘exotic’, a love-hate romance with colonized cultures — all this can be found in the mass-market films of the eighties, more clearly than in any political analysis I have yet read.

Ordering these columns was difficult, as themes appear right across the films, not neatly demarcated but often in complex overlays; however, I have organized them so that a read straight through should both illustrate the more general ideas I have outlined here, and trace the specific concerns that the movies of this period in Western culture have explored.

In Dreams

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

At a party last Saturday a complete stranger asked why I don’t use this column to say which films are worth going to. To me, that seems as inappropriate as asking a geographer or geologist why they don’t tell you where to go for your holiday: my job — as I see it — isn’t to provide a brochure of favourite beauty spots but to map out the ground and try to understand its construction. Different things are ‘worth seeing’ to different people for different reasons; the mainly middle-class, leftish professionals who most often ask me that question usually have in mind a meaningful art movie which will address what they see as ‘relevant’ issues at the same time as giving them pleasure.