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 It
is one of the continuing disgraces of American film studies that the most
important body of cinematic work of the past three decades has still not
been given the critical attention it deserves. Beginning in the late 1950s,
a small group of independent filmmakers, working outside of the Hollywood
system with newly available and affordable portable equipment, rejected
the notion that film had to be designed for mass-consumption. They invented
American art film. Their works (which include John Cassavetes' Faces,
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams, Paul
Morrissey's Trash and Flesh, Barbara Loden's Wanda,
Robert Kramer's Ice and Milestones, Mark Rappaport's Local
Color and Scenic Route, Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky,
Claudia Weill's Girlfriends, Sara Driver's Sleepwalk, and
Rick Schmidt's Morgan's Cake—to name only the most important
examples) define the great tradition in recent American film. Yet, given
the terrifying economics of film distribution and promotion in our culture,
combined with the appalling neglect of these artists by critics apparently
still in thrall to Hollywood forms of mass-entertainment, it is not surprising
that it is a lost tradition. The major works of post-war American film
remain unknown and undiscussed.
David James' Allegories
of Cinema is a long-overdue attempt to redress that situation. His
book (notwithstanding its misleading subtitle, which suggests that its
subject is mainstream sixties movies) is a detailed critical history of
the first two decades of the independent movement. However, James' analytic
methods fatally doom his attempt. James is an unapologetic Marxist, and
his book suffers from the limitation of much recent politically and socially
engaged criticism (unfortunately including most feminist analysis of art,
literature, and film): Interpretation becomes a matter of subjecting the
works under examination to a series of ideological purity tests for politically
“correct” social, intellectual, and sexual values.
The problem with such an approach
is its hopeless reductiveness. The political and social categories employed
to parse the texts being discussed are inadequate to appreciate their
expressive subtleties. Flat-minded formulas about what is or is not ideologically
acceptable or socially progressive substitute for nuanced analysis of
artistic expression.
James' book is symptomatic
of some of the most disturbing tendencies in recent criticism. In the
hands of critics of James' stripe, authors are no longer regarded as being
powerful, distinctive makers of meaning, and artistic texts are not approached
as special, enhanced uses of language distinguishable from its ordinary
uses. Rather, both authors and their works are treated as more or less
direct expressions of the culture that surrounds them. Once that conceptual
shift has taken place, criticism becomes a form of intellectual history
or sociology (only the objects of its attention are different). The seduction
of this approach is obvious—which is undoubtedly why it has won so
many converts in the past two decades. It offers what seems like an enormous
enlargement of the scope and importance of criticism. The critic is no
longer a connoisseur of “irrelevant” and superficial aesthetic
effects, but is transformed into an analyst of “deep” cultural
structures of understanding.
It is an intoxicating vision
of the function of criticism; the only problem is that, in the rush to
significance, the actual ways artistic language operates get forgotten.
Works of genius are not explainable in terms of a series of generic cultural
meanings. Shakespeare is not synonymous with the Elizabethan world view;
in fact, the power and wonder of his work begin where cultural descriptions
of it end. Great artists inflect and comment upon the systems of expression
into which they are born—they do not merely repeat them in their
work.
That might be said to be the
basic difference between strongly authored works of art and weakly authored
(or unauthored) manifestations of mass culture. Star Wars and The
CBS Evening News are reducible to a set of cultural myths and expressive
conventions, but the films of Cassavetes, Loden, and May (like the novels
of Hawthorne and Faulkner) are not. The greatest texts punch imaginative
and emotional holes in the very systems of understanding that semiologists,
sociologists, and Marxist critics describe. It is this appreciation of
the path of creation as an idiosyncratic, eccentric swerving away from
systematization that ideological critics lose sight of.
It is not that there is no
value whatsoever in the sociological approach, but it is clear that the
necessary next step in criticism is to begin to recognize how the strongest
authors and texts defy ideological understanding and resist cultural codification.
The great task facing the next generation of critics will be to explore
the mysterious movements of the individual artistic imagination against
the expressive structures that always threaten its freedom....
—Excerpted from a review
of David James, Allegories Of Cinema, printed in American Studies
(Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas), Volume 32, number 1 (Spring
1991), pp. 123-124.
To read more about fads
and fashions in academic criticism, click on “Multicultural Unawareness”
in the Carney on Culture section, the essays “Sargent and
Criticism” and “Eakins and Criticism” in the Paintings
section, “Day of Wrath: A Parable for Critics” in
the Carl Dreyer section, “Capra and Criticism” in the
Frank Capra section, and all of the other pieces in this section.
This page
only contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's writing.
To obtain the complete text as well as the complete texts of many pieces
that are not included on the web site,
click here.
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