Archives for August 2003

The Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting a series called “The Whole Wide World: Fifty Years of Widescreen Moviemaking,” starting today (well, maybe not!) and running through Sept. 4 at the Walter Reade Theatre, next door to the Juilliard School. I recently received an e-mail about the series containing this sentence: “The inauguration of CinemaScope 50 years ago changed the way we look at movies.” Literally speaking, of course, that’s true–movies do look different because of the invention of CinemaScope and the other widescreen processes that followed it–but did that change the way we look at them? And while we’re at it, was “Scope” (as film buffs love to refer to CinemaScope in lobby conversations, thus signifying their coolness) really such a great idea?

Like most art-related questions, this one isn’t as simple as it looks. Pre-Scope directors were mostly dubious about the various widescreen formats, which were introduced after World War II in order to help Hollywood compete with TV, the thought being that bigger pictures would tempt more Americans off their couches and back into their neighborhood movie houses. Older directors feared the loss of intimacy that would come from larger screens, and they were right to do so, as you can see by watching any of a hundred films shot in the Fifties by clueless directors who didn’t know what to do with all that extra space. In addition–though the inventors of CinemaScope couldn’t possibly have foreseen it–widescreen movies can’t be shown in their original form on a TV screen, whose “aspect ratio” closely resembles that of pre-Scope movies. Instead, the studios had to create special “pan-and-scan” prints of widescreen movies to be shown on TV, in which large chunks of the action simply vanished, letterbox viewing not yet having been contemplated. (For a viewer’s guide to aspect ratios, go here.)

In time, some older filmmakers got used to wider screens, while younger ones took the additional space for granted–which doesn’t necessarily mean they made good use of it. In examining the roster of widescreen films being shown at Walter Reade, I was struck by how few of them I’d go across the street to see. Yes, I’ll be glad to catch Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life, partly because James Mason is so good in it (I love his dark-brown Yorkshire accent) and partly because, like most of Ray’s films, it has yet to surface on DVD. But…Two-Lane Blacktop? El Cid? The Girl Can’t Help It? Aliens? Whenever I see schedules like this, I think to myself, film buffs are such geeks, by which I that whatever it is about movies that interests them, it isn’t their artfulness.

I told a friend of mine at lunch the other day that I thought the day would come when the producers of smart movies aimed at older viewers (i.e., anyone over 21) would bypass theatrical release altogether and market such films in more or less the same way novels are sold in bookstores. If that happens, I’ll be sorry to spend less time in theaters. The enveloping experience of watching a good film in a big, dark room–and in the company of a rapt audience–is unique and irreplaceable. Alas, it’s already been replaced, at least for most of us who love classic films. How many of the great movies of the past have you seen in a theater? Not many, I suspect, especially if you’re under 40 and don’t live in a film-friendly city like New York or Chicago.

Naturally, watching a movie at home has its own advantages, if you have a good TV and it’s the right movie. But there’s a catch: in a world where most people watch serious movies at home, the widescreen films of the past are destined to lose much of their impact. It happens that I’d never seen The Bridge on the River Kwai before I rented the DVD last month, and though it made an impression on me, I’m sure that impression was diminished drastically by the fact that I watched it on a letterboxed TV screen, not in a theater.

Is it possible that widescreen filmmaking will be seen in the very long run as an aberration–even a mistake? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time a “superior” technology turned out to be an artistic dead end.

A reader sent me this excerpt from Piano Notes, a book by the pianist-author Charles Rosen:

Before one played a new piece in London, Berlin, or New York, it used to be possible to try out the program for a small audience. (Composers, of course, prefer that a premiere of their work be held in an important city with proper press coverage.) It is not, as one might think, easier to play in a small town than in a large capital, and the stage-fright that is magnified by playing a new work is more or less the same wherever the recital takes place. But confidence increases naturally with successive performances. The concert series that used to be held in hundreds of small communities is dying out. It is not that the public for them is diminishing, but it has not grown as rapidly as the public for rock concerts, and does not attract investment. Above all, the expenses of travel and publicity have mounted almost catastrophically. Only in large cities is the public concert still a normal constituent of social life.

I know what Rosen is talking about, though more from what an economist might call the demand-side point of view. I grew up in a small Missouri town that had its own Community Concerts series back in the Seventies, and was located just 30 miles from a larger town that had a more ambitious series of the same kind. As a result, I got to hear live performances by artists of quality (including David Bar-Illan, the Beaux Arts Trio, and the St. Louis Symphony) at a relatively early age, and the experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Such small-town performances, alas, are a thing of the rapidly receding past, as is classical music on commercial TV. It now seems barely believable to me that I first saw Vladimir Horowitz in a Carnegie Hall recital telecast in prime time on CBS.

All of which makes me wonder: would I have become interested in classical music had I not been exposed to it in such a way? I like to think so. I mean, I didn’t start looking at paintings until long after I moved to New York. In the church of art, there is always room for late vocations–but earlier is better, and in large parts of America that’s no longer an option.

Dark thoughts for the day before a vacation, I supppose. (No pun intended–I wrote that line before the power went out!) But if we don’t think them, who will?

“It is perfectly correct to disregard all the bad reviews one gets, but only if at the same time, one diregards the good ones as well.”

André Previn, No Minor Chords: My Life in Hollywood

Our Girl in Chicago writes:

The back of the book in this week’s New Yorker is a real roller coaster. It leads off with a typically smart review-essay by Joan Acocella about recent scholarly infighting over the historical origins of childhood. An Acocella byline is always good news. Here, she distills the lumpish books under review into their “good parts,” conducting a brisk tour of the most relevant and striking historical ground they cover. She’s an even-tempered, fuss-free giant slayer:

A good deal of our intellectual life in the past half century has been ruled by the following pattern: First, a French person, with great brilliance and little regard for standards of evidence, promulgates a theory overturning dearly held beliefs.

As one who exceeded her own recommended lifetime allotment of academic writing some time ago, I say: Joan, you had me at “a French person.” Flip a few pages, though, and the unsuspecting reader, knocked off guard by Acocella’s wit, seems to have strayed into an upmarket edition of FHM. Richard Avedon’s creepy photo of a smirking, haphazardly clothed Chan Marshall, leader of the band Cat Power, stages the accompanying article’s tagline in a laughably literal-minded way: “Cat Power demands attention, then resists it.”

But at least the Avedon photo, for all its raincoat-flasher aesthetic, has a couple of things going for it. One, lots of fans don’t really know what Marshall looks like. (When I saw Cat Power perform in Chicago this past March, it was maddening that the stage was unlit and her hair flopped over her face.) Two, the Hilton Als piece that goes with the picture is worse.

Cat Power’s music is ravishingly abstract. Marshall’s famous voice is at once disaffected and melodramatic, the instrumentation spare, the effect like strong weather for the psyche. Als’ piece seems to aspire to the same enigmatically profound condition. The problem is that Marshall is an artist, while Als is merely a critic–and not a very good one, either. After drawing out Cat Power’s classic blues roots in a reasonable enough middle section, he staggers from one undercooked metaphor to another, calling Marshall in the space of one column a cowboy, a preacher, and “a fluid version of Liberty standing guard over the Harbor.” To all of which, and much more, I can only say, “Huh?”

Yes, Marshall may be unprofessional and off-putting. She may also may be this generation’s incarnation of the untamable spirit of rock and roll. (It’d be pretty surprising, though, if the faux scandal of a naughty glossy photo in The New Yorker did anything but puncture the latter image.) But whatever she is or isn’t, her great music deserves better–and smarter.

I wish I could take it for granted that you read Lileks before breakfast, but since some of you probably don’t, allow me to draw the attention of the benighted to yesterday’s “Bleat,” in which (among various other things) the indispensable James Lileks confesses to having developed a midlife taste for the country music he hated as a boy:

On the odd chance I shoot a home video that needs a song about an impotent Vietnam war vet imploring his wife not to go to town and do some hooking, I also ripped “Ruby” by Kenny Rogers. “If I could move I’d get my gun and put her in the ground.” Cheery! Socially relevant! Once you realize that they usually followed this song with “Candy Man” by Sammy Davis Jr., you’ll know what a strange stew AM radio used to be.

That’s so quintessentially Lileksian (an adjective waiting to happen). I love his sharp turns–all of a sudden he swerves from Seventies country to the long-lost world of unformatted AM radio, where you really could hear a little bit of everything in the course of a day’s listening, from Paul Harvey to Top Forty to “Desafinado” and “Take Five.”

Excuse me for a momentary lapse into being an intellectual, but the drying-up of unformatted radio is yet another sign of the fast-growing fragmentation of American culture. Time was when there were mass-media “meeting places” where you could get a quick taste of life outside your cultural niche, no matter which niche you happened to inhabit. Time and Life used to fulfill that function. So did TV variety programs like The Ed Sulllivan Show. So, to a surprising extent, did commercial radio.

And now? Well, I’m trying to do something similar, in my Web-based, eggheady way, but I suspect that to the marketers, who see the world through category-colored glasses, we “About Last Night” types are our own little niche–the niche of people who like to peer into other people’s niches. Call us The Eclectics. The Unpredictables. Slap a label on us and sell us our very own brand of designer beer.

Sigh.

I usually listen to music while I’m editing–my iBook contains an iTunes player onto which I have loaded 2,646 songs to date–and I thought it might amuse you to know the ones I played as I polished up today’s blog:

(1) The Beatles, “Lovely Rita” (I love Paul McCartney’s swoopy bass line)
(2) Pat Metheny, “A Lot of Livin’ to Do”
(3) Earl Hines, “Love Me Tonight”
(4) Buddy Rich, “Love for Sale” (dig that single-stroke roll at the end!)
(5) Dwight Yoakam, “Long White Cadillac”
(6) Woody Herman and His Woodchoppers, “Lost Weekend”
(7) Glenn Miller and His Army Air Force Band, “Flying Home”
(8) Elvis Costello, “Pump It Up”
(9) Bobbie Gentry, “Ode to Billie Joe”
(10) Steely Dan, “Monkey in Your Soul”

“The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic

It’s worth noting that in the four weeks since “About Last Night” first went live, I haven’t felt the need to recommend a single new classical CD to you. That says something about the increasingly desperate state of the classical recording industry. Still, good things do find their way to my desk from time to time, and “good” isn’t nearly strong enough a word to describe the latest release from BBC Records, a 1971 broadcast of the Mozart Requiem conducted by Benjamin Britten.

In addition to being one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Britten was also an extraordinarily gifted pianist and conductor. But even though he made many commercial recordings for Decca/London, they were mostly (though not always) of his own music. Fortunately, the BBC also taped dozens of concerts in which Britten can be heard performing the music of his favorite composers, and this one ranks right up there with his unforgettable BBC broadcasts of the Mahler Fourth and Shostakovich Fourteenth Symphonies. Not that he does anything obviously startling. As always with Britten the performer, the insights are contained within an essentially traditional interpretative framework–but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there in abundance. His approach to the Mozart Requiem is both weighty and rhythmically forceful, with sonorities built from the bass line upward (an approach typical of many other composer-performers as well). The result is at once fresh and “centric,” so to speak.

The recording was made at a 1971 performance by the the Aldeburgh Festival Chorus, English Chamber Orchestra, and four of Britten’s favorite solo singers. It’s well sung and well played, with slightly congested but otherwise serviceable sound–none of which matters in the least. If you had a chance to hear Felix Mendelssohn conduct Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, you wouldn’t pass it up because the organ was out of tune, would you?

Should you require additional persuasion (and you shouldn’t), the filler is a half-hour interview in which Britten talks about such subjects as the process of composing, opera on TV, and his reluctance to teach. It’s worth the price of the album all by itself.