Archives for 2004

Supermaud is in tomorrow’s Washington Post Book World. Go see.

My recent Wall Street Journal piece
about Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which I declared to be the greatest movie ever made, has drawn quite a bit of reader mail. One person wrote to say that he preferred Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, and asked what I thought of it. Another wanted to know what my Top Five films were.

As it happens, Our Girl in Chicago gave me a DVD of L’Atalante for Christmas. I had to put it aside–things, as you know, have been a trifle hectic of late–so we decided to watch it together last night after coming home from Paul Taylor. The pairing turned out to be serendipitous, since L’Atalante, though it has dialogue, feels more like a silent film (which isn’t necessarily surprising for a movie made in 1934). The words are mere props for the unfolding imagery, and most of them could have been flashed on title cards without impairing the overall effect. It’s a perfectly lovely film, sweet and unaffected and very, very French, and it made me think of The Triplets of Belleville, another oh-so-French movie in which the journey matters far more than the arrival.

A keeper, in other words, though it didn’t crash my Top Five list. David Thomson, who ranks it in his own Top Ten, catches its essential quality nicely: “It is love without spoken explanation, unaffected by sentimental songs; but love as a mysterious, passionate affinity between inarticulate human animals. A fairy tale about plain, even ugly people, its intensity is always to be found in its images.” All true, which probably explains why I still prefer The Rules of the Game to L’Atalante. I’m a writer, after all, and I’ve never doubted for a moment that the place of words in non-silent film is pivotal, far more so than most film theorists are prepared to admit.

Whit Stillman, who makes wonderfully talky movies, once said to me:

Some visual purists still think film is pictures at an exhibition. They seem to forget that we’ve been making sound films ever since the Twenties. Talk is incredibly important….Of course you have to be very careful with it, and I understand why all the screenwriting gurus warn against too much dialogue, but I think they’re making a mistake. Even action films often have very good dialogue, though there isn’t necessarily a lot of it. What’s the charm of a buddy comedy? Just to see two guys shooting bullets? It’s what the two guys say to each other that matters.

I agree. When I want to immerse myself in wordless narrative, I listen to a symphony or look at a plotless ballet. This isn’t to say that wordlessness can’t be a tremendously effective device in narrative filmmaking (remember the first scene in Rio Bravo?), but it is a device, an effect, not the normative condition of the medium. Exceptions don’t prove or test a rule: they define it. Jerome Robbins once made a terrific ballet without music called Moves–but he only did it once. Similarly, moving pictures cried out for sound, and once it came, the silent movie vanished overnight. I don’t think that was a historical accident, much less a mistake.

And what about that Top Five list? Well, I don’t know whether I really care to oblige my curious correspondent. In my experience, it’s usually not that hard to pick a One Best–absolute excellence is by definition self-evident–but no sooner do you venture below the pinnacle than all sorts of other factors crowd into your viewfinder. When Time asked me to pick the best dance of the 20th century, for instance, I didn’t have to think twice before choosing George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, but I found it much harder to decide on two runners-up, though I finally opted for Paul Taylor’s Esplanade and Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas. Up to a point, the problems of choice multiply as the list grows longer, though eventually they subside. I suspect that most serious moviegoers’ lists of the 50 greatest films (as opposed to their 50 personal favorites) would overlap substantially, but their Top Ten lists would wander all over the map.

For me, The Rules of the Game is the obvious Greatest Movie Ever Made, and I expect a lot of other critics would agree with me, or at least consider it a completely plausible candidate. Beyond that, I have my doubts. Right at this moment–and no other–I’d be inclined to follow it up with Citizen Kane, Vertigo, The General (a silent film, please note!), and…er, um…I don’t know. The Searchers? His Girl Friday? Chinatown? I simply can’t tell you. The greatest opera ever written is The Marriage of Figaro, except when it’s Falstaff, but what’s the fifth greatest? That’s a party game, and a good one, and if you’re in the right mood it’s also a way of clarifying your own feelings about art–but nothing more.

I’ll end by quoting myself. This is a snippet from “Living with Art,” the essay I wrote for Commentary about my collection of prints:

Living with art teaches you things about the criteria of quality that cannot be learned in any other way, things I am still in the process of learning. If I had to guess–and it is nothing more than that–I would say the finest piece I own is Milton Avery’s March at a Table, closely followed by Isle au Haut and Piazza Rotunda. But there are many times when I would rather look at Grey Fireworks, Stuart Davis’ jazzy Any as Given, or the gossamer untitled Wolf Kahn monotype that now hangs over my mantelpiece. This never-ending cycle of looking and experiencing is one of the most instructive aspects of living with art. To see a painting or print on a daily basis is to learn from hard experience what makes some works of art durable and others ephemeral. Experienced collectors speak of how certain paintings “go dead on the wall,” meaning that their appeal fades over time and with familiarity. So far, all 15 of my pieces are still alive and well, but I never cease to be fascinated by how my preference for one over another shifts from day to day.

So it is with the making of Top Five lists as with the watching of L’Atalante and The Triplets of Belleville: all the fun is getting there.

Our Girl has landed at LaGuardia and is en route to the home office of “About Last Night” via psychotic cabby. Lunch will follow. Additional blogging will follow that. Paul Taylor will follow that.

In other news, I await the imminent arrival on my doorstep of the first finished copy of A Terry Teachout Reader. I held up the dust jacket at Wednesday’s artsjournal.com get-together, and there were cheers. I’m hoping to be able to show off the Thing Itself to OGIC.

Watch this space for bulletins.

These three words, when used in the same paragraph, automatically turn my ears off:

(1) Offended

(2) Demand

(3) Apologize

It’s Friday–do you know where I am? In The Wall Street Journal, of course, holding forth on Lincoln Center’s new production of King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Christopher Plummer, plus an off-Broadway show, Tristine Skyler’s highly touted The Moonlight Room.

Lear didn’t do much for me:

I confess to not being much of a fan of Jonathan Miller, who has always struck me as rather too smart for his own theatrical good. That’s more or less how I’d sum up this well-bred, largely uninvolving “Lear,” which runs through April 18 on a limited schedule of performances. Shakespeare was no intellectual, and his plays don’t benefit from “thoughtful” stagings. Mr. Miller may think he’s given us a Shakespearean-style soap opera, but in his hands “King Lear” comes off more like a slide show on the perils of bad estate planning.

I had sharply mixed feelings about The Moonlight Room, but not about its young star:

As for Laura Breckenridge, she’s definitely worth watching. Like Linda Cardellini in “Freaks and Geeks,” the TV series that perfectly captured the same youthful anxieties Ms. Skyler has sought to put on stage, Ms. Breckenridge is a dark-eyed, tense-looking young woman whose very pores ooze adolescent angst. If she can play other parts as well as she plays this one, we’ll be seeing more of her. Totally.

No link. Buy the damn paper, O.K.?

Would you go see any of these plays, based on the way they’re described in their press releases?

– “A stylized, irreverent romantic comedy about loneliness and isolation

“Closing the Times was the end of his religious observance for the day. He wished real religion wasn’t quite so damn impossible. There was a need for it that the Times didn’t really fill.”

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

As of mid-afternoon Friday, the activities of “About Last Night” will be temporarily centralized. Our Girl in Chicago is en route for a three-day visit to see the Teachout Museum and other cultural goodies. She’ll be doing a bit of blogging from here, and–brace yourself–her secret identity will be revealed to Supermaud in a ritual ceremony from which some participants may not return.

Me, I’ll be hacking away all weekend at the you-know-what, just like always, though I plan to pry myself away from the iBook long enough to take OGIC to a couple of cool performances. You’ll hear about it all in good time.

For now, here are some links to whisk you into the weekend:

– This one’s spreading across the Web like kudzu, with (alas) good reason. From L.A. Observed:

Here’s why reporters want newspaper corrections to make clear that an editor is at fault for an error introduced to their copy. Last week, the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed filed a review of the opera “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Music Center. He wrote that the Richard Strauss epic is “an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean…” But when it ran in the paper, pro-life had been changed to anti-abortion.

Swed was reportedly mortified, since the opera is not remotely about abortion….

There’s more–and believe it or not, it gets worse. Read the whole thing here.

In case you were wondering why I blog–and why the blogosphere is rapidly becoming a major center of serious arts writing–there’s your answer.

– Says Reflections in D Minor:

I was fascinated with Bolero for a short time when I was just beginning to explore classical music but it quickly became boring and then seriously annoying. Now it is one of the few pieces of classical music that I truly hate….

Actually, Bolero is kind of cool, at least in theory. But I had to play the bass part in a college performance–the same two notes, over and over again, for about six weeks, or maybe ten–and since then I’ve been unable to listen to it.

– Courtesy of Cinetrix, a chunk of Alistair Macaulay’s recent Times Literary Supplement piece about Fred and Ginger:

It’s dismaying to see how often, even when a ballet is being broadcast live, camerawork chops up the dancing. Fred and Ginger, by contrast, really do dance several of their duets in a single take, some of them almost three minutes in length. In the annals of cinema, these takes should stand beside the finest feats of D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles….

Is that perhaps coming it a bit high? Um…no.