True blue movies
Charles Marowitz
Film As A Subversive Art Amos Vogel (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.95) Sexual Alienation In The Cinema Raymond Durgnat (Studio Vista £4.50) Cineastes, like bull-fight enthusiasts, have always bored me in precisely the same way. They have the tendency to wax rhapsodic about people and events which, to the untutored eye, seem remarkably unremarkable. A bogus-cineaste, in my experience, is someone so besotted with the medium that he finds a myriad of weird and wonderful sensations in whatever he sees, unaware that he is merely repeating his fundamental enthusiasm for the art of cinema. He is the sort of person who can blithely transcend brain-damaging ennui and metabolic banality to discover a whole network of subtlety and innuendo beyond the comprehension of normal, Odeon-bred cinemagoers. Often his superior cinematic sensibility flourishes to such a height that it uncovers marvels in the generally-accepted 'turkey'. A true cineaste, on the other hand, is someone who recognises the messages for which the medium has been created. He is more in tune with the ideological and thematic content of film rather than the intricacies of their technical life.
Amos Vogel's Film As A Subversive Art is very much in the second category. He con
tinually relates film to the social and cultural forces that produce it; a perspective which firmly puts film in its proper place .and, ironically, elevates all discussion of it. His notion of film as a developing source of subversion is a convenient framework in which to examine pornography, propaganda, Expressionism, Dada, silent screen comedy, the 'new wave' and a great many other subject-headings which require a hefty backbend to qualify as subversive art. In fact, as a thesis, the book is a vulnerable as a hooker at a church social,. It seems to suggest that any kind of good film-making (or movie-makers who appeal to Vogel) is automatically to be classed as 'subversive', an emotive word which, for the author, is full of upbeat connotations. But if one ignores the somewhat too insistent churn of polemics, the book can be easily appreciated for its insights into avant-garde cinema, the eruption and dissolution of trends, and the whole process of film evolving as a way of recording first the topography and then the metaphysics of life.
There is not one subject, no matter how over-worked, that Vogel does not illuminate with a passing reference, a pertinent quote or an apposite observation. He is excellent on the Nazi cinema and its satanic anti-semitism, and on the gradual liberalisation of censorship in America. By coolly selecting simple categories like 'Birth' and 'Death', he tells us precisely how far cinema has gone in the destruction of taboos. His non-stuffy academicism permits him, quite rightly, to include Otmar Bauer's defecation-epics and the US Army's footage on the atom strikes. He is so steeped in his material that the slightest flick of his mind yields a nugget or, at tile very least, a bright piece of critical quartz. Although his attitude to pop moderns like Kubrick and Huston is respectful (he vastly overrates Bertolucci), he is very much more in tune with the stylistic
revolution that began with Godard and Res nais and eventually 'embraced' (read stran gulated) the American Underground. Being, among other things, the founder 'Cinema Sixteen' and a director of the Ne York Film Festival, he has a way of dealin with Morrisey, Warhol, Broughton, Brakhag in a way that defines them accurately and Ye doesn't slobber over their achievements. 111 only irritation is in the short précis of hill which interlard the commentary, where manages to find uniqueness in a strink° off-beat films which I can remeilw squirming through during my (7', 'Cinema Sixteen' days. Here, the idealisal. cineaste, for whom celluloid is holy, gets lr the way of the cool-minded adjudicateh. Although I find it hard to share many enthusiasms, one never feels that they voguish or trendy, but rather the result of well-tempered taste which has saVOUth everything and knows precisely whY palate prefers one tang to another. As a sZi.,1 and comprehensive breakdown of everYt"'„i seminal in motion pictures, from the rnaeo lantern to the present, the book is lit waveringly sensible, radically-based, thou& provoking and utterly readable. Qualities which do not exactly abound,h Raymond Durgnat's Sexual Alienation in:, Cinema which is, essentially, a dressedi"5 version of Eros in the Cinema which fr appeared in 1961. The latter half of the ne, book is a somewhat p0-faced look at the sif„i nificance of underground cinema and the 01 flicks of the past decade. hat! There is something slightly absurd a'"„ adopting a high-toned academic air ab°' films which are fundamentally sexual 05 modities, and although one can examine sPe films for psycho-socio-erotic content, thefs„ that they also exist for masturb9t,l,"5 somehow subverts the academic assumPti°'
(I missed, for example, an analysis of just how erotically stimulating many of the films, made expressly for that purpose, were. It's like reviewing a musical and ignoring all the songs.) 1 don't suggest that eroticism in the cinema should not be the subject of profound analysis but I find the tone of voice disturbingly out of keeping with the subject matter, and any book that proceeds to tell me the story of films I have seen or missed tends to alienate me very early on.
Nevertheless, Durgnat has assiduously done his homework and there is a vast amount of methodical analysis and diligent featherplucking in its pages. His speciality is taking a film such as Women in Love (or Satyricon)
and lovingly pulling it to bits. He doesn't exactly make the feathers fly. He is more prone to classify them in neat piles. The cross references are, on the whole, astute and, in passing, there are little strings of fairy-lights illuminating the erotic imagination at work. But the book is more a wadge of sporadic insights than a developing thesis — which wouldn't be bad if one didn't feel it was the latter that was intended — and, as I say, one has to spend quite a lot of time either paddling laboriously or judiciously bailing out.
Charles Marowitz, the director of the Open Space theatre, is editor of a forthcoming Penguin anthology, Open Snare Plays
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