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Writings on Film
PETER WOLLEN
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London - New York
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CONTENTS
An Alphabet ef Cinema
PART I: DIRECTORS AND FlLl"1-MAKERS
I Guen-illa Ceinditiens: The Cinema ef William Seward Bum:-ughs
3 Viking Eggeling
4 ‘Who the Hell ls Hewarcl Hawks?
Hitch: A Tale cif Twe Cities (Leinclen and Les Angeles)
6 JLG
7 jean Reuth
PART ll: FILMS AND MOVEMENTS
Freud as Aclventuner
9 Blade Runner
I0 Spies and Spies: An Angle-Austrian Entanglement
ll Rules tifthe Game
I1 The Last New Wave
I3 Rif‘l'-Raff Realism
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CONTENTS
PART Ill: THEMES AND STYLES
Architecture and Film: Places and Non-Places I99
The Can-.:in 2 l 6
Time in Film and Video Art 233
Mismatehes {Bi Aceusmetres) 242
Bock te the Future 255
Spee-:1 and the Cinema 264
N-ates 225
Film-mal<ers:‘Directeirs lndes: 29?
Filmtsgraphy 393
General lndeit 305
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AN ALPHABET OF CINEMA‘
I am going to begin at the beginning, with A. Perhaps with the
collaborative film A 6' B in Ontario that Joyce ‘Wieland made with Hollis
Frampton, and completed after his death—in which each film-maker in
turn shot a segment of their own for the other to respond to, like a game
of tag, or a cinematic dialogue? No,
A is going to be for Aristotle. This may seem a strange choice, but
I believe that Aristotle can be seen, convincingly enough, as the first
theorist of film. Certainly he was the first theorist of narrative and,
in his Paitriirr, written or recorded in the fourth century BC, he wrote
about tragic dratna as an art-form that had siit components—plot,
character, dialogue or screenplay (counting both as content, or signi-
fieds—what Aristotle called ‘thought’-—and as form, or signifiers,
what Aristotle called ‘diction'), music and spectacle. These are also,
of course, the basic constituents of the cinema and so it becomes
relatively simple to transpose Aristotle's theory of tragic drama into
a theory of film. Aristotleiis approach was marked by his own experience
of life, the social and political conteitt in which he lived. His father
was a court physician, serving the King of Macedon (Philip, the father
of Alexander the Great), and, all his life, Aristotle was inevitably
involved with Macedonian politics. He served as tutor for a while to the
young Alexander, before he became king, and he remained on close
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terms with the authorities after the Macedonians went on to conquer
Greece itself.
Aristotle's life was far from calm. He lived through an extraordinary
period of history, one during which Alexander extended his empire Far to
the East, to what is now Pakistan. It was also an extremely bloody and
destructive period. Struggles for power were customarily settled by one
family member assassinating another. Aristotle's protector during his
period of exile in Asia Minor, his wife's uncle, was betrayed by the
Macedonians to the Persians and killed. Aristotleis hometown of Stageira
was razed to the ground and its inhabitants slaughtered. His nephew was
cruelly murdered by Alexander. ‘When Aristotle himself left Athens,
shortly before his death, the column erected in his honour was torn down
by angry Athenian nationalists, who seem to have regarded him as a
Macedonian agent. In effect, his life was marked by a torrent of unexpected
and appalling reversals of fortune--peripeteias, as he called them—by
fatal misunderstandings and miscalculations, and by bloody struggles
within the ruling family to which he was connected. In this sense,
Aristotle's view of Greek tragedy as an imitation of life was perfectly
plausible. It portrayed events which, however horrific, rnust have seemed
quite normal to him—the Oedipus story, the troubles of the ruling House
of Thebes. More than once, Aristotle received unexpected word of some
terrible event that would change the course ofhis life.
I think we can see the cinema as reflecting, in the same kind of way,
the bloody and tragic twentieth century. This may seem strange for an
art-form created largely in America, where whole cities have never been
levelled to the ground, but it is not so hard to understand in the rest of
the world—in Europe, Africa or Asia. Like Greek tragedy, cinema has
continuously echoed the violence and terror of the twentieth century. At
the same time, it has distanced itself from them. As Aristotle argued,
narrative--or emplotment—--distances art from the history it mirrors. it
Focuses on the ways in which actions are caused and have efiiects, so that
the spectator can learn from them, can gain an understanding of events
which may at first seem simply meaningless and arbitrary; and thus
gather the practical wisdom necessary to survive and cope in turbulent
times. My own reading of Aristotle is not so much that he thought
tragedy purged the emotions-—he mentions the word 'catharsis' just once
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AN ALPHABET OF CINEMA 3
in passing—but that he thought it enabled u.s to learn about history and
how it works, even—especially—in its most frightening and overwhelm-
ing aspects: the fateful moments when hidden truths are revealed, when
families and dynasties an apart and the passions destroy public order.
Narrative is interwoven with the shocks and peripeteias of fortune.
Patadoxically, I began to read Aristotle in order to understand the
writings of his great antagonist, Bertolt Brecht. Brecht himself directly
attacked the idea of an Aristotelian theatre, seeking to replace it with
what he named ‘epic’ theatre, but I now think his polemic was based on
a common misunderstanding. Aristotle's idea of tragedy was very far
from the kind of psychologically involving theatre that Brecht attacked.
Like his fiercest critic, Aristotle saw tragedy as essentially didactic and
political. Brecht's tragic vision of history, a vision shaped by world war,
by successful and failed revolution, by the civil strife of the ‘Weimar
period and the rise to power of Hitler, was not so very distant from that
of Aristotle, shaped by Alexander of Macedon and the crisis of the
Athenian polo. For Dariey, cinema-—-true cinema—-began with Hirarbiraa,
Mair Arirarrr, a film about our personal response to an immense historic
tragedy. Resnais's film became the measure against which all others were
judged. It was in their relation to Hirarbiara, Mart Araarrr that Daney
came to see Rossellini and Godard as the great moral film-directors of
our time, an epoch marked by the Holocaust, by the use and proliferation
of weapons of unimaginable destruction, by endless episodes of violence
and terror-—in Algeria, in Cambodia, in France itself. As time went on,
the historical and political context of the cinema became increasingly
central to Daney's writing about film, as he turned Godard's maxim that
travelling shots (raise or store) are always a matter of morality into the
touchstone of his critical reflection. Later, I shall have a little more to say
about travelling shots.
B is not for Brecht, although of course it could be. Or even for B-movies,
much as I always loved them. It is for Bambi. Bonsai was the first film I
ever saw and it left, no doubt, a deep mark on me, even a traumatic one.
After seeing it, I repressed it, I put it out of my mind—until one day,
on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California, I was driving down the road
with friends, sitting in the back of an open car, when I looked up and
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suddenly had a vision of my terrifying childhood memory, right there:
the forest fire in Bambi. At first I couldn't grasp what I had seen but, as
I recovered from the shock, I realized that there was a huge drive-in
movie screen right acmss the road and we had happened to drive past it
precisely at my traumatic moment. Hormr and pity-—Aristotle's categor-
ies—had stayed with me, more or less suppressed, for years which,
increasingly, I spent in the cinema, without ever thinking back to the
trauma. When I did, after my Santa Barbara ‘return of the repressed’, I
started to realize that the hormr and pity were not simply explicable in
terms of the little Disney deer. There was something else at stake. Bambi
was made during the war and, in a hidden sense, it was a war film. In
fact, it was released in August 1942, at the onset of the Battle of
Stalingrad.
My own memories of the war—a little later, when I lived in a small
industrial town in the North of England, just south of Mar'rchester—--
were of air raids: what has become generically known as the Blitz. I
remember the sirens, when I had to get out of bed and go down into the
closet under the stairs, or crouch under the table in the larder, listening
to the buzz of the rocket bombs overhead, aimed at Manchester, but
often straying off-course to fall on Macclesfield. Looked at this way, it is
easy to interpret Bambi as a war film, with the hunters as the Nazis, the
forest fire as the Blitz, the father as missing, away at the front, and the
mother as a casualty of war. Aristotle again—the horror stems essentially
from political conflict and barbatism. I still think, secretly, that Bambi is
one of the great films. Strata White is more admired by connoisseurs but,
in an un-Aristotelian way, it has a happy end—-in his terms, it is a
comedy, and therefore a lower form. From an artistic point of view, T/me
Cairalio-as is the most adventurous, less overwhelmed by kitsch than the
grandiose Fantasia. But Bambi is the Aristotelian tragedy, the film about
trauma. Serge Daney notes, in the very first sentence of his book
Prrreixeraerr, that he had never seen Barebi---or, indeed, he boasts, any
other Disney film, ever.’ Instead, he remembers quite a different film——
Charles Laughton's Night afrbe Harrirr, which he saw when he was twelve,
the age of the boy in the film, persecuted by Robert Mitchumis terrifying
preacher. The films we remember best fmm our childhood always seem
somehow autobiographical, always seem to be about ourselves in an
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