Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics

211 Pages·2010·1.2 MB·English

by  Bert Cardullo

SCREEN WRITINGS

SCREEN
WRITINGS
Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics
Volume II
Bert Cardullo
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2010
by ANTHEM PRESS
75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Bert Cardullo 2010
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested.
ISBN-13: 978 184331 837 8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1 84331 837 7 (Hbk)
ISBN-13: 978 1 84331 879 8 (eBook)
ISBN-10: 1 84331 879 2 (eBook)
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction: The Film of Value ix
Part I. Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics 1
1. Shooting the City: The Gangster, Manhattanites,
and the Movies 3
(on Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Martin
Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever,
Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl, and Woody Allen Manhattan)
2. Back to the Future, or the Vanguard Meets the Rearguard 23
(on Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani,
Kim Ki-duk’s 3-Iron, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind, and Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone
We Know)
3. Flags and Letters, Men and War 49
(on Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and
Letters from Iwo Jima)
4. Farce, Dreams, and Desire: Some Like It Hot Re-viewed 61
Interlude 71
5. Switching Genres, or Playing to the Camera,
Playing to the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting 73
vi TABLEOFCONTENTS
6. On the Road Again: The Road Film and the Two Coppolas 87
(on Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Francis Ford
Coppola’s The Rain People)
7. The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni 103
Part II. Classification, Re-classification, and Assessment 113
8. Early vs. Later Bergman: Winter Lightand Autumn
SonataRevisited 115
9. “Everyone Has His Reasons”: Words, Images, and
La grande illusion in the Cinema of Jean Renoir 127
10. A Passage to Tokyo: The Art of Ozu, Remembered 149
(on Tokyo Story)
11. Through the Looking Glass: The American Art Cinema
in an Age of Social Change 161
Bibliography of Related Criticism 173
Index 177
List of Illustrations
1. Next Stop, Greenwich Village
2. Saturday Night Fever
3. Tony Takitani
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
5. Flags of Our Fathers
6. Some Like It Hot
7. The Rain People
8. Winter Light
9. La grande illusion
10. Bonnie and Clyde
11. Midnight Cowboy
12. The Graduate

Introduction
The Film of Value
Throughout history, two factors have formed people’s taste in any art,
their valuing of it, that is: knowledge of that art and knowledge of life.
Obviously this is still true, but the function of taste seems to be altering.
As formalist aesthetic canons have come to seem less and less tenable,
standards in art and life have become more and more congruent, and
as a result the function of taste is increasingly the selection and
appraisal of the works that are most valuable to the individual’s very
existence. So our means for evaluating films naturally become more
and more involved with our means for evaluating experience; aesthetic
standards don’t become identical with standards in life but they are
certainly related – and, one hopes, somewhat braver.
Of course the whole process means that human beings feed on
themselves, on their own lives variously rearranged by art, as a source
of values. But despite other prevalent beliefs about the past connected
with theology and religion, we are coming to see that people have
always been the source of their own values. In the century in which
this responsibility, this liberation, became increasingly apparent – the
twentieth – the intellect of man simultaneously provided a new art
form, the film, to make the most of it.
That art form is obviously still with us, and now, in the twenty-first
century, more than ever, it seems. And its critics proliferate in number,
in part because of what I describe above: the “personal” element
involved in the watching of any movie, and the ease nowadays with