Links for Movie buffs

Almost anyone with an interest in the history of film criticism knows about the great debates that took place around the auteur theory in the 1960s, with publications like Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight at Sound, and individuals like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, in the eye of the storm. But one journal that doesn’t get mentioned as much these days – though it was central to those conversations and provided some of the most intelligent, passionate film writing of its time – is Movie, the little magazine started by Ian Cameron in 1962.

I didn’t know much about Movie myself until a few years ago, but I came to feel a distant kinship with it when I learnt that two of the film writers who had most influenced me – Victor F Perkins (author of Film as Film) and Robin Wood – were part of the magazine’s core group in its early years. I knew of no connection between Wood and Perkins when I first read them, but I knew both stressed the importance of assessing film as a form with its own distinct language – subject to careful visual analysis that goes beyond the bare bones of story or plot – rather than as an underling to literature. Naturally, this meant according serious attention to works that lay outside the circles of cultural respectability at the time. (Wood’s path-breaking study of Hitchcock began with this now-famous passage: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously? It is a pity the question has to be raised: if the cinema were truly regarded as an autonomous art, not as a mere adjunct of the novel or of drama – if we were able yet to see films instead of mentally reducing them to literature – it would be unnecessary.”)

Anyway, I mention this because I just came across this website with content from a recent revival of the journal, with Perkins – now in his mid-70s – still involved. There are older articles as well. Some of the writing is intense (and needless to say, requires familiarity with the films being discussed) but do bookmark and take the plunge once in a while; it’s worth it.

Some recommendations (the links are all PDFs):

“Films, Directors and Critics” – an important 1962 piece by Ian Cameron, which responds to charges of “over-analysis” in the first issue of Movie, spells out some of the journal’s main concerns, and takes a jab at the cultural conservatism of Sight and Sound (while also rejecting the most extreme definitions of auteurism proposed by the French critics). I think this piece should be read in conjunction with two other famous essays: Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares” and Andrew Sarris’s “Towards a Theory of Film History”. (Kael berated the Movie critics in her piece, even asking the – in my view bizarre – question “If they are men of feeling and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to be a little ashamed of their ‘detailed criticism’ of movies like River of No Return?”)

A 2010 editorial by Perkins, with context for the Movie revival and a reminiscence of the winds of change in the early 60s. (“1958 was the key year. It was the year of The Tarnished Angels, Touch of Evil, Party Girl and Vertigo, films to revere, to see and see again, but loftily dismissed by the critical establishment … The depth and eagerness of [Orson Welles’s] response to admiring interrogation about Touch of Evil did two things. It showed us that film makers might rise to the level of the questions put to them, and it stoked our fury at the blinkered terms of this film’s and others’ reception in the English-writing world.”)

A detailed piece by Alex Clayton about “the texture of performance” in Hitchcock’s Psycho and its “shot-by-shot remake” by Gus Van Sant. Probably best read with DVDs of both films handy, but there are useful insights of a general nature here too. I particularly like Clayton’s observation that the concept of a shot-by-shot remake is inherently flawed, being based on the idea that “the figures who populate film shots are not essentially constitutive of them, except as hominid-shaped design elements”. (In other words: casting Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche in iconic roles formerly played by other actors is one thing; but confining them in a pre-determined pattern of shot compositions and gestures that requires them to exactly mimic the original performers is another thing altogether.)

Andrew Sarris's essay on Luis Bunuel and Viridiana, from the first issue of Movie. ("There is a danger in attaching an explicitly political moral to Bunuel's career [...] His camera has always viewed his characters from a middle distance, too close for cosmic groupings and too far away for self-identification. By focusing on the abnormality of life, Bunuel forces his audience to accept man unconditionally.")

Also: two long pieces about Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and Lang’s You Only Live Once, which I will read after watching the films again, but which look interesting if you have the films in recent memory.

Full table of contents here and here. Also, here is a listing of contents of old Movie issues. Wish all the pieces were available to read online.

[Related posts: Perkins on subject and treatment; a tribute to Robin Wood; thoughts on story and storytelling]