The Persistence of Hollywood

Thomas Elsaesser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136519475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

While Hollywood's success – its persistence – has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser's research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his classic essays on auteurism and cinephilia, focused around a director's themes and style, up to his analysis of the "corporate authorship" of contemporary director James Cameron. In between, he has helped to transform film studies by incorporating questions of narrative, genre, desire, ideology and, more recently, Hollywood's economic-technological infrastructure and its place within global capitalism.

The Persistence of Hollywood brings together Elsaesser's key writings about Hollywood filmmaking. It includes his detailed studies of individual directors (including Minnelli, Fuller, Ray, Hitchcock, Lang, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, and Cameron), as well as essays charting the shifts from classic to corporate Hollywood by way of the New Hollywood and the resurgence of the blockbuster. The book also presents a history of the different critical-theoretical paradigms central to film studies in its analysis of Hollywood, from auteurism and cinephilia to textual analysis, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-industrial analysis.

I Flashback: Of Objects of Love and Objects of Study

1 Film Studies in Britain: Cinephilia, Screen Theory and Cultural Studies

DOI: 10.4324/9780203152508-2

It All Started in the Sixties …

That the question of film studies as a distinct discipline and its relation to cultural studies can be asked, is a tribute to the success which in the 1980s and 1990s assured film (and television) studies in the universities something of a privileged place, as a young, innovative and provocatively hybrid discipline: one of the few so-called “growth areas” in the humanities. That the question has to be asked in the new century means that past success as well as present dis/reorientation have to be seen in context. One such context is the emergence of film studies in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, the place and the period that have shaped my own contribution most directly. I begin on a personal note and will conclude with some speculations on the possible fate of film studies after its encounter with cultural studies. Probably sharing a professional profile with several film scholars of my generation, I began writing about film in the early 1960s as a student of literature. I arrived at the University of Sussex in 1963, involved myself in running a university film club and began by compiling program notes. After my BA I stayed on for a PhD, eventually also organizing festival-like retrospectives: among others, one in 1971 on German avant-garde films from the 1960s. I began teaching film and cinema courses in a department of English and American Studies around 1973 (at the University of East Anglia), initially as an addition to the Modern Language & Literature program, but always with the aim of developing an autonomous Film Studies Department. This finally came to pass in 1976, and I continued to develop the subject throughout the 1980s. By the time I left in 1991 we were teaching film studies at undergraduate level, we had an internationally recognized MA program, as well as supervising PhD students.¹ Before recapitulating the formation of the discipline from this personal vantage point in more detail, a flashback is in order, to—what else—the Sixties.

Following the call for a “white-hot technological transformation” by the then Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Britain in the 1960s underwent major expansion in its higher education system (the foundation of the so-called “New Universities,” which included both Sussex and East Anglia), where new disciplines and interdisciplinary work, especially in the humanities, was being actively encouraged. But London was also the center of much intellectual ferment in the field of politics and culture (around the journal New Left Review, for instance) and a magnet for anyone seriously interested in cinema (studies). Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, several internal “revolutions” at the British Film Institute were taking place, resulting in a specially set up Education Department, a new publications policy (the “Cinema One” book series, pamphlets, working papers, journals), and an active program of supporting schools and universities to teach film as an academic subject.² The fact is that during the 1970s and 1980s Britain emerged as the most vibrant country in Europe with respect to film studies, producing a very diverse film culture that acted as a conduit for ideas between Paris and the United States, while also sustaining a remarkably focused and yet internationally highly influential home-grown intellectual debate about the cinema, its theory and history. Why this should have been so deserves a broader study than I can give it here, but it can be traced to the combined, although by no means always convergent effects of institutional initiatives (notably at the BFI and at several of the “New” universities, at the Society for Education in Film and Television [SEFT], as well as through the retrospectives at the Edinburgh Film Festival and at the National Film Theatre in London). Add to that the different, if short-lived magazine publications and their editors and contributors, some of whom were nothing less than brilliant and occasionally charismatic individuals, as well as a thriving avant-garde filmmaking movement around the London Co-op, and you have an effervescent mix, but also a community committed for the long term. The diversity of this film culture can be measured by remembering that it ranged from Hollywood cinephilia to promoting the structuralist avant-garde, from auteurism to new approaches to genre, from archival research on “early cinema,” to work in television and popular culture, from studies of “national cinema” to feminism and psychoanalysis, from conferences on realism and Bert Brecht to debates about ethnographic film and documentary, from “political” cinema and Eisenstein to the “New Hollywood” of Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola. Among the journals, it is Screen that is most often cited as the center of all this activity, but as I shall argue, it was by no means the only film magazine of note, the diversity being a vital aspect of the “ecology” of this film culture and its robustness. Finally, among the active individuals were Robin Wood, Victor Perkins, Sam Rohdie, Ben Brewster, Richard Dyer, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, but also a remarkable number of couples: Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Rosalind Delmar, Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, Andi and Pam Engel, Richard Collins and Christine Gledhill, Pam Cook and Jim Cook, John Ellis and Rosalind Coward (which may go some way to explain the early and intense engagement with feminism and film theory).

Jean Luc Godard's Le MÉpris

My own involvement in this London film culture started, as mentioned, around a university film club in Brighton, which in one sense was a natural follow-up to my affiliation with a film club in my ’teens during the 1950s in Germany, one of those distinctly middle-class Film-Gilde institutions, devoted to “realism,” whether Italian neo-realism, much valued by my parents, who loved de Sica's Miracle in Milan and Fellini's La Strada, or in the form of psychological realism of the Ingmar Bergman or Kurosawa variety, much prized by myself, at a time when going to the cinema meant stealing a glimpse at what adults did, when they thought the children were not watching.

The Brighton film club I joined in 1964 was quite different from the Gilde-Club: it defined itself in the mirror of French auteurism of the late 1950s and worshipped Hollywood, and so in another sense from Bergman movies, by joining it I put a symbolic end to my adolescence. For my new friends quickly attacked this German middle-class taste and eventually browbeat me into agreeing that Bergman's The Silence, despite its sexual frankness and existential “angst,” was not as important for the cinema as John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I could see for myself that Jean-Luc Godard was an exciting director not just in and for the present, but because he opened up the past: he had made me curious about Vincente Minnelli, when Michel Piccoli in Le MÉpris insisted on wearing his hat at all times, because Dean Martin did so in Some Came Running. But that a Western with John Wayne should be more serious than Wild Strawberries or The Seventh Seal seemed inconceivable to the aesthetic orthodoxy I grew up with.

Ever since I was sixteen, I had been drawing up lists of the films I needed to see and taking copious notes immediately after the screenings of those that I did manage to catch at a local movie theater or the film club. But what galvanized all of this, and made cinephilia so completely distinct from other juvenile obsessions, such as stamp collecting or drawing up the weekly top-ten hit parade, was the encounter with the films of Godard. Mesmerized by A bout de souffle in 1960 and Vivre sa vie in 1962, baffled by Le petit soldat in 1963, it took a screening of Le MÉpris in London in 1964 to make the idea of studying film an urgently felt necessity. If someone had asked me at that time André Bazin's famous question from 1958, “qu'est-ce que le cinema?” I would probably have answered: “cinema is whatever Jean-Luc Godard happens to be doing right now.” Film studies, as far as I was concerned, was initially born from the wish to catch up with Godard, and from the realization that words (that is, our training in literature) were all we had to cope with the heady confusion of feelings, action and thought that was cinema.

Le MÉpris confounded most profoundly any ideas one might have entertained about the “essence” of cinema, either as ontology (cheating death, by preserving the imprint of life, according to Bazin), or as driven by an inherent teleology (mimetic realism, for instance). It confronted one with the fact that film was the most total art ever invented, but also the medium in which one could speak about anything that mattered in life. In Le MÉpris, the cinema was as much a black box of infinitely receding depths in time and space, as it was a white surface covering an ontological void. In Godard's film the screen could at any point revert to its flat and two-dimensional state, right in the middle of telling a fictional narrative, proving that neither deep focus nor greater and greater “realism” could possibly be the direction in which the cinema was heading. Le MÉpris brought back the “graphic” in the photographic, and gave a “scriptural” dimension even to Cinemascope. It showed that color was as much a matter of rendering surfaces opaque and impenetrable, as its palette conferred transparency to objects, or allowed light to emanate from the texture of a dress and the complexion of a face. Since anything could enter a Godard frame, be it a page from a book, a photo clipped from a newspaper, a street scene or a staged tableau vivant, his images had the iconic-semiological status of posters (of which quite a few were prominently featured in Le MÉpris). That is, they were as much topological-tropological maps as they were visual representations, they were as much a crowded canvas of picture emblems from the time of Giotto (with a nod to Elie Faure) as they were dispositions of objects in post-Euclidean space (with a salute to Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon).

Sound and language, too, deployed their own distinct ontology in Godard's cinema. He first of all returned words to their status as graphic signs and pictograms, which is what they were prior to becoming articulate sounds in the “talkies.” And to the all-talking film, Godard restored the pause, the “mute” intermittence, as well as the eloquence of silence, while his soundtrack was voice and noise, even before it was music or speech. In Le MÉpris, Georges Delerue's music keeps spreading its chromatically lush wings into soaring heights of feeling, only to break off so abruptly each time, either shocked into silence or hushed by an invisible conductor. This music is a character in its own right: it moves among the protagonists, inserts itself between them, and like the voice of some Shakespearean Ariel conversant with Bert Brecht's epic theater, it provides its own comment on the action—ironic, ominous and incorrigibly optimistic in turn.

Le MÉpris made me realize—long before I saw, for instance, Anthony McCall's work or Dan Graham's installations—that the projection of an image might be nothing but a cone of light, cutting a slice of geometry out of space. At the very next moment, though—for instance, when the ancient statue of Neptune, eyelessly scanning a fallen world in a 360° circle, and yet fixing us with a piercing gaze—the image could conjure up a depth in both mythic time and philosophical thought that stretched into infinity. When in the opening scene, Raoul Coutard's camera, moving with stately grace along the tracks so inexorably laid out for it, began to swivel, at the end of the credits spoken by Brice Parain as if he was God(ard) himself, and finally turned towards us, spectators in the darkened room, I became conscious of my vulnerability inside my imagined invisibility, as the single, square face of a menacing alien was suddenly upon me. All but swallowing the screen and me with it, this camera-mouth made palpable how tight was the space, physical as well as metaphysical, in which any fiction sustains the illusion that what we see is taking place “out there,” before it folds back upon itself, mirror-like doubling the apparatus in a mise-en-abyme of infinite regress that finally excludes the human subject altogether.

But what perturbed me most, and for the first time made me want to write about “the cinema” in 1964, was Michel Piccoli, demonstrating six different ways of stepping through a door (in which the central pane of glass is missing). It occurs early on in the film, when Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and Paul Javal (Piccoli) visit for the first time the flat Michel had bought for them from the money that Prokosh (Jack Palance) had advanced him for his work as script-doctor on Prokosh's Hollywood-in-Italy production of The Odyssey. The couple is already seriously at odds with each other, with Camille suspecting that Michel had “sold” her to Prokosh, in order to secure the deal. The scene starts with them entering the apartment, a desultory exchange ensues, while both, on their own, explore the different rooms and views, and it ends with Camille bending down to look at herself in a gilt-framed mirror, casually stacked against a wall. Quite possibly an homage to a Buster Keaton gag (from The Haunted House), Piccoli's movements back-and-forth—sometimes opening the supposedly glazed door and closing it behind him, sometimes just stepping through the empty pane, then again, opening the door and still stepping through the pane—outline a complex moral geometry. At the time, it struck me as a metaphor of the cinema, as much as it evidently was a comment on the passages, dead-ends and false openings of the couple's marriage. A metaphor for the “frame” as well as the “screen,” for what separates and what connects, for the limits between what is inside and what is outside, the scene is also a metaphor for the difference between the literal and the metaphoric itself. Never before in a film had I felt so strongly the possibility that the (non-)drama of the solitude of two human beings in the company of each other—echoes of Bergman, or of Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia—could become a theoretical treatise on “what is cinema” in miniature. Documenting the documentary dimension within any diegetic space, and demonstrating how the make-believe of fiction arises from within the materiality of a setting or a décor, Piccoli's viaggio in camera was for me one of Godard's most Bazinian moments, achieved by means that were quite un-Bazinian. It taught me that telling a story for Godard would always mean “painting the space between” his characters, rather than providing any firm ontological ground they might be able to share, even in moments of intimacy, tenderness or anticipated domesticity. A “door” would always be in the way: half-open, half-closed, half-solid, half-glazed, but in any case, forever half-finished.

Cinephilia in the Sixties and Film Writing as (Surrogate) Film Making

Godard propelled the wish to reflect on the cinema, but he did so in a dramatic/traumatic way. He lodged the desire for a theory of cinema through the cinema itself, but his films foreclosed that very possibility, because the standards he set were so far in advance of everything else that happened in the cinema up to that time. The experience was so traumatic, and Godard became so emblematic, I think, because his films fostered the illusion that writing about films was already halfway to making them, and that making films was the most authentic manner of being engaged in the world, or quite possibly in transforming the world: not only one's own, but that of one's culture and society. Hence the fatal ambition to become a film activist, which meant—in a gesture that both copied Cahiers du cinéma and harked back to the avant-garde movements of the 1920s—to write for and edit a film magazine, which I eventually did in 1968.

Among the books I read to prepare myself for the task in the years between 1964 and 1968 was neither André Bazin's four volumes Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (1958–62) nor Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film (1960) but Le cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire by Edgar Morin, published in 1956, who took a distinctly anthropological view of the 7th Art. Besides Morin, it was Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience (1962), and especially Parker Tyler whose essays I devoured, written mostly during the 1950s but collected in the 1960s as The Hollywood Hallucination, and as Sex, Psyche, Etcetera in the Film. What had prepared me for Tyler were the occasional pieces by the English critic Raymond Durgnat, whose iconoclasm was generously spiced with Adou Kyrou's and Robert Benayoun's brand of surrealism, which had survived in the pages of Positif, the Parisian antagonist of Cahiers du cinéma, and a magazine that hated Godard. Morin, Warshow, Tyler and Durgnat gave my understanding of cinema an ethnographic-anthropological slant and a broadly cultural-historical grounding, reinforced by my university studies in European Romanticism and Modernist literature, 19th century historiography and 20th century politics.

The reading prescribed by my friends, after they had converted me to Hollywood, was slightly different. What gave them such self-confidence was a subscription to Movie magazine, edited by Ian Cameron, which started appearing in 1961. Sometimes regarded as a clone (or rather, in those days a “carbon copy”) of Cahiers du cinéma, it was admired by us for its intransigent militancy vis-à-vis other positions, notably that of Sight & Sound, the house journal of the British Film Institute. Realism, for instance, was attacked by Movie not because it privileged the cinema's mechanical reproduction of reality over its expressive-constructivist potential, nor did Ian Cameron and Victor Perkins object to British “kitchen sink” cinema because of its manifestly middle-class “angry young men” rather than authentic working-class heroes. Movie abhorred the realist credo because it was championed by Sight & Sound: the victory of good taste over cult and camp, of pragmatism over passion: a prescriptive, well-meaning, understated consensus of those who enjoyed the cinema, but in moderation, and who, when given the choice, would probably prefer a good novel, or an evening at the theater. Movie writers, on the other hand, argued openly among themselves over the merits of Richard Brooks’ Elmer Gantry (1962) or the significance of John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962) for the future of Hollywood. For Movie, Hollywood stood for mise-en-scène, and mise-en-scène stood for the manifestations of a soul, at once more violent and more vulgar, more ideologically ambiguous and more bracingly naive than seemed enshrined in either the Cahiers du cinéma cult of auteurs or Lindsay Anderson's Free Cinema movement. Movie loved Otto Preminger and Joseph Losey, when the reputation of the first had already entered into free fall, and the second had not yet been adopted by Sight & Sound, which did so only after Losey's successful collaboration with Harold Pinter on The Servant and Accident.³

A Paris Pilgrimage

Movie's Hollywood, then, was not exactly the Hollywood of Cahiers or of Bazin. Granted: Hitchcock, Hawks and Welles were mentioned, but they did not—at least not in the early years—provide the touchstones. Insofar as it looked to Paris, Movie was closer to the MacMahonists (of Présence du cinéma), and when it invited art critics to contribute, it was people like Lawrence Alloway, an influential voice of British pop art, who was sympathetic to Hollywood movies, to advertising and comics, and who, in a study of movie iconography (published in one of Movie's first issues), had extolled the values of “mass popular art” and its cross-fertilizations with high art, rather than antagonism.⁴ Movie embraced not only gangster pictures and film noir, but saw even in the Frank Tashlin movies with Jerry Lewis the energy and vitality of the new youth culture (which had not yet been given this name...