V. F. Perkins on Movies

Collected Shorter Film Criticism

Douglas Pye

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780814346433
• eBook ISBN: 9780814346440
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Victor Perkins (1936–2016) was a foundational figure for the study of film both as a writer and as an educationalist and teacher who played a key role in establishing film within British higher education. Best known for his 1972 book Film as Film, Perkins has a worldwide reputation within film studies that has been enhanced in recent years by the interest among emerging scholars in the practices of detailed film criticism. His extensive writing in journals and edited collections, spanning sixty years, is less well known, despite its importance and quality, partly because much of it was published in small magazines with limited distribution. V. F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism, edited by Douglas Pye, makes it possible to see his writing as a coherent body of work, developed over a long career, and to appreciate its great historical and cultural significance. Part 1 of the book covers Perkins's early articles from 1960 to 1972, showing the emergence of ways of thinking about criticism and movies that remained constant throughout his career. Perkins was one of a small group of British writers who pioneered the serious and systematic discussion of Hollywood cinema. Beginning at the University of Oxford in the pages of Oxford Opinion, and then in Movie, the journal they established in 1962, these writers mounted a sustained critique of established writing on film, arguing for a criticism rooted in the detailed decisions that make up the complex texture of a film. The work Perkins published in the 1980s and beyond, which makes up part 2 of this volume, was resolute in upholding his critical values. It elaborated his approach in studies of individual movies and their makers and also reflected on major critical and conceptual issues, while maintaining his lifelong commitment to writing accessibly in ordinary language. V. F. Perkins on Movies gives unimpeded access to one of the most distinctive and distinguished of critical voices and will be widely welcomed by academics, students of film, and informed film enthusiasts.

Part 1

1960–1972

Oxford Opinion and Movie: The Battle for a New Criticism

The British Cinema and British Film Criticism

Fifty Famous Films 1915–45

First published in Oxford Opinion, April 30, 1960, 36–37.

Introductory note: Perkins’s article was published in the “Film” section of the student journal Oxford Opinion in March 1960. It was preceded by Ian Cameron’s editorial, which we include here to indicate a little more of the context within which Perkins and his colleagues were beginning to engage with contemporary British film culture.

Film criticism in Britain is dead. Hardly a single piece of perceptive criticism has been written here in the last few years. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to believe that British criticism has ever been alive. Perhaps in the good old days of “Sequence” . . .1

A first reaction to the latest Sight and Sound with its pale blue cover and pale pink contents was to scrap everything on films planned for this number of Oxford Opinion and to devote all our space to a dissection of that distressing journal. But it is only a pretty typical product of an approach to films that is fundamentally perverted and will continue to throw up muck until it begins to be flung back in the faces of its authors. At the moment there is hardly any sign of dissatisfaction with the current product. Therefore we are devoting the two main articles in this section to attacking two aspects of film criticism in Britain: the pallid philanthropy that has always provided its criteria for evaluation, and the falseness of the implicitly accepted distinction between art and commerce. How strange that a criticism which treats films as a medium of mass communication rather than as an art should be completely oblivious of the commercial realities of filmmaking. Later we hope to dissect the most pernicious article in the current Sight and Sound. And that should be all. Since “Stand Up! Stand Up!” we have had plenty of proof that repeated attack on the same subject from the same viewpoint become monotonous and finally ineffectual.2

For the rest of the term we aim to write about films rather than about criticism. The remaining three numbers will each contain an article on an important director—[Frank] Tashlin, Nicholas Ray, and [Georges] Franju—as well as pieces on other cinematic topics and reviews of films.

Ian Cameron

“Grant me patience, just Heaven! Of all the cants which are canted in this world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.” Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Sterne 1946: 131)

Fifty Famous Films, 1915–45 is the title of a booklet published by the BFI to provide notes for the [National Film] Archive programs at the National Film Theatre; any criticism should presumably observe the title’s terms of reference.3 Not that the booklet itself does so: it lists fifty-four films, at least five of which are certainly not famous, and one of which was made in 1914.4 The title itself is interesting in the modesty of its claims; the Archive could have included The Jazz Singer (1927) or King Kong (1933) in its program and no one would have been able to deny that the films were famous. It has in fact included both Storm over Asia (1928) and Brief Encounter (1945). The use of the word “famous” is just a blanket; it would have been much less evasive to call the season “Fifty Great Films.” In that context there would have been some sense in the note which apologizes for the nonavailability of [Charles] Chaplin’s feature films: “The Archive season . . . should include Shoulder Arms, The Kid, A Woman of Paris, The Gold Rush, City Lights and Modern Times” (99). The publication of this list—and, even more, the exclusion from it of The Great Dictator (1940)—can only imply a value judgment and it’s a pity the Institute was not more honest about it.

I thus intend to treat the booklet as a catalog of films that are included in the Archive series either for their value as works of art or because of their historical importance. From this point of view the publication is worth examining for the light it throws on the standards and prejudices of this country’s cinematic establishment.

The season covers three decades, and the numerical distribution of the films is itself interesting: the first (1915–25) is represented by seventeen films, the second (1926–35) twenty, but the most recent (1936–45) by a mere six—or five not counting Night Mail (1936).5 As for directors, six are represented by more than one film: [D. W.] Griffith, [Sergei] Eisenstein, and [René] Clair have three apiece; [Erich von] Stroheim, [John] Ford (!) and [G. W.] Pabst (!!) have two. Meanwhile Hitchcock, [Fritz] Lang, and [Orson] Welles have to be content with a single film, and in each case it is not one of their best. The omission of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is perhaps the most startling gap in the entire season. But there is worse to come: [George] Cukor, [Mark] Donskoy, [Josef von] Sternberg, [Billy] Wilder, [Jean] Cocteau, and, above all, Howard Hawks and Jean Renoir are nowhere to be found; the contributions of filmmakers in Italy, Sweden, and Japan are totally ignored; and among the important genres that are either completely or virtually unrepresented are the animated film, the film noir, and the western. The color film was never invented.

However, in fairness it must be admitted that the difficulties involved in compiling a season of this sort are enormous—no selection of fifty films could hope to be without omissions and unbalance. There are excuses for the content of the season; there are none for the content of the booklet. In the first place it suffers from a terrible confusion over its aims. The foreword by the director of the BFI states that “it is hoped that the booklet will have some value as a permanent reference work” (n.p.).6 It has none. There is perhaps one contribution which could be dignified by the name of journalism. But nowhere is there the slightest sign of the detailed, academic criticism which one might reasonably expect to find in a publication of this sort and from this source. If films are not to be subjected to close and intelligent study in the National Film Archive, then there is little hope that they will be so anywhere else. A single example: The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924), we are told, “was recognized as breaking new ground in the art of screen narration. It was particularly praised for its use of camera movement” (42–43; 42).7 And there the subject rests.

Instead of careful analysis we are offered, in most cases, a plot synopsis, a short account of the careers of people connected with the making of the film, details of production costs and hazards which would fit quite well into a Ben-Hur (1959) handout, and pious liberal sentiments. Thus of the anti-Negro propaganda in The Birth of a Nation (1915): “A charitable view may imply indiscretion rather than malice” (1–4; 3). Could anything be daintier? Or less relevant to the quality of the film?

Another question one automatically asks—though the BFI seem to have given it no thought—is for whom this publication was intended. The answer seems obvious: the patrons of the National Film Theatre. But surely they can be supposed to have passed the stage where they need to be told that “the close shot gives us a single detail of a scene, the rest being excluded; but the rest can be supplied by other close shots of other details” (2). No; they will look in vain for an examination of technique which goes beyond this elementary Manvellian stage.8

In fact such scant attention is paid to technique and aesthetics that the notes in this booklet might as easily have been written about novels or plays as about films. A plot synopsis of The Navigator (1924) would have revealed that whereas “Robinson Crusoe cannot boil an egg because he has neither fire nor kettle—Keaton cannot boil an egg because the available apparatus is only fit for boiling three hundred.” (30–32; 32). There is nowhere an indication that the writers of this booklet have realized that the film is a medium different in kind from any other.

One conviction, however, they do seem to share: things are not at all what they used to be. The Birth of a Nation has a “maturity and power . . . which have seldom been equalled since, despite the great technical progress made by the cinema in other ways” (2). “The handling of the actors in intimate scenes (of Intolerance [1916]) has seldom been equalled” (5–9; 8).9 Metropolis (1927) “has a bizarre quality which the current science fiction films have never equalled” (44–46; 44). And 42nd Street (1933) was “realized with flair and the sort of gusto that even the best musicals of to-day . . . cannot match” (73–74; 73). No wonder “the three greatest artist-innovators in world cinema remain Griffith, Chaplin and Eisenstein” (33–35; 33) with never a mention of Welles, Renoir, or [Roberto] Rossellini, let alone [Alain] Resnais.10 Read on. “Griffith created the cinema’s alphabet, Chaplin its humanity, individual and particular, and Eisenstein its intellect” (33). No, I’m not making it up.

With criticism stuck at this level one is not surprised by the absence of any attempt to define or describe a director’s artistic personality; indeed two of the films in the season are reviewed without even a mention of their director’s names. But one is surprised, naïvely perhaps, by the carelessness with which the whole thing has been bundled together. The Beggar’s Opera is “the seventeenth-century operetta” (68).11 The ending of Blackmail (1929) was changed “for ‘commercial’ reasons” (58–59; 59) (cf. Chabrol and Rohmer, Hitchcock).12 Worst of all, we read within a single paragraph that in Un Chien andalou (1929) “the emphasis is not on movements or tricks for their own sake . . . in spite of its harrowing and pointless effects” (60–62; 62).13

Lack of intellect and originality go hand in hand: not once is the traditional valuation of a film challenged. The verdicts pronounced by [Paul] Rotha when The Film Till Now (1930) was first published thirty years ago are still being pressed into service; Eisenstein’s estimate of his own work is swallowed whole. It gets worse: there are five films in the season that were made in Germany between the wars. Of these only Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) (1931) is reviewed without reference to [Siegfried] Kracauer’s book From Caligari to Hitler (1947)—other notes retail and accept without question a thesis which Fritz Lang has described as total nonsense.

But of course they would, for Kracauer’s book must be a model that almost every British film critic attempts to follow, since it neglects the aesthetics of the cinema in favor of politics and sociology. We all know by now that what the cinema needs is “warmth,” “heart,” “compassion,” “human sympathy,” and a pile of other artistically expendable commodities. That is why The Grapes of Wrath (1940) “must mark the highest peak of achievement in (Hollywood’s) long traffic with the art of the film. . . . For whatever other qualities this film may possess it is primarily a film about people, people who transcend the incidental evil and ugliness of life by their innate qualities of goodness and human courage. And when the meanness and malice of cruel men have done their worst it is the great spirit of Ma Joad . . . (et al.) . . . which remains. It is because of this positive affirmation of life that the film soars to greatness” (86–88; 87). So there you are. Run out and get yourself a positive affirmation and, cinematically, you’re made. You’ll have “the greatest masterpiece the screen has ever produced” (87) on your hands.14 Fine: but don’t ask me to sit through it.

I cannot pretend to believe that the attitude which exalts right-mindedness above form, style, and technique (“It is almost impertinent to refer to the production qualities of the film”) (87) has grown up in order to fulfill a real need.15 I do believe that British film critics have been forced to adopt this method because it is by far the easiest to practice; any fool can blather about positive affirmations. But in an art as new as the cinema it demands intellect, perception, and sheer hard work to get to grips with aesthetic questions. And these are gifts which our critics too obviously lack. They are thus driven back to their easy assumption that a great film is made by the director’s having his heart in the right place. The assumption, like the booklet, and like the criticism that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by George M. Wilson
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction by Douglas Pye
• 1: 1960–1972—Oxford Opinion and Movie: The Battle for a New Criticism
• 2: 1981–2016
• Index