Another idiot (yeah, that one) throwing a hissy over my dissing of the idiocy of "auteur theory" and my point that movies (actually I said "art") are generally crap in inverse proportion to the cost of their production and the number of people involved in making them, brings up the double-movie Les Enfants du Paradise based on a scenario by the popular poet Jacques Prévert, directed by Marcel Carné. I looked for how much the production cost and saw a figure of 55 million francs, about twice what was originally estimated for the cost. Since Les Enfants is, actually, two movies, I think to compare it with some other movie you should probably halve the figure when comparing it to another movie.
A lot of the cost of the movie was due to it being a historical costume drama which, involving the construction of sets, some of which had to be rebuilt when they were destroyed - the movie was made in the last days of the Nazi occupation of France and, if I recall correctly, as the Allies were landing at Normandy and advancing on Paris.Not to mention the costs of things like costumes. I would argue that sets and costumes are of little importance in determining the artistic quality of a production. And there were large numbers of extras - some of them members of the resistance in their day jobs who, for artistic purposes, add little more to the substance of a production than objects on the sets.
It is an interesting thing about the production, made under the Nazi collaborator Vichy government that even as it employed Jews in hiding from the Nazis and members of the resistance in hiding from the Nazis (no doubt adding to its legendary status), other members of the production, some of the starring roles, were collaborators who were tried for that even as the movie was being shown. Clearly even if you take that to be the great movie that it is held to be - I was kind of "meh!" as I generally am with costume drama extravaganzas - it is clearly not typical of big, high cost movies. I was unable to figure out the equivalent of 55 million 1945 francs (assuming the figure I found was given in those) in 2019 dollars so I have no idea what the guesstimate of that would be.
I would argue that there were many, far more modestly produced movies that are as great or greater art, or at least as much art as movies ever are. I have read that the fashionable French movie ideology, La Nouvelle Vague the thing I criticized was inspired, or so I've read, in part in outraged reaction to the eminently true and eminently sensible statement by André Malraux about the movies being as much an industry as an art. And that was back when there were large numbers of people working in it who had worked as either legitimate writers of artistic and even superior popular fiction and plays. And then a lot of those wrote out of bitter experience about how Hollywood was good for making money but it could destroy you as an Artist. The French New Wave were, like Brecht, inspired by Hollywood crap, ironically enough.
Malraux, trying to encourage more of the art through relieving the industrial character of the movies through public funding and promotion, and to compete with the universal hegemony of Hollywood, ironically ended up helping to produce some of the worst of the New Wave junk.
The modern history of the French cinema is the history of its protection and advancement by the French government. Immediately after the Second World War, France imposed quotas on the importation of American films and reserved a certain number of weeks per screen for French films. Paradoxically, it was a discerning passion for Hollywood movies that launched a young band of critics at Cahiers du Cinéma into notoriety and inspired them to make movies that made them famous under the journalistic rubric of the New Wave—and it was the sudden rush of creation in the late fifties that led France’s then-Minister of Culture, André Malraux, to introduce a series of measures intended to promote the production and distribution of French movies not just as commercial ventures but as works of art that would be fundamental to France’s cultural heritage. The New Wave directors themselves, at least in the early years, hardly benefited from this system, which, however, reinforced their critical legacy—that of the auteur, the individual creator, as the key element in movie production—as the image of the French cinema as marketed to the world.
I don't think it worked the way he hoped it would. The excesses of that "auteur" who wasn't the writer but the friggin' directors, generally more interested in the spectacle than in ideas and morals, who drove things. The last French movies I saw that I thought were good were Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. But I've pretty much given up on the movies since the late 80s. As I recall, late 70s Hollywood junk killing off any inclination I had to sit in a theater. But that will set him off if I go into details.
As I said, I was talking about art in general when I made the comment about the inverse proportionality between cost and quality. I would guess that I could name a hundred novels written in the 20th century that are more artistically, intellectually and morally significant than that movie, art that I would guess cost, in terms of money, little to nothing its creation and even the editing and printing and distribution taken into account wouldn't even have cost a week's production of most movie extravaganzas. I could name at least a dozen plays you could probably say the same about and some books of poetry of around that time. Even the top part of Eugene O'Neill's production of plays from the war years, alone, are greater art than any of the movies produced in that decade. Then there are the compositions, classical and jazz, I don't think any director produced greater art than Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, the early bop musicians, did, than Olivier Messiaen was writing or Henri Dutilleux was about to start writing. Or Luigi Dallapiccola or Arnold Schoenberg or Bela Bartok were or had just written. I'd certainly include Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland in that list. though much of their greater work was to come.
I have gone back and looked at some of the movies I'd liked back when I watched movies. I like Ignmar Bergman's movies, none of which I'd guess would be considered big productions, as movies go. I liked some others. But my reaction to movies, these days, is like Groucho said his reaction to TV is, when someone turns one on I go read a book. If I had to sit and look at a screen while I was listening, I don't think I'd listen to my beloved radio dramas, a medium that gets more of the actual author's work into the final result than the movies or theater are likely to do. I don't think even the movie in question comes up to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead novels. I don't think it even comes up to Steinbeck, to tell you the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment