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The Times (02/Jan/1963) - The Giants of Today's Cinema

(c) The Times (02/Jan/1963)

The Giants of Today's Cinema

Film critics, like any other sort of critic, are liable to play, and sometimes overplay, the influences game. In the past few years the situation has been even further complicated by the transformation, particularly in France, of critics into film directors. It is bad enough when the critic looks at a director's work and murmurs — appreciatively or insultingly as the case may be — "school of Antonioni with a dash of Hitchcock", but far worse when a critic-turned-director starts assuring us, before we have even seen any of his films, that the prime influence on his work has been Eisenstein, or Welles, or Murnau, or Douglas Sirk.

However, from this tangle of oddities and irrelevances one very interesting thing does emerge when we start looking back with as much detachment as we can muster on the cinema of the last decade: that in all the talk about influences the same small group of names keeps recurring. Again and again the same handful of directors are cited, from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo, and it seems reasonable to suppose that however excellent the individual films, or even total oeuvres, of other directors may be, it is these who have placed their personal mark most decisively on the medium during the 1950s.

INFLUENTIAL FIGURES

It is, when one considers it, an oddly heterogeneous collection. Not all, by any means, are youthful revolutionaries, and two of them have in fact been making films since silent days. Yet both of them, Senor Luis Bunuel and Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, are quite undeniably "Men of the 'Fifties", and have never been more influential than they are today. With Senor Bunuel this is understandable; after his two early surrealistic classics, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, he virtually disappeared from the scene, to be remembered, if at all, as Dali's collaborator, until 1950, when suddenly Los Olvidados arrived from Mexico to remind us that he was one of the cinema's great originals. Since then he has turned out, often on a shoestring, an astonishing series of masterpieces, from El and La Vida Criminal de Archibaldo de la Cruz to the recent "trilogy" Nazarin, Viridiana and El Angel Exterminador, which has done more than anything else to make surrealism a living force for the younger generation in the cinema.

Mr. Hitchcock is a far more curious case. After his wonderful series of British thrillers in the 1930s he went to America and for a while, in spite of some interesting films like Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious, seemed to be going through rather a barren period. But then, when the talents of most of the other Hollywood seniors were beginning to atrophy, he made an astonishing comeback with Strangers on a Train and has continued to get younger every year since, so that his recent films, above all Vertigo and Psycho, are among the most advanced in subject matter and style now being made anywhere in the world. Even if the precise grounds on which the French New Wave directors idolize him are sometimes a little bizarre, the works are there to demonstrate that there is after all a lot of method in their madness.

The other four directors who have established themselves as major influences during the last decade could hardly be more diverse. Two, perhaps — M. Robert Bresson and Signor Michelangelo Antonioni — might be regarded as quietists of the cinema, while the other two, Mr. Ingmar Bergman and Signor Federico Fellini, incline notably towards the extravagant and exhibitionistic. But while M. Bresson is a classical quietist, ruthlessly paring down his style with each succeeding film until in his latest, Le Proces de Jeanne d'Arc, he reaches a point of almost total self-abnegation in an "objective" style of documentary bareness and simplicity, Signor Antonioni is, under the deceptively poised and disciplined surface of his films, a passionate romantic. It is, in fact, the feeling of urgency and conviction in the importance of what is being said which prevents his films from falling into the sterile aestheticism of which they are often accused; as much, unfortunately, cannot be said of the works of most of his followers, who tend to take over wholesale the technical procedures which make an Antonioni film so beautiful to look at but forget that the result cannot live unless its creator's heart is in it.

The difference between Signor Fellini and Mr. Bergman lies precisely in this question of "heart". No one doubts that Signor Feilini's heart is in his films to a quite extraordinary degree: they constitute, virtually, a spiritual autobiography ranging from the landscapes and fantasies of bis early childhood in La Strada through the provincial adolescence of I Vitelloni. to the mature, metropolitan disillusion of La Dolce Vita. What some doubt though — those, anyway, to whom his world is not naturally congenial — is whether enough fundamental brainwork goes into the films along with the heart, whether the creator stands back far enough from his creation. With Mr. Bergman, on the other hand, the head may be felt to rule the heart rather more than it should; even though his films, too, have something of the spiritual autobiography about them, from his early studies of the agonies of adolescence, through the grapplings with the problems of marriage which he gave us in the early 1950s, to the more recent religious phase. But always Bergman the showman has a tendency to get between us and Bergman the man; his films sometimes dazzle, puzzle, and intrigue only to fall short of their real intention, to move us to pity and terror.

Something of all these richly idiosyncratic creators has rubbed off on the younger generations in France and Italy; occasionally in imitation of superficial traits — an Antonioni composition here, a Fellini waif-character there, a touch of Bergman paradox in the scripting, a dash of calculated savagery after Bunuet or Hitchcock, an "endistancing" narration in the manner pioneered by Bresson — often in something deeper, arising from a true likeness of mind. They have also, naturally, provoked a balancing hostility in their juniors: M. Jean-Luc Godard, for example, may idolize Mr. Hitchcock but can seriously debate with himself in public whether Signor Antonioni or Signor Fellini has first claim to the title of the world's worst director. Which is, of course, just as it should be, with any luck, out of this rebellion a terrible beauty may be born. Has been in fact: already M. Godard and M. Francois Truffaut, mere beginners compared with Mr. Hitchcock, are plagued by a rash of pseudo-Godard and pseudo-Truffaut films.

They and their generation have brought something new to the cinema, simply, it seems, by virtue of having been born late enough to take the sound film for granted. They treat it as no one older can altogether do, with happy ease and irreverence; they make films just as unselfconsciously as you or I might scribble a letter or sketch a caricature. They, no doubt, will be among the prime forces of cinema in the 1960s, but whatever the vicissitudes of fashion, whether the half-dozen Men of the 'Fifties Continue to exercise influence or become, as to some of the young they may already seem, old hat, there can be no doubt that some of the films made by Bunuel, Hitchcock. Bresson, Bergman, Antonioni, and Fellini during this period, whatever the faults which go with their virtues, will continue to stand as landmarks of the cinema and be shown and shown again as long as the celluloid holds together.

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