I’ve been dipping into Pauline Kael’s Deeper Into Movies lately and came across this delicious quote:
There’s a good deal to be said for finding your way to moviemaking—as most of the early directors did—after living for some years in the world and gaining some knowledge of life outside show business. We are beginning to spawn teen-age filmmakers who at twenty-five may have a brilliant technique but are as empty-headed as a Hollywood hack, and they will become the next generation of hacks, because they don’t know anything except moviemaking.
She said that in 1969 in the context of reviewing documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s High School. Wiseman had come to film after a career as a law professor and urban planner, and definitely came to his films with some ideas about the world. Kael would probably have a lot to say about some of today’s young directors, many of whom grew up comfortable with the tools of filmmaking but who have yet to find anything distinctive to actually say about anything.
What do you think? Can you give me some examples and counter-examples of young filmmakers with nothing (or something) to say?
UPDATE: Oh wait, there’s more! From a rather unfavourable review of Canada’s own Alan King’s A Married Couple:
[Y]oung filmmakers, who are rarely writers but are hooked on technology, love an approach in which the thinking out in advance is minimal—an approach in which you shoot a lot of footage and then try to find your film in it. Young filmmakers generally know almost nothing about how to handle actors, but probably all filmmakers have unhappy or “unfulfilled” friends eager to have a movie made of their lives; fame is probably the cure they seek.
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Brooke and I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle) (1960) the other night. It was my first time seeing it, though Brooke has seen it several times before, and says it’s one of her favourite films. Frankly, I had mixed feelings (though I gave it an 8 on IMDB). Some people can immediately dissect a film into its parts and can expound at length on the editing, the cinematography, the sound design, and lots of other “technical” aspects of the movie. I’ve never been able to do that, at least not upon my first viewing. I guess I have to ingest the whole before I can talk about any of the parts. And for me, the whole was somewhat unsatisfying, even disturbing.
I tried to distance myself from the obvious charms of the movie: Paris in the Sixties, exciting “French New Wave” flourishes like jump-cuts, the gorgeous Jean Seberg. And what I found was a film about two people with no souls. Michel and Patricia are completely amoral and aimless, and I could find no sympathy for them. This always makes watching a film difficult for me. And even though Brooke grudgingly agreed with me, it was still clear that she loves the film and I, well, not so much.
I was struggling to figure out whether it was just me being contrary, so I grabbed Pauline Kael’s book For Keeps off our bookshelf. Imagine my relief when I read:
“What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the engagingly coy young hood with his loose, random grace and the impervious, passively butch American girl are as shallow and empty as the shiny young faces you see in sports cars and in suburban supermarkets, and in newspapers after unmotivated, pointless crimes. And you’re left with the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting chaos as natural, and not caring one way or another about it or anything else…The characters in Breathless are casual, carefree moral idiots.”
I think seeing the film for the first time at the age of 39 has a lot to do with it. If I’d seen it twenty years ago, I may not have suspected that the characters are poseurs, that even the filmmaker may be a bit of a poseur. I might have mistaken their chilling soullessness for “cool” and tried to imitate it.
When I see Breathless again (and I think it is worthy of another viewing), I certainly will pay more attention to the revolutionary camerawork and editing. With the moral vacuum at the heart of the film now recognized and named, that seems to be the only place left I’d want to look.
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