By Steven Boone
2009 is the year I quit film criticism for the fourth or fifth time. It was sort of like the local crazy homeless guy quitting his post as honorary mayor of the corner. Big whoop. I keep coming back to the block, hoping somebody heard my cry of doom and responded accordingly. The cry goes something like this: Cinema as a popular art form has lost the fundamentals that make its expensive products worth our time. Critics, content that a stubborn minority of classically trained filmmakers still endure at the arthouse and on the festival circuit, happily chalk up the disaster at the multiplex as Other People’s Problem. In other words, caviar for us, scraps for the rabble. It's the blithe attitude of Whole Foods shoppers toward the Food Stamp set, and it's disgusting.
_____________________________________[To read the full article, full of polemic and full of fire, click here to get your snatch on at Boone's baby, BIG MEDIA VANDALISM.]
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16 comments:
Singling out Inglourious Basterds as being a film that finally "sell(s) classical film technique", ignores far too many recent movies. You argue that it is Inglourious Basterds' mainstream success that makes it significant. I think its clear that difference between the underwhelming $40 million that There Will Be Blood (a shot-focused, classically made film) grossed and Inglourious Basterds is a misleading add campaign centering on Brad Pitt talking about scalping nazis.
Although I think the film is worthy of you devoting attention to its mastery of "the shot", any grand statement you make about the film, singling it out from other, albeit less successful, shot-focused films, should be acknowledging the film's marketing or its director's place in film culture rather than something QT is doing differently or better within the medium itself.
Brian,
I am emphasizing box office performance here, precisely because it's the only language Ho'wood respects. But I cited plenty of other films that speak the old dead (or, better, murdered) language, including There Will Be Blood.
(You want more titles? No Country for Old Men, I Am Legend, Lars and the Real Girl, The Good Shepherd, Children of Men...)
It just so happens that Tarantino has also made an extraordinarily beautiful film, far out ahead of anything else he's done and my choice for film of the decade over my other two beloveds, Import Export and Mulholland Dr.
Sure, it's Tarantino's place in film culture (Gen-X curator/entertainment brand) that makes Basterd's shot list so important. He's using his pop clout to do the right thing.
Marketing is the prime mover in all of Ho'wood these days. What I'm more interested in is what happens on the screen after we've been duped into seeing a film.
With Basterds, I spy a phenomenon that takes me back to the summer of '77: plain folks returning to see it again and again. No marketing in the world can do that.
If you are interested on what happens on screen "after people have been duped" and you want to dive into the formal mastery on display, I certainly think that would be worth-whiled. But this isnt the focus of the piece. Other than (accurately) describing how the movie consists of shots, instead of "snatches", you never dive into the internal elements of the film. You dont even cite one specific shot to back up your point (the first one that comes to my mind is the reveal of the hidden nazi officer in the bar scene).
Instead of focusing on such things you create an overly broad interpretation of recent film history, deriving generalities that, in my mind, offer little in the way of substance.
You said: " it has taken Tarantino, with his infectious love of violent scenarios and grindhouse grand guignol to sell classical film technique not as a quaint alternative to snatch cinema but as the most vital, elastic and essential use of the form. ". I'm reading this as you saying it has taken something QT has done with internal elements within the film to make a classically designed movie with mainstream success and not, like i am arguing, external elements such as smart but misleading marketing, and QT's reputation.
Perhaps im wrong and there is another phenomenon at work here, as you imply by saying "plain folks" returning for multiple viewings. I don't know anything about this (nor do i understand how you could know the ammount of repeat viewings and whether or not these repeat viewers are "plain folk" or not), but i would find it interesting if this was instead what your piece focused on. Still I would cite There Will Be Blood again, which perhaps if it had as strong an opening as Inglourious Basterds, would have had such repeat viewings. And in turn the difference between the success of the two films is still external elements.
I think I generally agree with Brian that you're deriving some very broad generalities about one film's success over another to support your point. I think there's far more to the success of Inglorious Basterds than Tarantino's camera technique. And while it's easy to mock the editing and direction on of Greengrass' Bourne films or Nolan's Dark Knight (I find the Bourne style insufferable), one can't deny that audiences and the vast majority of film critics reacted to those films very favorably (and not to say the masses, critical or audience, are always right either). I'm not sure if that bolsters your argument or not, since I'm failing to see the causal connection between cinematic styles and box office beyond the fact that people really seem to respond well to expensive CGI effects, no matter how poor the direction is. If Michael Bay is secretly a classic filmmaker, he's still one of the worst storytellers in Hollywood.
I think a video essay would really illustrate your points much better than what you've offered.
Just wanted to chime in and say, considering how weird and off-putting "There Will Be Blood" was for some (not me), I though $40 mil was surprisingly decent B.O.
That's all. Carry on.
Brian,
One reason I posted this piece at Big Media Vandalism and not The House is that over there the editor (me) lets me get away with screeds, rants and polemics without having to fulfill any of the obligations you mention. Weee. A lot of my pieces over there are about provoking a sharp response in the spirit of that Howard Beale line, "All I know is that first you've got to get mad."
Also at BMV, I put a lot of my "substance" into my choice of links and pics. Take a glance at the frame grabs I put up to get a sense of what I mean by "shots" (it's really a very simple point). Click the banner image at the top to see what I mean by "snatches." I didn't spend all that time effing around with Photoshop for nothing.
If you want more than that, you're in luck. This film has provoked a lot of thoughtful shot-by-shot analysis all over the web, including this site.
But Anonymous let the cat out of the bag: This piece is the intended narration to a video essay I haven't finished. Don't hold your breath, but we'll see.
Anon also said: "I'm failing to see the causal connection between cinematic styles and box office beyond the fact that people really seem to respond well to expensive CGI effects, no matter how poor the direction is."
I've got something even more arrogant and presumptuous for that: People are taking what they are given, and the past decade has been about molding an audience that will take any ol' shit. We are benumbed to harsh, disjunctive editing. What was applied with delicacy and precision in, say, The French New Wave or a Wham! video is now deployed indiscriminately, with no feeling for form, just content and filling out a time span by any means "necessary." Here's a random TV clip that illustrates this (maybe I'll embed the link somewhere in my Inglourious piece): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQKvb6XAUb8
So when a film like Basterds comes along, promising the same old spastic storytelling (the trailers) but delivering big time sensuality, yes, it draws an unusual number of repeat viewers. How do I know? The scientific evidence of my friends and neighbors.
Craig, I'm with you on There Will Be Blood. Too weird and diffuse for Basterd numbers. I went to see it with a weird brainiac poet whose first response upon leaving the theater was, "That shit was WEIRD."
I would like more on what a 'snatch' is. That photoshop banner isn't really helping me.
As for There Will Be Blood, simply not nearly as good a movie. It had a very good but not very commercial first half; it then turned into a ridiculously unconvincing remake of Citizen Kane. I remember being in the theater and thinking to myself the second that derrick went on fire and DDL started doing his crazy act that the movie was going down the drain. Inglourious Basterds has its faults, but it's not half botch job.
I agree wholehearedly with the main thrust of Stephen's article. I remember The Bourne Ultimatum as being one of the most depressing cinema-going experiences of a lifetime - it was just a loud, interminable assault on the most basic tenets of cinematic story-telling, style, and communication. As with The Dark Knight, what was particularly dispiriting was the fact that the majority of critics were fawning over those movies. With the exception of Michael Mann, and possibly Bigelow's Hurt Locker, very few directors can actually make the "snatch" style work as an a viable alternative to classicism.
(P.s Also have to agree with Tray in relation to TWBB. It was magnificant when dealing with the quest for oil and wealth, but in attempting to condemn/develope a commentary on the consequences of that quest, it simply resorted to cliche, caracature, and sheer histronics.)
@ tray: A snatch, in my understanding of the term, is a shot that might allow the viewer to register the basic information of what's happening but doesn't allow what's happening to breathe or have much weight or jive spatially with successive shots. And oftentimes the cuts between the snatches are more motivated by a desire to keep the energy level high and/or use more of the excessive amount of coverage big budget productions tend to get than because there's actually new information to impart. While I'm all for new modes of filmmaking, this one mostly seems like an aesthetic dead end, and its ubiquity has shaped some general audience members' expectations to the point where when presented with some authentically great filmmaking they're more likely to be bored than enraptured.
Having said that, I'm going to stand up a little bit for The Dark Knight here. While Nolan's grasp of film grammar definitely leaves something to be desired, many of the individual moments that made it so overwhelmingly successful with audiences, most of them involving Ledger's Joker (the pencil trick, his walking nonchalantly out of the exploding hospital in a nurse's uniform), take place in single, well-executed non-snatches. The propulsive energy even of the more inadequately/incoherently edited sequences creates a sense of the movie's world being torn apart that's far more palpable than the narrative's attempts to convey the same. So while its merits were blown insanely out of proportion and it probably doesn't deserve a place in the modern filmic canon, it also isn't quite a middlebrow Michael Bay movie, in that its aesthetic crimes don't, at least for me, manage to pollute the real, actually-sorta-classical pleasures it offers.
I'm going to have to vehemently disagree with you (tray) about There Will Be Blood. It might engage with the same themes as Citizen Kane and Plainview might end up in a Xanaduesque abode, but the tone and form and characters and, really, purpose of the two movies are completely different. What you see as a jumping of the shark midway (how did you not dig the derrick fire?) I see as a smooth shift into delicious black comedy, which comedy is latent in DDL's performance from the beginning. If it's Citizen Kane, it's Citizen Kane with no Rosebud, and Citizen Kane with no Rosebud is a completely different movie.
I'm commenting on this a day after reading it and I'm in a rush. Bad combo, but here goes...
Though I agree with the general idea that "the shot" has given way to "the snatch," regardless of the reason (sometimes it's artistry, for better or worse, sometimes it's lack of imagination and sometimes it's practicality), let me toss this out there:
While "the snatch" is often lesser than "the shot," it seems to be on the same level as "THE SHOT." Confused? Here's what I mean: Often when directors go anti-snatch to pull off extravagant or just curiously long unbroken takes (Children of Men, for example, has both) to create THE SHOT -- a profound artistic gesture -- the result is that our attention is drawn not to THE SHOT's effect on the art but to THE SHOT itself. I suggest for consideration that any shot that calls attention to itself and thus to the filmmaker behind it isn't any richer than the snatch that just throws the story in front of us like flashcards.
To continue with other examples used above, Inglourious Basterds and There Will Be Blood definitely utilize "the shot" to beautiful and profound artistic effect. But when "the shot" becomes "THE SHOT," the artistry cancels itself out.
Hope someone followed that. Gotta run.
On that definition, it sounds like snatches have always been with us? I mean, Eisenstein? Though of course, your definition of a 'snatch' depends in part on how it relates to other shots (or snatches), so I suppose those aren't snatches? Not to compare Eisensteinian montage to Christopher Nolan, one certainly knows the difference when one sees it, but the exact parameters of the shot/snatch line aren't so obvious.
I did like the derrick fire, the fire itself anyway. But I simply didn't believe that in that moment, Plainview would abandon his son and stand out there thrilled that he'd found oil. It struck me as the first departure in the film from an organic conception of what that character was about and a turn to some sort of unconvincing tragic vision of Plainview, based in nothing much more than Anderson's sense that that's what all heroes of Great American Dramatic Films (Kane, Michael Corleone) just do, become alienated from their families and the world and hole up in gigantic mansions, and of course he'd like to add his movie to the list, so that's where he feels he's got to go. (Sorry for the tense switch.) When, shortly after that scene, DDL starts slapping preacher-boy around for no apparent reason whatsoever, then I really knew Anderson had lost the thread. Even if you buy it, think that Plainview's sudden insanity is something you could really see happening at this point in his life, it's such generic, unrewarding, and often quite ugly Kane-pastiche that it doesn't much matter either way. There's some fun black comedy there, but most of it is establishing shots of this gigantic mansion, followed by interiors in which, suspiciously, we only ever see the same two rooms and one smallish staircase. Which is fitting. The last hour never feels real. When he told his son he was a bastard, didn't you find that horribly gratuitous? I felt like the screenwriter was sitting in judgment over Plainview, putting words in his mouth that he'd never really say so as to grotesquely announce his moral worthlessness to the audience.
You've got some good points, but I think it comes down to how we read Plainview in the early going. Regardless of how unambiguously vile he turns out to be in the end, the movie is still very much an open text. I buy into his madness because I think it's there from frame one, it's just sublimated into his work, bubbling beneath his affected social facade, and the derrick fire is when it begins to really emerge.
And, he says wishing he could edit his last comment to include this one, it really does seem to matter if you buy into it, because what follows is a whole lot more resonant and rewarding and un-generic if you do.
Commenter JF has given one of the sharpest definitions yet.
"A snatch, in my understanding of the term, is a shot that might allow the viewer to register the basic information of what's happening but doesn't allow what's happening to breathe or have much weight or jive spatially with successive shots. And oftentimes the cuts between the snatches are more motivated by a desire to keep the energy level high and/or use more of the excessive amount of coverage big budget productions tend to get than because there's actually new information to impart. While I'm all for new modes of filmmaking, this one mostly seems like an aesthetic dead end, and its ubiquity has shaped some general audience members' expectations to the point where when presented with some authentically great filmmaking they're more likely to be bored than enraptured."
Damn straight.
And, yes, Tray, snatches have always been with us. They've always had their proper place. Look at how Orson Welles deploys snatch to deliver a jolt of battle hysteria after a lyrical setup in Chimes at Midnight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX9-9ae0ymI
What I'm arguing is that snatch no longer knows its place, because market research and high-pressue salesmanship, not good filmmaking sense, have gained undue influence over the flow of images in these exponentially corporate times.
It's the same kind of efficiency ethic that gets us through check-out lines faster thanks to self-serve kiosks or helps us digest a tumble of news stories in a blink but has been disastrous when applied to movies (our communal dream life).
To me it all comes down to a clash between two dead Russians. Check out what Andrei Tarkovsky had to say about Eisenstein (in Sculpting in Time):
"I am radically opposed to the way Eisenstein used the frame to
codify intellectual formulae. My own method of conveying
experience to the audience is quite different. Of course it has to be
said that Eisenstein wasn't trying to convey his own experience to
anyone, he wanted to put across ideas, purely and simply; but for me
that sort of cinema is utterly inimical. Moreover Eisenstein's
montage dictum, as I see it, contradicts the very basis of the unique process whereby a film affects an audience. It deprives the person
watching of that prerogative of film, which has to do with what
distinguishes its impact on his consciousness from that of literature
or philosophy: namely the opportunity to live through what is
happening on the screen as if it were his own life, to take over, as
deeply personal and his own, the experience imprinted in time upon
the screen, relating his own life to what is being shown."
Damn. straight.
As for The Dark Knight...
I suspect the backlash against TDK has more to do with the vapid-sounding praise it suckered out of audience members and critics who felt it was giving them a clever, adult gloss on a comic book scenario. The backlash essentially says, "Yeah, okay, but it's UGLY! And MEAN!"
There is a sleek, gorgeous Bat-bike/truck chase at the heart of The Dark Knight that nearly redeems the whole mess.
No, TDK isn't as rife with snatch as Batman Begins, but where it does deploy snatch tactics constitutes a human rights violation. I'm working up a petition as we speak.
The snatches in TDK mostly occur in scenes of human beings in peril, like that cocktail party siege that pingpongs between steadicam shots in the manner of a quickie Junior Mafia video (remember them?).
Speaking of hip-hop, I got the sense that Nolan was aiming for the kind of snatch/visual ballet synthesis that Dead Prez nailed in their video masterpiece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8ZwVGY4Snc.
Bike chase notwithstanding, there is more terror, sadness and complexity in that Dead Prez clip than in any of TDK's flailings and histrionics.
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