FILM BERGMAN AUTEUR [1] – All anecdotes must lead somewhere

Persona was premièred at the Spegeln cinema on 18 October 1966. The editor Ulla Ryghe has described how the famous scene where the film burns up, often interpreted as if the actual celluloid cannot stand the friction between the two main characters, caused a number of problems at the initial screenings. After a number of projectionists had stopped the film, the film cans themselves had to be marked with red labels assuring them that the actual film does not catch fire, even though it appears that way.

From:


Persona
–As a nurse talks and her patient remains silent, their identities begin to merge.

from

Ingmar Bergman Foundation


Nice story. Someone’s bound to use it in a film. Ah, the intertextuality of film. Is there a Bergman Biopic yet?

This post is the beginning of my triple-ply, stronger, more absorbent re-look at Bergman, mostly through the lens of auteurism, starting with Persona which I watched again, fortuitously, a few days before reading about Godard, auteurists and cineastes. The Criterion version of Persona is currently available on YouTube. The naughty bits are in, so this must be Bergman’s cut. On the Criterion website, a set of essays on Persona and a 1.31 min. video essay without an oral/aural essay attached, which neatly catches some of the bits you’re bound to look for again in the rewind! If you’re fortunate enough to be able to watch the YouTube on a nice big tv screen, all the better. It’s good definition, but watch it while you can, you never know.

I feel I ought to say – which has probably been posted here and there before – that I’m not an academic (clearly) or a formal film student. How I’m learning about film is piece-meal and fragmented. And full of half-understood things. It seems at times like a person dragged off the street and pressed down in a chair in front of an old-fashioned editing machine, strips of film of various lengths hanging all about in the way we see in shots in films about editing rooms, and made to create a film, ending up with an out-takes ‘film’ just like the at the end of Cinema Paradiso but with some other subject apart from kissing. Or more appropriately, here, pre-credit sequence astoundingly similar to the ‘mad’ sequence in Persona.

In the previous post, the conversation I picked up the comments stream in a recent Girish post mentioning the publication by Caboose of an English version of Godard’s 1978 Toronto ‘lectures’, with the title Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television. A commenter made some remarks about auteurists and cinephiles as distinct, in opposition, which Girish had a distinct view on. All this seemed to be something I ought to get clear.

Anyone interested in films beyond watching them and a like/didn’t like, ends up with auteur theory, mentioned almost every time someone writes a film book or essay, which ineluctably leads to Truffaut’s “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”, back to Andre Bazin et al. and trillions of academic papers, essays and articles.

The auteurist vs. cinephile apposition which Girlish deals with made me realise I couldn’t blague my way through this with scant knowledge but needed to sit down and take some time over it.

And so for a while to Bergman, considered auteur de auteurs, how he made his mark, put his thumb-print on his work (and why even..). Having watched Persona before reading the post, I was primed, motivated, and ready to go.

As the opening paragraph of Ingmar Bergman the filmmaker, says:

The history of the cinema has seen directors whose works have been more “original” or “groundbreaking” (such as Eisenstein, Ozu or Godard). And there are plenty of directors who have made as many, if not more films (Griffith, Hitchcock or Chabrol). Yet the question remains: is there anyone who so epitomises the concept of the auteur – a filmmaker with full control over his medium, whose work has a clear and inimitable signature – as Ingmar Bergman?

FILM THINK All auteurists are cinephiles

In a May 2014 post, Godard and Other Reading, Girish flags up Caboose’s publication of an English translation of Godard’s 1978 Montreal Lectures, Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, quoting translator Timothy Barnard:

In the book, Godard sets out a philosophy of the image—in the process disproving his own thesis that words are prison, for there is nothing more liberating than this book—and outlines a theory and practice of ‘making’ film history through the act of viewing films. The Montreal talks were the forerunner to his video series Histoire(s) du cinéma. While some critics have described the latter as his Finnegan’s Wake, the True History of Cinema is his Arabian Nights: page-turning true stories of the movies whose idiosyncratic views, leavened with Godard’s famous caustic wit, will delight all readers. Never has Godard been as loquacious, lucid and disarmingly frank as he is here, holding forth, in an experience he describes as a form of ‘public self-psychoanalysis’, on his personal and professional relationships, working methods, aesthetic preferences, political beliefs and, on the cusp of 50, his philosophy of life.

A commenter Remy Renault wrote…

Well one thing that concerns me is what appears to be a schism between the “cinephiles” and the “auteurists”, the latter of whom are accused of vulgar auteurism by the “cinephiles”. The cinephiles tend to see ‘foreign art cinema’ of the fifties, sixties, and seventies as the apotheosis of filmmaking and are skeptical of what they perceive as mere entertainment products revered only for their technical merits, the films of Hawks and Ford. I used to be in this camp but now genuinely believe Ford to be among the three or four most important filmmakers of all time. The others are Godard, Renoir, and Vigo perhaps. The auteurists scoff at the cinephiles and then inevitably and perhaps unfairly begin judging Antonioni and Tarkovsky “by their respective audiences”. So should this gap be bridged? And for rhetorical purposes, what makes the “cinephile” attitude reactionary as well as the symptom of a less “advanced” stage of cinephilia? Why does one “grow out of” Tarkovsky but not Ford or Renoir for that matter?

Girish responds:

My take is very different from yours.

— I see no built-in opposition between cinephiles and auteurists (or between cinephilia and auteurism) at all. Cinephilia is the larger category — of all film-lovers who are also (see Antoine de Baecque on this) interested not just in watching films but also reading, writing, talking about them seriously. Auteurists are a subset of cinephiles, and are those who like to view films through the lens of an ‘author’—most often the director. All auteurists are cinephiles but the reverse is not true. There is no hard-and-fast equation of cinephiles with (exclusively) art cinema. See the history of French New Wave cinephilia—Godard, Truffaut, et al. were BOTH cinephiles and auteurists. Some of the most respected cinephiles today (like Jonathan Rosenbaum in the elder generation or Ignatiy Vishnevetsky in the younger) are also ‘selective auteurists’–meaning, they often like to focus on the marks of authorship of the director but this is not exclusively the only lens they bring to analyzing films.

— “Vulgar auteurism” is a very narrow, specific phenomenon (see this post and discussion from last summer)—much smaller than auteurism at large.

— There are several large conversations (and posts) at this blog about auteurism and cinephilia. You may want to do “searches” on these two terms on this blog; there’s a search box at the bottom of the sidebar. I think you’ll enjoy all the reading you’ll turn up.

To which our Remy responds:

Perhaps the terms I employed were problematic, but you do raise the issue I’m referring to, that there are cinephiles who judge filmmakers solely based on what they regard to be their ‘medium specific’ contributions whereas others tend to judge films based on how they stack up as ‘works of art’ in a more ‘cosmic’ sense and on how they contribute to what’s perceived as ‘high culture’. So is taking a traditional ‘high culture’ approach to film appreciation reactionary? Also, is it limiting to dwell with an evangelical fervor on ‘medium specific’ elements at the expense of all else, since it often leads to the devaluing of guys like Bergman and Fellini who contributed to art and culture in more of a cosmic sense?

And Girish finally:

…. I believe this is a false opposition.

‘Medium specificity’ has to do with making use of the unique powers of cinema–i.e. doing something in cinema that is not translatable to other forms (like literature or theatre) without great loss.

The good practitioners of what you refer to as ‘high culture’ or ‘art cinema’ are VERY much aware of the specific, unique powers of cinema–and they are venturesome in making use of them.

Ford’s films contribute as much to the larger world (‘in a cosmic sense’, as you say) as Bergman or Fellini. Think of someone like Jean-Marie Straub (among the most exalted of ‘art cinema’ filmmakers) for whom Ford is one of the supreme filmmakers.

All of the above mentioned filmmakers are deeply aware of–and make great, imaginative use of–medium specificity.

Other

[1] wiki:Cinephilia

[2] wiki:Vulgar auteurism

A definition: “a critical movement committed to assessing the ‘unserious’ artistry of popcorn cinema with absolute seriousness.” Discuss.

Ref list including [4]

[4] What the Insular Debate on ‘Vulgar Auteurism’ Says About Contemporary Movie Criticism and Cinephilia

[5] Vulgar Auteurism

6 June 2013 post by Girish

He points out he’s posted variously on auteur theory and cinephila – searches for these posts bringing up e.g.
On Auteurism. In this one, Girish quotes from Dana Polen’s Auteur Desire – a 14 page downloadable file.

I also found the term ‘master of enunciation’ in Aesthetics of Film. Pages 234-5 are the key sections though enoncé/énonciation is introduced earlier in the book [p.82-83]. Having the hard-copy is nice but a GoogleBook is available with quite a few relevant pages including 82-83 under heading Narrative, Narration and Diegesis:

Two paras at p.233 give some help:

Since the 1960s and its valorization of auteur theory [..], we have seen more and more filmmakers asserting themselves by a personal enunciation and also signing, as it were, their films with some more or less flamboyant marks of their own characteristic enunciation.

E.g.s such as Bergman’s Persona, Antonioni’s Eclipse, Godard’s Contempt, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

At the beginning of the 1970s, a large theoretical debate surrounded ideology as conveyed by the classical cinema and, in particular, its transparency and effacement of the marks of enunciation. Several filmmakers, in keeping with their political or ideological concerns, believed it best to inscribe the work of enunciation [which is to say the production process] clearly within their films.

e.g. Godard/Gorin’s Tout Va Bien

This section beginning p. 233 is sub-headed, Identification and Enunciation. It’s worth going back to the beginning of the section to get identification/enunciation clear.

It says finally:

[6] Auteurist backsliding

Dan Sallitt, 22 April 2010 [Dan Sallitt’s Homepage]

[7] Auteurist v. Cinephile (Dan Sallitt)

Screenville, 23 April 2010

Harry Tuttle in part tackles the confusions over the terminology, auteurist, auteurism, cinephile, by reference to Sillett’s post [6].

[8] Authorship & Auteur Theory

in RioDrome – my header Wordle came from here.

Girish points out two from FSFF:

[9] On Auteurism and Film Authorship Theoriespacked with refs from Film Studies for Free

[10] C is for Cinephilia Studies (plus some telephilia, too)

– Well, no, I’ve not read refs in [9] & [10] but I know where to look for them. A quick perusal of titles makes me think this might be a step too far for me.