Hi there - can I go back to the abbreviated postings please?

Cheers,


-- 
Erin Brannigan
PO Box 1292
Potts Point
NSW 2011
Ph: 02 9356 3472
Email: [log in to unmask]


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> .. .:   .'..  ,. . ... F I L M - P H I L O S O P H Y
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> . .. .  :   ...   .'..  ..,.. ISSN 1466-4615
> . ., .  . :...  . .   '.. Journal : Salon : Portal
> . .'.  ,  : ..... . PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD
> .  .:..'...,.   . http://www.film-philosophy.com
> .. :.,.. '....
> ....:,. '. vol. 7 no. 4, February 2003
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> 
> 
> 
> Ken Mogg
> 
> Small World: Deborah Thomas's _Beyond Genre_
> 
> 
> Deborah Thomas
> _Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy and Romance in Hollywood Films_
> Moffat, Dumfriesshire, Scotland: Cameron and Hollis, 2000
> ISBN 0-9065506-17-4
> 142 pp.
> http://www.cameronbooks.co.uk
> 
> On page 36 of _Beyond Genre_ Deborah Thomas says that she is going to
> 'recapitulate the argument so far'. While the ensuing 84-word sentence does
> start to describe an aspect of Nicholas Ray's _Bigger Than Life_ (1955), an
> 'argument' is slow to emerge. Unsettled, I decide to read the sentence again
> -- and then the rest of the paragraph. But I still don't find what I'm looking
> for. Instead, I'm simply informed of the film's husband-wife resentments, and
> a parenthesis tells me that James Mason's slippers are 'an apt symbol of . . .
> [would-be] domestic comfort' (37). None of this enthrals me. Oh, and the last
> sentence of the paragraph is 86 words long. [1]
> 
> In other words, I wouldn't dream of calling Thomas an incisive writer, though
> she can be both perceptive and industrious in describing aspects of
> mise-en-scene. Indeed, that perceptiveness is her strength and she applies it
> single-mindedly -- which of course is her *weakness*! In the instance just
> cited she seems to say: 'Well, so far I haven't really got much of an
> argument, so let me just carry on analysing, doing what I do best!' In the
> same chapter, called 'Melodramatic Masculinities', about the tendency of
> domestic melodrama to be stifling -- and to set up 'an imaginary elsewhere'
> for the male protagonist to retreat to -- it's ironic to read the following,
> this time about _The Incredible Shrinking Man_ (Jack Arnold, 1955):
> 
> 'By moving Scott [Grant Williams] into so threadbare a symbolic battlefield
> [as a cellar] away from the complexities of human contact and the social
> domain, where much of interest could have been said about masculinity in
> 'fifties America, the film has painted itself into a corner' (29).
> 
> Ironic, because that's pretty much how I see Thomas's book. First, the author
> doesn't seem to me to possess (in a phrase of Truffaut's about the films of
> Resnais) the 'secondary discipline' to situate her perceptions in a broad
> arena: they remain emanations of a largely theoretical bent, and the theory
> itself is unexciting. (It may have some teaching merit, though.) Second,
> hardly at all do you feel, as you read the book, that Thomas is interested in
> the social domain in general, as a place of complex, often bizarre realities;
> her's is essentially an aesthetic temperament. Third, she seems to have chosen
> the -- surprisingly few -- films discussed in the book for their convenience,
> not just in fitting her theory, but to being interpreted in terms like 'stuffy
> versus free' and 'safe versus adventurous'.
> 
> For example, in the final chapter, on 'Romantic Fresh Starts', there's a
> remark about _An Affair To Remember_ (Leo McCarey, 1957) and the scene with
> Cary Grant's widowed grandmother in her hilltop isolation: Grant's 'inflection
> is stiff and formal here, befitting the airless qualities of this world'
> (103). (Why do I think of Hitchcock's _Psycho_ (1960), and what Marion Crane
> tells Norman, 'You'd know, of course!'? [2]) More importantly, Thomas's
> analysis of this brilliant film has failed to win my full confidence at the
> outset. She clearly is alert to its sophistication and its poetry -- no
> question -- but in a somehow repressed way. She has trouble, she tells us,
> with understanding the meaning of its title-song which accompanies a wintry
> view of New York. (The Empire State Building, where a key scene will occur, is
> just visible in the background -- another icon of would-be transcendence from
> on high.) The song runs as follows:
> 
> 'Our love affair is a wondrous thing
> That we'll rejoice in remembering.
> Our love was born with our first embrace,
> And a page was torn out of time and space.
> Our love affair, may it always be
> A flame to burn through eternity.
> So take my hand with a fervent prayer
> That we may live and we may share
> A love affair to remember.' (99)
> 
> I have no problem with the presence here of both a future tense and a
> future-conditional tense: it is surely the privilege of the exalted state of
> mind of lovers that they may simultaneously speak of their love as both
> eternal and as forever in jeopardy. (An identical double-vision seems to me an
> integral part of Hitchcock's magical _The Trouble With Harry_ (1955) and of
> Harold Ramis's _Groundhog Day_ (1993) -- the latter discussed in _Beyond
> Genre_, the former not. The Hitchcock film even quotes from Shakespeare's
> 'Sonnet 116': 'Love's not time's fool . . .'.) Thomas, though, finds the words
> of the song 'decidedly odd':
> 
> 'They simultaneously imply the early stages of a new romance . . . and
> anticipate looking back on it . . . an invitation from one lover to the other
> to embark on the love affair not so much for its own sake as for the prospect
> of being able to look back on it later when it's over.' (99)
> 
> I find this an ugly reading, a petty reading. (To invoke _The Trouble With
> Harry_ again, a roughly similar prospect to what Thomas is describing arises
> there when, late in the film, Sam (John Forsythe) and Jennifer (Shirley
> MacLaine) get engaged. Jennifer momentarily protests at losing her 'freedom',
> but Sam insists that, with him, she'll retain it. 'You must be practically
> unique, then', she responds. Meanwhile, the film has intimated the approach of
> winter, an honest acknowledgement of the mutability of all things -- but no
> rebuttal of the almost Bergsonian trust in the power of the 'elan vital' to
> change the way time itself appears. [3]) Crucially, I have no problem with the
> line, 'A love affair to remember': I can conceive of a love affair that is
> 'eternal', and in that sense not ended, yet which is 'remembered' by the
> lovers concerned, perhaps in their old age, as a kind of shoring-up against
> bodily ruin. Significantly, in _An Affair To Remember_, the Deborah Kerr
> character ends up immobilised in a wheelchair, but the Grant character has at
> long last found her again. 'So take my hand . . .'.
> 
> While reading Thomas's analysis of _An Affair To Remember_, I kept hoping that
> a note of incisive common sense might intrude for a moment: something like
> Kierkegaard's 'Life is to be lived forwards but understood backwards.' But it
> didn't happen. Similarly, as Thomas described the intricacies of _Groundhog
> Day_ (at the end of the chapter 'Comedic Masculinities', mainly given over to
> comedies of the 1940s and 50s -- only two post-1990 films are discussed in the
> entire book), I was hoping for some kind of acknowledgement that the film's
> philosophical ideas were not entirely new: again Kierkegaard, with his essay
> on 'Repetition', and Bergson, of _Creative Evolution_ fame, might seem worth
> citing. But this is a book born of the _Movie_ school -- by which I mean the
> school of 'film-as-film' criticism, so excitingly pioneered in the pages of
> _Movie_ which grew out of _Oxford Opinion_ in the 1960s -- whose founders were
> their own kind of brilliant 'movie brats' (forgive pun). That is, they tended
> to write of films, and the film 'world', in a very reflexive way, no doubt for
> specific polemical reasons. (Their bete noir was the Establishment journal
> _Sight and Sound_, so stuffy in its own way.) The original Editorial Board
> included Ian Cameron (this book's publisher), V. F. Perkins, Paul Mayersberg,
> and Mark Shivas, with Robin Wood and Raymond Durgnat hovering somewhere in the
> wings. The latter two, though, never seemed to exert sufficient influence to
> make _Movie_ a truly liberated journal. The outcome is a book like this. It is
> still citing the old _Movie_ favourites, like Hawks's _Monkey Business_ (1952)
> and Minnelli's _The Courtship of Eddie's Father_ (1953), as reference points,
> but in a distinctly hermetic way. (Note: Deborah Thomas is one of the current
> _Movie_ Editorial Board. [4])
> 
> Personally, I'm not sure that I don't like the film _Bedtime for Bonzo_
> (Frederick de Cordova, 1951) more than _Monkey Business_. I can see how Hawks
> may have noted the former's strong points -- in particular, its central
> performance by Bonzo the chimpanzee -- but have felt that they were vitiated
> by the direction or just not 'fun' in his rather elitist sense of that term. A
> near-identical reaction against the humanist _High Noon_ (Fred Zinnemann,
> 1952) later prompted Hawks to make _Rio Bravo_ (1959). But in both cases the
> original films are, if not masterpieces, then at least small gems. I would say
> that _Bedtime for Bonzo_ is a strictly one-off comedy, [5] treating its
> *humane* theme about animal consciousness in sometimes inspired fashion, and
> with an unforced symbolism (Bonzo finally represents something like 'tamed
> love', hence the film's title which comes true when Ronald Reagan marries
> Diana Lynn). [6] Also, it has a stinging climactic line, delivered by Walter
> Slezak to the university Dean, about stupid people with degrees -- meaning
> those who can't see the wood for the trees! But clearly Deborah Thomas has
> never watched _Bedtime for Bonzo_, is unaware of its influence on the making
> of _Monkey Business_, and (forgive me) probably remains largely reliant for
> her estimation of a film's worth on how well it may be made to fit certain
> notions she has inherited from _Movie_.
> 
> As they say at the end of Hawks's _The Land of the Pharaohs_ (1955): 'We still
> have a long way to go!'
> 
> Melbourne, Australia
> 
> 
> Footnotes
> 
> 1. Allow me to quote the following, though it is no doubt a two-edged sword
> (no matter, I have always tried to bear it in mind, and maybe some of my
> readers may want to do so, too!): 'An American study showed that when sentence
> lengths reach more than about twenty-five words, only ten per cent of readers
> can understand them.' Gordon Wells, _The Craft of Writing Articles_ (London
> and New York: Allison and Busby, 1983), p. 51.
> 
> 2. Is _Psycho_ a melodrama or a comedy? Questions like this one challenge the
> easy categorisation that Thomas attempts to set up in her book. (Satire/parody
> is especially a category that would probably give her trouble if she were to
> address it.) She does include a brief note on Hitchcock's film, about attics
> versus basements as traditional places of concealment of unwanted madwomen or
> madmen respectively (31), but it strikes me as specious.
> 
> 3. Towards the end of Hitchcock's literally autumnal comedy, dialogue and
> visual references (e.g. a wintry landscape over the mantelpiece in Jennifer's
> house) evoke the coming change of seasons -- much as scenes in both _Groundhog
> Day_ and _An Affair to Remember_ do. Which only gives the films' warmth and
> humanity something to fight, so to speak. By the way, Lesley Brill, in _The
> Hitchcock Romance_ (Princeton University Press, 1988) takes a roughly parallel
> course to Thomas in his emphasis on 'romance' as a bridging (or amalgamating)
> category, as opposed to 'pure' melodrama or 'pure' comedy.
> 
> 4. At least, she was in 1990, which is the date of the last issue of _Movie_
> that the Reference and Information Library of the Australian Film Institute
> holds (_Movie_ 34/35, Winter 1990). But I believe another issue has recently
> come out. Certainly, Thomas refers in her book's Acknowledgements to 'my
> colleagues and friends on the editorial board of _Movie_ . . . welcoming me
> into their midst for the past eleven years' (7).
> 
> 5. Its sequel, _Bonzo Goes to College_ (1952), in which Ronald Reagan this
> time refused to appear, is reportedly much inferior.
> 
> 6. The film's ostensible theme concerns the influence of heredity as opposed
> to upbringing and environment. But other concerns run through the film and
> contribute to its engaging quality.
> 
> Ken Mogg lives in Melbourne, Australia, and edits the hardcopy Hitchcock
> journal _The MacGuffin_ and its website. He is the author of _The Alfred
> Hitchcock Story_ (London: Titan Books, 1999).
> 
> 
> Copyright © Film-Philosophy 2003
> 
> Ken Mogg, 'Small World: Deborah Thomas's _Beyond Genre_', _Film-Philosophy_,
> vol. 7 no. 4, February 2003 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n4mogg>.
> 
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