Entries associated with the tag "Andrew Sarris":

Yes, Virginia, there is an Edgar G. Ulmer, and he is no longer one of the private jokes shared by auteur critics, but one of the minor glories of the cinema. —Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968

Already I've sat through Edgar Ulmer's Strange Illusion (screening at Doc Films Sunday at 7) twice and still can't remember anything about it. Or hardly anything: one very odd-looking actor (presumably Jimmy Lydon, from review summaries I've read), an elaborately gated estate entrance, and some of the most ludicrously awful back-screen projection I've ever been witness to ... except I adore that out-of-sync matting, as antidote to our official (as in "oppressive") realist paradigm, arguably one of the "minor glories" that Sarris would call our attention to.

But a lot of Ulmer just goes by me—like Detour (October 26), his alleged poverty row "masterpiece." Yes, yes, the surreality and hothouse delirium, the expressionist accents on loan from 20s Weimar, the absurdity of the winding telephone cord—and of course Ann Savage (but why "of course"? what's supposed to be so outlandish?: another of those privileged insights I can't get a handle on). But inspired?—I'd take Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster any day. Or Ruthless (not in the Doc series), the Citizen Kane of the bargain bins and, pace The Black Cat, still probably my favorite Ulmer of all. Rich if not exactly strange—which is defeating the whole idea, right? Since respectable Ulmer is arguably less consequential than no Ulmer at all.

I'm also a bit of a contrarian—or maybe just out of it—on the Texas state fairgrounds twins of 1960, The Amazing Transparent Man (November 23) and Beyond the Time Barrier (November 30—and why isn't Doc screening them back-to-back?). Beyond usually gets the critical thumbs-up, for its putatively "imaginative" dollar-store sets, while Transparent is more often dissed for being too straightforward, too doggedly matter-of-fact. Like anyone else's movie about a guy who's supposed to be invisible, the camera stalking a vacancy as if somebody or something were actually there. Pure, elemental Dada—gotta love the damn stuff.

Still to come in the series: The Strange Woman (November 9) and The Naked Dawn (November 16), plus a trio of Ulmers from a concurrently running Doc series of Yiddish-language films: Green Fields (October 30), The Light Ahead (November 13), and The Singing Blacksmith (aka Yankl der Shmid, December 4). None of which is a missable one-night stand, whatever the reservations and kvetches. But I probably won't remember anything in the morning.

Doc Films is at Ida Noyes Hall, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th St; call 773-702-8575 or go here for more info. 

If you received The American Cinema at the right moment in your life, ... it came with the force of a divination, a cinematic Great Awakening. --Kent Jones in a 2005 Film Comment interview with Andrew Sarris

Which exactly describes my own experience with Sarris's classic volume—"I once was blind but now I see," or at least see a damn sight better than I had before. It's 40 years on since the The American Cinema: Directors and Direction, 1929-1968 was published by Dutton (in late '68), and my gratitude for it remains undiminished, even if our still sometimes capricious author-critic loses me more often now than he ever did then (e.g., Juno as 2007's best film?).

Though actually he lost me pretty often back then too. On Douglas Sirk: "His art transcends the ridiculous, as form comments on content. ... Sirk's taste is exquisite, and hence, inimitable." On Howard Hawks: "His technique has served ultimately to express his personal credo that man is the measurer of all things." With Hawks I'm still on the outside looking in, especially vis-a-vis his allegedly "masculine" vision (Veit Harlan anyone?), but in the case of Sirk I've long since been converted. Because as Sarris himself never stops insisting, the proof of the art is in the viewing: set Sirk's '59 Imitation of Life, that opalescent, chill masterpiece, against John M. Stahl's emotionally invested but stodgy '34 version and tell me it all comes down to the screenplay. Obviously more routes to epiphany than story lines and actors—which mostly bored me then and still do today—and getting lost in a mise-en-scene "delirium" seems, at least to this somewhat deranged viewer, a far more engaging alternative. And if not for Sarris's insights into, e.g., the work of Preston Sturges, the almost choreographic sensibility you find there, I'd probably still be kvetching about why his films aren't really "funny." But who needs literal ha-ha's when there's so much else to get into, in the commedia dell'arte energy and spectacle, what Sarris essentially refers to as the films' "Brueghelian" congestion. As with Renaissance painting to contemporary eyes, you don't have to buy into the iconography to groove on the formal envelope, of composition and line, of visual orchestration and texture. And to think that, fussbudgeting over a "yes it's funny"/"no it's not" bottom line, I might never have seen these things at all.

So: all about an identifiable "consciousness"—or awareness or empathy or whatever you want to call it—that, arguably and/or ideally, goes to the "creative" heart of what we see on-screen. Which isn't leaving much room for necessary qualifiers and quibbles, so let's give our auteurist in chief the final word on those—from the 2005 interview again: "I've always said to people that auteurism is nice, but it's hypothetical, and gradually you learn how much or how little influence different directors had. You can see that Hitchcock had more influence than someone like Stahl. What it really is, is first you see something, and you like it, and then it's a mystery, and you go into the mystery—and that's what's interesting. And the test of criticism is: can you make a case for it."