460
PARTISAN REVIEW
seriously about contemporary cinema is to make a silk purse out of a sow's
ear, what shall we say when we restrict contemporary cinema to the 21
Republics? !
But if we turn to the other possibility for a magazine, theoretical
aesthetics, the set-up is even worse. For the most part we must expect that
concrete works will pose the critical problems, and where are the works?
Painstaking general analysis demands the inspiration of achievement and
progress, to seem worth the trouble; but now, in place, e.g., of the labori·
ous and praiseworthy essays of Jean Prevost on
La
Face Humaine
a
l'Ecran.
(Close-Up,
1927-8) or of Pudovkin on Acting, we have the thin generaliza·
tions of Alberto Cavalcanti that the correct (sic!) use of sound
is
"non·
sync." Concerning the outrageous attempts (Kurt London) to praise the
Film Music of the Quarter, I hold my peace. But consider such absolutely
basic aesthetic questions as are invariably raised by a change of the
medium: When Sound came in, or when the abortive Grandeur Screen was
projected, there was a flood of excited controversy among the best minds
in the art, for either imagination saw a new path or productive genius saw
threatened the old way not explored to the end. Now color
is
here, the
full-length animated is here, and where are the critics? Their reply is,
Who cares?
Turn over a file of
Close-Up
or
Experimental Cinema
of the end of
the 20's or a year or two of the 30's: they are talking about,
currently
reviewing-not
always wisely,
leanne D'Arc, Mother
and
The End of St.
Petersburg, The Wedding March, Ten Days
and
Old and New, Stonn Over
Asia, Jeanne Ney,
and
Sunrise;
the names that come up are Stroheim,
Pabst, Sidzuki, Arnheim, Herbert Read, Man Ray, Potamkin, etc., etc.
Now some idiots have had the consummate brass to say, to say as a
dogma,
that the decadent 20's, the international and apocalyptic 20's, were sterile.
It was the decade of
La Creation du Monde
and
The Rhapsody in Blue,
or the
Symphonie des Psaurnes, The Castle,
Cocteau and
The Waste
Land.
In comparison I can only paraphrase Adenoid Hynkel, "The 30's shtunk!"
And the 40's? I am speaking only of the arts, and the vanguard of the arts.
Of more general social phenomena-nor is the cause and effect far to seek
-there is a rather different story to tell.
Let me quote the pathetic accents of old
Arnheim~he
is writing
in
1935
(Cinema Quarterly,
Summer 1935) -as he describes the role of a
cinema critic: "With others like himself he argues about films which, for
10 years or more, no one has been able to see, and about which, therefore,
anything or nothing may be said; he discusses montage as medieval
scholars discussed the existence of God, and believes that all these things
could exist today. In the evening he sits, reverently attentive, in the cinema,
playing the critical friend of art, as tho we were still living in the days of
Griffith, Stroheim, Murnau, and Eisenstein. He thinks he is seeing had
films, instead of realizing that what he sees is no longer a film at all."
PAUL GOQDMAN
