tobias
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Post by tobias on Jan 3, 2018 5:53:36 GMT
Some critical reevaluation (not using the phrase "vulgar auteurism" because it's basically a meme); so checking out more films that were hated on release but have been slowly gaining more attention/possible cult-following in later years - Showgirls, New Rose Hotel, Miami Vice, etc I don't really see why it's a meme. Obviously the term will be used differently by different people and I disagree with sort of the section that it orrigianted from and I'm relatively sure I dislike a big portion of the films it's meant to describe. But still as a phenomenon, this is basicly what autheur theory itself is. Hitchcock was slammed by the critics of his time. His films were very vulgar. They were nto intellectual and they were not artsy (which isn't to say that I don't consider a portion of his films in an intellectual context). It's the same with Fuller, Tourner, Huston, Sirk, Hawks, etc. America in that sense has a strange artistic history. The things that were praised at that time were often the really stiff films dealing with a certain moral message or the big, lavish productions (probably somewhat influenced by christian ethics even). And I'm unsure but I think to an extend this might still prevail, even though of course today Hitchcock and the other guys I listed are considered big names in "serious art". Like a lot of people won't consider something artistic unless it ticks very certain boxes for them on how they think an "artsy film" has to look. I never really understood the concept, also not the word "arthouse". I think because european history of art is older (well, technically it's maybe not but it's not like americans are particularly into native American culture), we've had those revolutions earlier already. The gold standard of german litterature (and I mean it, this the biggest and most singular work in public perception) is basicly an old professor making a deal with the devil to be young and horny again, then fall for a girl, make her pregnant, kill her brother and then run off, while she gets sentenced to die by the public (it's a great book though). In France Duchamp declared a mass-produced pissoir art in the 1910's. Now, I know the sort of gold standard of english litterature is Ulysses & like Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth (which are all also excessively vulgar) but it seems like the understanding about what excactly makes these works great is somewhat lacking. They are merely put on a pedestal and everyone will say, "yeah, that's art" but in reality there still seems to be a rather big reluctance to accept what they really entail. However my point is that art is for the most part pretty vulgar and that's sort of what I get from the word, that people made vulgar and direct films but that they still had a clear sense of vision and conveyed something deeply. Maybe how it's used as a figure of speech is detrimental though. I guess I didn't really notice too much how people use it, to view it separate from the original auteur theory I think is very much the wrong idea for instance. Though I think I might understand some of the reluctance. Over the past 1 or 2 years, I've become a lot better acquainted with classical American cinema and I really like a lot of it but still one could describe many of these films as tigers without teeth. They mostly lack a sense of resolution or clear authoritarial intent. Even when analyzing some of Hitchcock's late 50's films (the timeframe he is most famous for), you can see some incredibly poignant observations about certain societal themes that will make your head spin in circles (think Rear Window for instance) but Hitchcock never makes a conclusion out of this. Vertigo and Rear Window are absolute fever dreams, they call the very foundation of society into question but not in a second do they ever say that clearly (the conclusions would also be much too sinister to be remotely acceptable in mainstream 50's US cinema). You can see in North by Northwest how Hitchcock worked with cities and monuments dwarfing people and how people vanish in crowds and modern life. If you have this in mind, I think the film is aestethically an immense representation of this. Some of the shots give one goosebumbs but then again: Happy ending, Hitchcock never said it. I think where that breaks is Psycho. You could easily write a 20.000 word essay on Vertigo, it's a movie which I personally think goes incredibly deep and which you can look at from a multitude of angles, that's even how the film works, it's very structure is dialectical. You see A, but then later A is refuted and B is installed instead but neither is the ultimate and satisfactory truth, so you have to use both to arrive somewhere. But still the essay would probably not be true to what Hitchcock himself thought while making the film (he didn't even think it was such a great film, right?). Psycho I think is a bit different. Psycho is overwhelmingly clear commentary and a clear break-off, a clear "fuck you" to certain conventions and a certain mindset. There was an impulse here that could not completely be misunderstood (and on top of that this was produced by Hitchcock and he had the full creative control). This seems to coincide with the clear awakening in Hitchcock, that he really was an artist (he famously also was very aroused by Antonioni's Blow-Up because he felt he had to catch up with the new), coincidentally again, this lead to movies which most would say were worse than those he made in the 40's and 50's. This is also similar to other directors working in that time, quite a few of them suddenly got the memo later in their career. Sirk finished his career with the one film that concluded what his previous films alluded to already: People are empty shells, Bunuel (who had always been a principled guy) suddenly awoke to make some of the most explicitly clear and biting stuff that had been seen up to that point (though of course his 3 early films already contained a lot of that), Fuller does it too with Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, The Big Red One & White Dog. Whereas in previous films things were only mere allusions, here the terror is clear and visible, even Ford comes to the conclusion that the myth he previously built was a lie (see The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance). Concerning the politique de auteur this is pretty darn biting because by these actual standards Rosselini, Passolini, Tarkovsky, Bresson, etc. are on an entirely different level because their films throughout most of their filmography sting like hammering a nail right into your forehead. In often very blatant manner questions about the future of humanity are raised and the outlook is frequently bleak. In general such a clear artistic line is rare. I recently made a list of films I consider singular, films that only exist once and deliver and overwhelmingly strong expression, one so strong that it reinvents the shape of cinematic language itself. Surprisingly actually only 23/186 of the films were from the US and a sizeable portion of those were made by immigrants, another sizeable portion is Brakhage, dog sherrifs cathing monkeys riding on goats and Flaming Creatures (yikes). And this is strange because in a list of personal preference, the US would probably be quite dominant (maybe not 50 % but more dominant than other countries), yet here I asked myself if I had seen this before or if I could otherwise conceive of it. If the answer was "hardly", the film was in. What I'm pointing to here is that Godard goes out to shoot people on the street (Masculin Femin), he burns cars (WeekEnd) or he has people read aloud from books (2 or 3 Things or Pierrot le Fou). In terms of intellectualism I find Godard limited but this is a clear quest for context. When he shoots people in the street, it is an expression of modern life, when he burns cars a critique of consumerism and when he quotes lines from books a clear reference to these ideas. This is the kind of context that even the films Godard so openly revered never had as they were very much product of an industry whereas Godard never got money on that pretense. And when he did, he took the shits on his producers (King Lear). This apparent inadequansy is of course something that is worth discussing but in that context it has to be said that these are actually among the most vulgar of films. And maybe this is actually the mistake that critics who want to hold up this definition have made. There is very much an extend to how vulgar films with such gigantic budgets can be and in those respects they do serverely mismatch the origins (as the original genre-filmmakers did not work on remotely these budgets). Real vulgarity is something much more personal which will not withstand corporal streamlining. The 400 Blows is a much more vulgar film than Transformers for instance or Event Horizon. And actually the personal stamp I see on the later 2 films is comparatively minimal when compared to the true dealbreakers. I'd also recommend reading Ruiz. I'm currently doing that.
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no
Badass
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Post by no on Sept 4, 2018 7:19:49 GMT
here are some of mine: - top one is at least to start a YouTube (or Vimeo) channel and make at least one analysis vid (suggestions for channel names?) - watch more classic Hollywood, and 1930's-1940's films in general - watch more female directed films unless they continue to bore me out of my skull I now have a channel with a few videos. I have seen more 30s-40s films... perhaps not enough. I am still pretty behind on female directors... I should change this. __ I have made progress
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oneflyr
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Posts: 566
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Post by oneflyr on Sept 4, 2018 7:52:34 GMT
Some critical reevaluation (not using the phrase "vulgar auteurism" because it's basically a meme); so checking out more films that were hated on release but have been slowly gaining more attention/possible cult-following in later years - Showgirls, New Rose Hotel, Miami Vice, etc I don't really see why it's a meme. Obviously the term will be used differently by different people and I disagree with sort of the section that it orrigianted from and I'm relatively sure I dislike a big portion of the films it's meant to describe. But still as a phenomenon, this is basicly what autheur theory itself is. Hitchcock was slammed by the critics of his time. His films were very vulgar. They were nto intellectual and they were not artsy (which isn't to say that I don't consider a portion of his films in an intellectual context). It's the same with Fuller, Tourner, Huston, Sirk, Hawks, etc. America in that sense has a strange artistic history. The things that were praised at that time were often the really stiff films dealing with a certain moral message or the big, lavish productions (probably somewhat influenced by christian ethics even). And I'm unsure but I think to an extend this might still prevail, even though of course today Hitchcock and the other guys I listed are considered big names in "serious art". Like a lot of people won't consider something artistic unless it ticks very certain boxes for them on how they think an "artsy film" has to look. I never really understood the concept, also not the word "arthouse". I think because european history of art is older (well, technically it's maybe not but it's not like americans are particularly into native American culture), we've had those revolutions earlier already. The gold standard of german litterature (and I mean it, this the biggest and most singular work in public perception) is basicly an old professor making a deal with the devil to be young and horny again, then fall for a girl, make her pregnant, kill her brother and then run off, while she gets sentenced to die by the public (it's a great book though). In France Duchamp declared a mass-produced pissoir art in the 1910's. Now, I know the sort of gold standard of english litterature is Ulysses & like Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth (which are all also excessively vulgar) but it seems like the understanding about what excactly makes these works great is somewhat lacking. They are merely put on a pedestal and everyone will say, "yeah, that's art" but in reality there still seems to be a rather big reluctance to accept what they really entail. However my point is that art is for the most part pretty vulgar and that's sort of what I get from the word, that people made vulgar and direct films but that they still had a clear sense of vision and conveyed something deeply. Maybe how it's used as a figure of speech is detrimental though. I guess I didn't really notice too much how people use it, to view it separate from the original auteur theory I think is very much the wrong idea for instance. Though I think I might understand some of the reluctance. Over the past 1 or 2 years, I've become a lot better acquainted with classical American cinema and I really like a lot of it but still one could describe many of these films as tigers without teeth. They mostly lack a sense of resolution or clear authoritarial intent. Even when analyzing some of Hitchcock's late 50's films (the timeframe he is most famous for), you can see some incredibly poignant observations about certain societal themes that will make your head spin in circles (think Rear Window for instance) but Hitchcock never makes a conclusion out of this. Vertigo and Rear Window are absolute fever dreams, they call the very foundation of society into question but not in a second do they ever say that clearly (the conclusions would also be much too sinister to be remotely acceptable in mainstream 50's US cinema). You can see in North by Northwest how Hitchcock worked with cities and monuments dwarfing people and how people vanish in crowds and modern life. If you have this in mind, I think the film is aestethically an immense representation of this. Some of the shots give one goosebumbs but then again: Happy ending, Hitchcock never said it. I think where that breaks is Psycho. You could easily write a 20.000 word essay on Vertigo, it's a movie which I personally think goes incredibly deep and which you can look at from a multitude of angles, that's even how the film works, it's very structure is dialectical. You see A, but then later A is refuted and B is installed instead but neither is the ultimate and satisfactory truth, so you have to use both to arrive somewhere. But still the essay would probably not be true to what Hitchcock himself thought while making the film (he didn't even think it was such a great film, right?). Psycho I think is a bit different. Psycho is overwhelmingly clear commentary and a clear break-off, a clear "fuck you" to certain conventions and a certain mindset. There was an impulse here that could not completely be misunderstood (and on top of that this was produced by Hitchcock and he had the full creative control). This seems to coincide with the clear awakening in Hitchcock, that he really was an artist (he famously also was very aroused by Antonioni's Blow-Up because he felt he had to catch up with the new), coincidentally again, this lead to movies which most would say were worse than those he made in the 40's and 50's. This is also similar to other directors working in that time, quite a few of them suddenly got the memo later in their career. Sirk finished his career with the one film that concluded what his previous films alluded to already: People are empty shells, Bunuel (who had always been a principled guy) suddenly awoke to make some of the most explicitly clear and biting stuff that had been seen up to that point (though of course his 3 early films already contained a lot of that), Fuller does it too with Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, The Big Red One & White Dog. Whereas in previous films things were only mere allusions, here the terror is clear and visible, even Ford comes to the conclusion that the myth he previously built was a lie (see The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance). Concerning the politique de auteur this is pretty darn biting because by these actual standards Rosselini, Passolini, Tarkovsky, Bresson, etc. are on an entirely different level because their films throughout most of their filmography sting like hammering a nail right into your forehead. In often very blatant manner questions about the future of humanity are raised and the outlook is frequently bleak. In general such a clear artistic line is rare. I recently made a list of films I consider singular, films that only exist once and deliver and overwhelmingly strong expression, one so strong that it reinvents the shape of cinematic language itself. Surprisingly actually only 23/186 of the films were from the US and a sizeable portion of those were made by immigrants, another sizeable portion is Brakhage, dog sherrifs cathing monkeys riding on goats and Flaming Creatures (yikes). And this is strange because in a list of personal preference, the US would probably be quite dominant (maybe not 50 % but more dominant than other countries), yet here I asked myself if I had seen this before or if I could otherwise conceive of it. If the answer was "hardly", the film was in. What I'm pointing to here is that Godard goes out to shoot people on the street (Masculin Femin), he burns cars (WeekEnd) or he has people read aloud from books (2 or 3 Things or Pierrot le Fou). In terms of intellectualism I find Godard limited but this is a clear quest for context. When he shoots people in the street, it is an expression of modern life, when he burns cars a critique of consumerism and when he quotes lines from books a clear reference to these ideas. This is the kind of context that even the films Godard so openly revered never had as they were very much product of an industry whereas Godard never got money on that pretense. And when he did, he took the shits on his producers (King Lear). This apparent inadequansy is of course something that is worth discussing but in that context it has to be said that these are actually among the most vulgar of films. And maybe this is actually the mistake that critics who want to hold up this definition have made. There is very much an extend to how vulgar films with such gigantic budgets can be and in those respects they do serverely mismatch the origins (as the original genre-filmmakers did not work on remotely these budgets). Real vulgarity is something much more personal which will not withstand corporal streamlining. The 400 Blows is a much more vulgar film than Transformers for instance or Event Horizon. And actually the personal stamp I see on the later 2 films is comparatively minimal when compared to the true dealbreakers. I'd also recommend reading Ruiz. I'm currently doing that. great read
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tobias
Full Member
Posts: 824
Likes: 396
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Post by tobias on Sept 24, 2018 14:10:05 GMT
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Post by JangoB on Sept 24, 2018 14:32:02 GMT
Wow, I forgot all about this but I just saw that I completed the goals I posted
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Post by Pavan on Sept 25, 2018 19:31:31 GMT
Just a reminder to myself that i haven't seen much.
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