Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

There are plenty of obvious reasons why British films are bad. Within the industry itself there is no time or money for experiment. There is no interest in originality, since people work on the assumption that what sold yesterday will sell tomorrow. And there is no sense of what I. A. Richards meant when he talked of the artist not being ‘consciously concerned with communication, but with getting the work, the poem or play or statue or painting or whatever it is “right” apparently regardless of its communicative efficacy’. Communication, on the other hand, is the real concern of most films, since the more people one communicates to, the more cinema seats are sold. And this, as is recognized, leads to sterility, a repetition of the old and the successful, to vulgarity and superficiality. And since attitudes and customs change, while the material of film does not, it leads also to unreality.

     It takes great talent or unusual circumstances to work within the limitations of the industry, or to overcome them. In the past this has happened from time to time, as in some of David Lean’s films, or in productions like The Third Man — in so far as that film, with its European setting and American principals, can be accounted British. The Third Man was actually the result of a team of professional talents working to produce a highly professional film. Graham Greene’s screenplay, Carol Reed’s direction, the performances of Trevor Howard, Alida Vail, Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles, the economical and imaginative editing, the perfectly matched photography and the plangent, popular music combined to make on its own level a film of extraordinary power. Its professionalism was very evident in the tremendous attention to detail, as in minor characters like the Baron — a dandyish and decadent exquisite of the kind that Isherwood has made familiar; or the sinister Doktor Winkel, established as an undesirable by a single shot of him carving chicken and by the bric-à-brac assembled in his claustrophobic study. Certain scenes stay in the mind as examples of the film’s carefully thought-out development, like the one where Valli’s landlady pursues the British police through her winding mausoleum of a house, clad in a Federbett and screeching abuse — a performance which she later repeats when Interpol search the flat. She provides a link between the two scenes, which are at different stages of the film, and points the humour in the contrast between them. One remembers, too, the irony of revealing the concierge’s murder through the precocious and unsuspecting child; the brisk but alarming interventions of Wilfred Hyde White as a doddery old literary propagandist; and effective tricks which enhance the film’s atmosphere, like the placing of the climactic scene where Harry Lime and Holly Martins finally meet on the Big Wheel in a deserted fairground.

     Orson Welles’s own case is symptomatic of what happens when a talent that has proved itself in other fields is given carte blanche by the industry. Over Citizen Kane, his first film, he was allowed complete control. But when the returns failed to justify this unusual expansiveness, he found himself on his next venture severely circumscribed. He was locked out of his cutting rooms while a more amenable editor took over. The result, in his own words, was that the film looked as if it had been cut by a lawn mower. The system of offering these limited ‘opportunities’ to new talent still continues. A recent case was that of Tony Richardson, whose first American picture, Sanctuary. was recently received — with some abuse — in London. Stanley Kubrick, who directed the scathing and vitriolic Paths of Glory, has since been enrolled into the ranks of the epic makers with the star-spangled Spartacus. It is still a precarious and arbitrary business. François Truffaut, before Tirez sur le Pianiste was made, said that if his next film was a commercial failure, his position (won by the success of Les Quatre Cents Coups) would undergo an immediate change.

     What are the alternatives to waiting for individual talents to emerge and be exploited by the industry? Ideally, of course, it is the setting up of an alternative system wherein the film maker works privately and experimentally, developing like any other artist without commercial pressures from outside. Ingmar Bergman in Sweden has established such a system, and produces for better or worse some of the most highly individual films currently being made. In France, the young directors journalistically branded as the nouvelle vague are attempting to make cheap but good pictures by shooting on location with primitive equipment and friends for actors. By winning prizes at film festivals, they succeed eventually in distributing their films, and in recouping the money spent in making them. Even so, the cheapest feature film costs something like £60,000 to make, which as John Osborne has said is more difficult to find than £600,000, which will pay for star performers, Cinemascope and all the other extraneous ingredients that lessen a film’s financial risk. Chabrol, it should be remembered, financed his first film from an inheritance.

     In England, experimental companies have been set up largely by successful playwrights and successful actors. Among the stimulating influences such companies have brought from the stage to films is an interest in subjects of working class realism. But while one welcomes films about the working class — because they provide a rich vein of dramatic material; because the characters are, in Philip Toynbee’s quaint phrase, no less ‘real’ than in any other class; and because this interest is indicative of a gratifying left-wing shift in current attitudes — it is clear that to restrict themselves to sympathizing with one class alone is to limit dangerously the potential of serious films.

     Art, in film as elsewhere, is fundamentally concerned with what Edmund Wilson described as ‘those terrific images of the commonplace by which the greatest poets can move us’. Aldous Huxley, in his essay ‘Art and the Obvious’, talks of the incompetence and vulgarity with which the great obvious truths have been stated by hacks, and goes on to say, ‘On some of the most sensitive and self-conscious artists of our age, this state of affairs has had a curious and, I believe, unprecedented effect. They have become afraid of all obviousness, the great as well as the little.’ He was speaking of another period, of other manifestations in other media, but his remarks apply particularly aptly to British film makers, who are reacting against the vulgarity and superficiality with which the majority of British films have treated commonplace themes. They react in one way by rejecting the commonplaces of dramatic form, since by now the ‘well-made play’ (or film) has become conspicuous for its emptiness. And they react in another way by retreating from the larger commonplaces into examinations of small, private areas of experience from which it is well-nigh impossible for important generalities to be given artistic form.

     The process of rebirth in art from one era to another consists not so much in looking for new things to say as in finding new and relevant ways of saying the obvious things. If we can use literary examples for a moment and look at the most impressive writers of our time, we see a preoccupation with broad and general themes as well as a search for originality of method. Boris Pasternak, Simone de Beauvoir, Lawrence Durrell, Vladimir Nabokov (less in the spectacular Lolita as in such works as Pnin) might serve to illustrate the point. In the first two, the sweep of history, the picture of man in relation to his age, are eminently visible. In the others, considerations of originality of style outweigh the breadth of their themes, but give a freshness and an added dimension to them. In the case of each — and it may be significant that they are a cosmopolitan collection — these two criteria of generalness and originality apply, thereby qualifying their works to consideration at a very high level.

     Returning to films, we see that in the best of those from abroad the idea of the unchanging qualities of human nature has not been lost. The plot, for instance, of the Russian film The Cranes are Flying might be paraphrased to sound very commonplace indeed, and yet it has a scope and meaning far beyond the ordinary. In Marius, the first part of the French comic trilogy, the theme though a minor one is equally commonplace. It concerns simply the conflicting claims on the hero of the girl he loves and his own insatiable urge to become a sailor and see the world. Much of the film’s power, apart from its central theme, derives from the constantly affirmed humanness of the incidental characters: the ability of Marius’s father to rise above his comic level to a sort of nobility in his dealings with his son; the baggy-panted lechery that conceals the kindliness of M. Panisse; the world’s view of M. Escartefigue contrasted with his own threadbare dignity, and so on. In Konrad Wolf’s film Stars the framework of the plot is simply another version of Romeo and Juliet, with the hero a German soldier and the heroine a Jewess. But because of the realism of the characters and the film’s treatment of them, it achieves enormous poignancy.

     It would be ludicrous to suggest that no equivalents for any of these commonplace themes exist in England at the moment; equally so to suggest that there are none for any of the variety of foreign films I mentioned in my last article. But one might give practical — even sociological — reasons why such films were not made in this country. We lack, for instance, a lyrical approach to love as in Les Amants, or the ability to see the comedy of it in the same way as did Dejeuner sur l’Herbe. Indeed, it has only recently been admitted on the British screen that love is ultimately expressible in some kind of physical act. Our fundamental reticence in these matters must probably be attributed to our Puritanism, real or imagined, as a race — in contrast to the Catholicism of France and Italy, which places less strain on the human conscience and allows it to be, so to speak, more human. The recent trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (‘would you allow your wife or your servant to read this book?’) reaffirmed the sexual backwardness of the official Englishman, and the ‘funereal Puritanism of British life’ from which Lawrence Durrell made it his business to escape. How far could one imagine, in his phrase, the British screen ‘unhurriedly savouring the happiness given to those who set out to enjoy each other without reservations and self-contempts?’ Perhaps to ask as much is to criticize British films for not being French. But it is a fact that our Puritanism, or the Puritanism hitherto enforced on the screen, cuts us off from many of the rich commonplaces of life. Is it responsible ultimately for our inability to produce a L’Avventura or a La Dolce Vita, or even a film like Jean-Pierre Mocky’s Un Couple, which examines in some detail the fragility and transitoriness of physical love? Perhaps. Even our fantasies, if they are truly represented in Kingsley Amis’s novels, are worlds in which we escape from the repressions of the respectable into imagined acts of rebellion and carnal excess. We seem either to ignore our physical existence or else to lay too much stress on it — which, after all, is Puritanism.

     In any comparison with films from abroad, we must be wary of asking too categorically why each of the various films was not made over here. The final answer is simple: we have either not the talent to match the variety of foreign films, or else our few talented film makers are preoccupied with other, narrower themes outside which their interest refuses to be drawn. This, however, is an increasingly cosmopolitan age, and influences from America, from Italy, from Germany, Sweden and France are constantly penetrating our insularity in many fields of art and design. Perhaps as our limited scope for producing good films increases, such influences will make themselves healthily felt in that sphere as well.