Organica News -- Film: Ray Carney on the Best Movies You've Never Heard Of

search

The Arts

	Poetry
	Film
	Music
	Gallery
	Fiction

The Arts: Film

Ray Carney on the Best Movies You've Never Heard Of
(From Summer 2002)

by Mitch Hampton

Most people possessing the intellectual self-confidence that comes with education and intelligence think they know a good movie from a bad one. Spanning the decades of the 20th century, a consensus has been reached on the kind of film that qualifies as good, or even great.

Films such as Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Shine, The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love and the more recent Memento, however disparate in style or genre, have qualities that appeal to cultural elites and the regular public alike. These films are well written and well acted, are mostly character and plot driven and follow an Aristotelian/Platonic three-act structure with neat and tidy resolutions and a few plot twists along the way. They also offer us the sort of psychoanalytic, depth-surface model of the self handed down from Freud, emphasizing identification with "good" main characters and condemnation of evil ones.

These films also provide missions for the main character to work toward, and plenty of obstacles to overcome. They offer plenty of emotional button-pushing, comic relief, entertainment value, and the requisite moral or lesson at the end—preferably a climactic one emphasizing the "spiritual" universality of all humanity. This last one is essential so that commercial entertainment can achieve its artistic aspirations—think American Beauty and The English Patient.

Is there anything wrong with these qualities? Are there not, in fact, formulas for good craft? According to Ray Carney, one of the world's great cinema scholars, these films are far from what the medium can be. In his estimation, none of these widely accepted "masterpieces" is, in fact, a great movie.

An alternative to mainstream Hollywood and feel-good independent movies has always been foreign or "world" film—the canonical auteur cinema of Goddard, Bergman, Antonioni, Ozu or Bresson. But according to Carney, there are homegrown, creative and original minor masterpieces native to the U.S. many of us never hear about.

Along with the groundbreaking work of John Cassavetes (Faces, Woman Under the Influence and Shadows), there are the films of Todd Haynes (Safe), Barbara Loden (Wanda), Jon Jost (Sure Fire), Mark Rappaport (Scenic Route, Rock Hudson's Home Movies), Caveh Zahedi (A Little Stiff), Harmony Korine (Gummo and Julian Donkey-Boy) and Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise), as well as films with Andy Warhol's name attached to them that were really the work of Paul Morrissey—Trash, Flesh, Heat and The Chelsea Girls.

This is a far from exhaustive list of great, lesser-known films that don't follow the usual formula; consequently, they are relegated to art houses, the film festival circuit and the Facets video catalog. According to Carney, this second group of films posits a different world view—one that is more truthful and aesthetically meaningful. Why are these films doomed to being underpromoted and little viewed? Their limited distribution and lack of promotional budget is only part of the answer.

I first discovered Ray Carney through his remarkable writings on the films of John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh, two filmmakers on whose work he is perhaps the foremost living authority. Carney puts into eloquent prose the philosophic and psychological differences between mainstream art movies and the lesser known films discussed above. A full elucidation can be found in Carney's seminal works The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

As we mentioned earlier, mainstream art and commercial films alike inherit a Platonic/Aristotelian (and more recently Freudian) model of the self and the world. Carney refers to this view as a visionary one. For Carney, visionary does not refer to the contemplative wisdom of mystics, but rather to an intellectualistic, Platonic view that seeks to escape the beat-by-beat flux and flow of life. An archimedean, objective, view-from-nowhere stance is implied here, a depersonalized "view" not to be confused with the detachment of good realist or documentary work such as Fred Wiseman's or the Maysles Brothers', where distanced "objectivity" serves pluralistic, heterogeneous, indeed, democratic ends.

In The Films of John Cassavetes, Carney uses as concrete examples of the visionary mode the films Citizen Kane and Casablanca. In Citizen Kane, heavy-handed symbolism is used to depict simple political or psychological points—Rosebud, the No Trespassing sign at Kane's Xanadu mansion and the long dining room table that separates Kane and his wife as they eat are good examples. In Casablanca, shot/reaction shots and the moon-eyed looks between Rick and Ilsa are stand-ins for romance and relationship. The emphasis is on clear, stable selfhood, the promise that things can be resolved and understood, and above all, on shortcuts to knowledge through looks and glances.

Conversely, in the alternative (non) vision of Leigh and Cassavetes, there is no stable, transparent, unitary self. In Cassavetes' Woman Under the Influence, the audience has to deal with the process of a real man/woman, husband/wife relationship free of psychological simplification. The audience must navigate the journey: a subtle, non-reductionistic experience where gaps, ambiguity, ambivalence and emotional flux are a matter of course. Because the characters are not dehumanized and reduced, there is more love in their creation: like us, they are neither heroes nor villains. The focus is on truthful, flowing exchanges between actors; in other words, something closer to "real-time" relationships. There is nothing in film more rewarding or enlightening, nor more true to life.

Carney is much influenced by Jamesian (William and Henry) philosophy and aesthetics, sometimes called Pragmatism or Pluralism. This philosophy regards human beings as bodily, interactive animals whose inner states are ultimately unknowable and a matter of speculation. As a result, the concept of selfhood must be translated into what is visible: active motion and a constantly changing, fluctuating, relational experience. Because the films of Leigh and Cassavetes are more interested in process than plot with melodramatic "big moments" and climaxes, they are often misunderstood as talky, unstructured, experimental actors' pieces where people "go around in circles" and lack resolution and closure in their lives.

In their films we view the world as we ourselves are viewed—from the outside—rather than the way we like to think of ourselves—from the inside. The characters' flaws are rooted in self-deception, and their intentions afford them no slack. As Carney points out in The Films of Mike Leigh, this is much more complex and frightening than what happens in the thriller or horror genre, where characters mean ill knowingly.

In fact, in Leigh's and Cassavetes' films, the characters mean well, but their actions often don't reflect this. As Carney says, the problem lies in the fact that "feeling is not being, and to feel, think, or believe something, however sincerely, is not enough. Feelings of love may be expressed in hurtful ways. Attempts to help someone may be misguided." Although the focus here is on character, Carney is critical of popular psychological ways of understanding art.

"What is lost in the translation is the art," Carney writes in The Films of Mike Leigh: "All the complexities (created by the language, the pacing, the shaping, the tone, the acting) that make a work of art different from and infinitely more interesting than an article in Psychology Today disappear. King Lear becomes the story of a proud old man abused by ungrateful daughters; Othello becomes the tale of a devoted wife mistrusted by an insecure husband. Is that really why people have read Shakespeare for centuries? It is the Philistine's view of art."

Carney devotes equal passion in his classes and books (Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer) to some of the most visual and least "talky" filmmakers—Dreyer, Antonioni, Tarkovsky. Moreover, he is an inclusive critic, concerned not with a particular film style, but with whether a work has value.

One of Carney's most important works is American Visions: The Films of Frank Capra. Not coincidentally, Capra was Cassavetes' favorite director, and one can see similarities when looking past the surface. Carney's most recent work, Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Faber and Faber, 2001), is described as the autobiography Cassavetes never lived to write, an appraisal and overview of the films, combining Carney's own commentary with interviews with the late director and photographs of the making of the films.

Carney's assessment of a film goes well beyond character psychology and plot, even seeing behind themes that seem central to the work. When teaching Todd Haynes' Safe, he actually requested that the students write about the film from the point of view, not of the plot (which deals with a woman's breakdown when she discovers her allergies to modern toxins), but from the premise that this was in fact not the film's real subject. For Carney, a work like Safe cannot be reduced to sociological categories; the surface story and psychologies are a back alley to get to more subtle truths.

Carney is uncompromising in his belief in art as a difficult, elevated path, and in his rejection of the relativistic standards of popular cultural studies and ideological and formalist criticism alike—all approaches that elevate lesser works.

In an interview in Moviemaker magazine (July-August 1995) he stated: "The pop-culture, mass-culture position is the snobbish one that doesn't respect the average person. If you are engaged in anything relatively seriously—auto mechanics, cooking, soccer playing—you have to work at it. You have to study and master its traditions. The plumber who came to my house last week understands the work of culture better than most professors—in his case, the culture of plumbing. He knows it takes time and work and knowledge to be a good plumber. I'm only asking that we take film as seriously as he takes plumbing."

In the November-December 1996 issue of the same magazine, he went further: "My students always say a particular movie 'is so moving.' So what? If you want to feel emotions go to a hospital emergency room on a Saturday night...You can get emotional hearing a baby cry, but that's not art. It's biology," he continues. "Shine and The English Patient are cartoons for adults—no different from Schindler's List, Forrest Gump or Bambi... to put it more bluntly they're a pack of lies. There is not an original or truthful shot, scene, or line of dialogue in all of Shine. It's a sign of how our film festivals have been dumbed down to the level of the melodramatic mainstream that it played at Sundance last year."

In an advice column to young filmmakers published in Moviemaker in 1999 and used in his class syllabus on independent film, he boldly states: "Spielberg bragged that Holocaust survivors were proud of Schindler's List, and World War II veterans loved Saving Private Ryan. That's not a virtue but a vice. All it means is that he let them wallow in their own clichéd views of themselves." In Moviemaker of May/June 1995, Carney had already complained that Schindler's List could have been a better film if Spielberg had "entered into the German point of view in order to reveal how regular people with wives and children could be drawn into committing such horrors. A film that didn't show the bad guys is in an emotional galaxy far away."

Who is this man who can and will say such things? I was determined to meet and talk with him. In person, Carney is soft spoken, warm, cautious and thoughtful in his analysis. We talked in his cozy office at Boston University surrounded by papers and videos—some from filmmaker friends—and bathed in a late afternoon spring sun.

Mitch Hampton: Why do you think so many people prefer mediocre, commercial movies?

Ray Carney: A thousand reasons. Those works flatter them, sometimes in representation, by showing them that people like them are lovable and cuddly and charming. More subtly, those works flatter them by giving them comfortable, more familiar emotions. It's not just a question of character, but an experience you put in your pocket and go home with it. It doesn't change anything and it doesn't surprise you and it doesn't upset you, for sure. Or it pretends to upset you.

MH: Like fake shock effects? Tarantino stuff?

RC: Yes, or fake everything—fake love, as in a lot of mind reading "you look into my eyes, I look into yours." Americans especially—and other countries could be different—don't take movies seriously; they want a children's book experience. And so as men read Tom Clancy and women read Harlequin Romances, the men go to The Matrix and the women go to Titanic. But they are the same movie! One flatters women [as being] so deep and so emotional, and pines away for that ideal love. And in the men's films, the young boy saves the world through his intellect and his cleverness. Coolness under pressure. These are fantasies and sentimental notions of ourselves. The same girl at this school who swoons [over] Titanic—if you were to put her life on the screen—she has lots of many more interesting things about her life that she never sees on the screen.

And so as men read Tom Clancy and women read Harlequin Romances, the men go to The Matrix and women go to Titanic. But they are the same movie!"

MH: Is there a connection between your academic struggles and independent film?

RC: To my mind, there is very little difference between film distribution and book publishing. Many [underground or "alternative"] filmmakers write to me and say "it's amazing how you understand what I have to go through." Of course, I put a little effort into understanding it, so I should take the glory. But the fact is, when I write a book—to the extent that the book is unconventional and unformulaic—it is unpublishable.

MH: But your work is so much more accessible that most academic film criticism.

RC: I don't submit to film journals anymore. Because either (a) you're outright rejected, or (b) to my shock and dismay, I was told by several film journals, "could you please insert some footnotes; could you please refer to Derrida or Deleuze and Lacan?" In fact, I had written one essay more or less out of my heart and mind and soul—just what I thought, and the fellow read it, and he said, "this is so deep, it must be indebted to Lacanian theory and Althusserian cultural studies. Please put that in, because this is the most brilliant restatement of their theory." Well, those are my thoughts. Academic film criticism is in trouble. They are in a life raft rowing, and they want to push me overboard because I don't write like them. In academic criticism what has happened is that sociology and sociological ways of thinking have taken over and replaced aesthetic or truth-telling modes. Whether it's feminist or political thought, or sociological analysis in that multicult[ural] way, or whether it's some other form of ideological dissection of the work, that is the only mode of discourse that's approved.

MH: I'm reminded of a bell hooks piece on the movie Kids, where just because a group of kids brutally beats a black kid, she claims the film was racist. She assumes that the audience is identifying with the kids beating up this boy. But the film doesn't say that!

RC: Well, I haven't read the piece, and I found the film somewhat bland, but it sounds like her piece is this type of criticism. They collapse the film back into the world. I remember in the novel Tom Jones a scene where Hamlet's ghost appears on stage, and a stupid, uninformed character in the audience goes running out because he's afraid of ghosts. Well, they're afraid of ghosts to the core. They confuse the film with the world and fold it back into the world, talking about, for example, racial problems in the world or racial treatment of characters as if it were life.

MH: A feminist critic once stood up at the end of a screening of Barbara Loden's Wanda, saying the film had failed because it didn't provide solutions to the main character's dilemma.

RC: At another university I was approached for a women's film festival, and the female students made the mistake of coming to me to advise them on programming films. This was several years ago. It was some kind of tenth anniversary, with posters and speeches, and for the film festival I programmed Swing Time, the Fred Astaire—Ginger Rogers musical, Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, Cassavetes' Woman Under the Influence, Barbara Loden's Wanda and two or three other minor master works that I loved. Of course, after several of them had played, they found Swing Time as offensive as Wanda, but for different reasons. They realized they had gotten the wrong programmer and they would never make that mistake again. They took my word for it.

MH: What was offensive?

RC: They have no understanding of stylization. In Swing Time, the [offended] students will take Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire and act like they met them on the street. And if she's in love with him or Fred wins her love, they say, "what a dumb babe, what a hooker, what a playmate of the month." Well, Swing Time or Follow the Fleet, or The Gay Divorcee or any of those MGM musicals with Fred and Ginger, one way of understanding them is that they are not even about characters; they are about states of feeling. They are musicals, for God's sake! They are forms of expression, like opera. It would be like going to La Boheme and trying to study tuberculosis, or seeing it as a history of Paris in the 19th century, or how to burn wood stoves. You don't go to Monet to study the flowers for botanical reasons. You don't go study John Singer Sargent to learn about fashions. You go for emotional and intellectual experiences that rock your boat in certain ways or educate you in certain ways. Yes, Swing Time is as unreal as an opera or a ballet is unreal, but they were taking it as if [Fred and Ginger] were people they had just met at lunch. Now, Wanda is not unreal in that way, but it doesn't give them a Jane Fonda character to provide easy answers. They wanted television and I gave them art.

Return to top