Reading
Film As Art (Rudolf Arnheim, 1957)
This collection by film theorist and Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, comprising essays of his from the 1930s, is about as foundational as it gets.1 The opening salvo is adapted from a work Arnheim originally wrote in German in 1933 to address the then-popular belief that film could not be art—“for it does nothing,” the people say, “but reproduce reality mechanically.” Arnheim takes a technical approach to dismantling this claim. This involves, among other things, repeatedly invoking the authority of the Russian film theorists to talk at length about the artistic potentials of montage. He might be splitting hairs when he says early moviegoers are wrong to call black-and-white pictures “true to nature” (nature being obviously in color), but he makes a valid point.
Arnheim’s argument in this first essay frequently differentiates film from the theater. Whereas it’s impossible to close the distance between the stage and a spectator in the audience, in the cinema you can alter the viewer’s perspective simply by changing the position of the camera. Consequently, the filmmaker can do easily what the theater director cannot do without some extra effort and ingenuity: “to make a very subjective experience accessible to the eyes of all.” Venturing the occasional prognostication of film’s future, Arnheim has an unmistakable bias toward silent filmmaking. In his 1938 essay “A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film,” he draws a comparison between film and opera, arguing that for the latter the introduction of the libretto expanded the possibilities of the music. Conversely, he predicts that the introduction of spoken dialogue to film will have an enshittifying effect on cinema (my words, not his).
As a critic of specific films, Arnheim’s judgment is not unimpeachable—I don’t think many today would defend his opinion that Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc indulges formalism for its own sake. On the other hand I didn’t need any convincing to accept his allegation that “the spectator shows himself to be lacking in proper understanding [of film as an art] when he is satisfied to notice merely the content.” Arnheim’s technical preoccupations may bore anyone who prefers more overtly political styles of criticism, though he does turn to more sociological concerns in other essays. 1935’s “A Forecast of Television” concludes with a long view of the new technology that still resonates today:
The pathetic hermit, squatting in his room, hundreds of miles away from the scene that he experiences as his present life […] is the final product of a century-long development, which has led from the campfire, the market place, and the arena to the lonesome consumer of spectacles today.
The Star Machine (Jeanine Basinger, 2007)
Basinger’s long and biographical history of the movie star from roughly the advent of sound films through World War II is built on two interrelated premises: that movie stars were Hollywood employees like any other person on set, and that they were also the most important commodity in the moviemaking system.2 With these insights front of mind, Basinger tells the stories of about a dozen different stars (mostly avoiding the biggest marquee names like Bette Davis and Cary Grant), to demonstrate some of the possible trajectories these worker-products followed.
I enjoyed this book’s historical insights, since I admittedly don’t know as much about Hollywood in this period as I’d like to. The so-called star machine, Basinger argues, grew naturally out of Hollywood’s silent era: as audiences began to take a liking to specific actors, the studios capitalized on their enthusiasm and started cranking out stars with intention. Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s produced upwards of 500 movies a year (an unthinkable number these days); consequently, studios both needed to keep a lot of stars and stars-in-the-making on hand and also needed to keep the machine that produced them running quickly. Some of the stats Basinger cites—Errol Flynn made more than 50 movies in 25 years, Deanna Durbin appeared in 21 films in the span of 11 years—are mind-boggling by today’s standards. Basinger acknowledges as much, and points out that the heightened production pace of the old days worked to stars’ advantage. If one of their films ever bombed, no matter—the next one was likely just a few short months away from hitting theaters and getting their career back on track.3
The actual portraits of stars that Basinger sketches, from Tyrone Power to Irene Dunne to Charles Boyer and beyond, were a mixed bag for me. The star machine usually had an invasive influence on star’s lives, starting with name changes (Suzanne Burce learned over the phone that her studio had decided to change her name to Jane Powell) and continuing with tightly controlled publicity. Basinger spends a lot of time describing the way people look and act onscreen, and while she does so with entertaining verve, I kept wishing I were just watching the movies under consideration myself (although it must be said that many if not most of the titles she recapitulates are not easily seen).
A concluding chapter on stardom since the age of the “machine” is as timebound as you would expect of a book written in 2007 (the attention paid to Brendan Fraser sticks out), but one thing is as certain today as it was then: “Manufacturing movie stars is no longer a priority—making blockbuster hits is.” As we (hopefully) exit our long national nightmare of endless superhero movies, there’s a renewed interest in the question of stardom and whether it’s still attainable for up-and-comers these days. Whether or not the Sweeneys and Butlers and Chalamets and Zendayas of today have the juice to make it as big screen idols, there’s little hope they’ll make the same impact as the stars of last century without the same industry infrastructure that made stardom possible in the first place.
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu (Shiguéhiko Hasumi, 1983/2003; trans. Ryan Cook, 2024)
“Seeing is difficult,” concludes scholar-critic Shiguéhiko Hasumi at the end of his study of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, and by the time you arrive at this point in the book you’ll find it hard to disagree with him. Hasumi has an axe to grind with the viewing public—not least of all Westerners, but not limited to them either. When people talk about Ozu, they tend to talk about certain “Ozuesque” features of his work: “certain gestures, certain ways of talking, certain kinds of looks,” and above all, the absence of certain filmmaking techniques. Hasumi’s mission is to convince you that anyone who talks this way about Ozu really doesn’t know Ozu at all.
Cards on the table: I think this might be the best book about film I’ve ever read. Hasumi’s approach to describing what really happens onscreen in Ozu movies is at once unconventional, stylistically gripping, and utterly persuasive in making the case that this is how you’re supposed to do film criticism.4 In each of the book’s 10 chapters, Hasumi picks an overlooked recurring feature of Ozu’s films to describe and analyze at length, from actions like eating and getting angry to the more abstract concept of inhabiting. At first this approach is a bit mysterious. What are we going to learn by enumerating all the times characters change clothes in Ozu’s movies (for instance)? In isolation nothing, but taken together Hasumi’s observations reveal a very different logic at work in Ozu’s movies than what we might have deduced from the films if we let cliché guide our thinking.
Parts of this book are absolutely revelatory, at least for this American reader. On the topic of weather in Ozu, I think it’s worth quoting Hasumi at length to give you a sense of his method and his prose (rendered lively and readable in Ryan Cook’s translation):
Here we see how tremendously misguided it would be to call Yasujiro Ozu a typically Japanese filmmaker. Not only is there no rainy season in his world, but there are not even any intermittent showers. In fact, Ozu is about as far as it gets from the poetic rhetoric of the seasons in traditional haiku. Nowhere does he depict things like budding plum blossoms, falling leaves, blanketing frost, or any other such subtle reflection of seasonal change. He can therefore hardly be said to conform to the image of a filmmaker attuned to nature. Ozu neglects the seasons with a consistency that can almost be called cruel. The films may have titles like Late Spring, Early Summer, Equinox Flower, or An Autumn Afternoon, but their concern with the seasons ends there.
On its own this was a startling observation to come to terms with, but Hasumi’s analysis of weather doesn’t end there. For every motif Hasumi adduces to his revised definition of “Ozuesque,” there are deviations. In terms of weather, this includes the downpour that undergirds a big confrontation in Floating Weeds and the wintery climate of Tokyo Twilight. These deviations only take on meaning (or at least, they take on greater significance) because of the consistency of Ozu’s approach throughout his career. You probably couldn’t run this kind of analysis on just any filmmaker, though I suspect you could give it a try with Hong Sang-soo, Éric Rohmer, or Angela Schanelec.
A critical introduction to this book by Aaron Gerow explains a bit of Hasumi’s background—a PhD from the Sorbonne, an interest in Flaubert, Deleuze, and Barthes. Hasumi’s original claim to fame was evidently his attack on the “many predominant forms of textual interpretation that seek to delve beyond the surface of the text to extract a meaning supposedly hidden underneath.” Hasumi’s book is barely concerned with biographical details about Ozu the man, surely a very Barthesian way of approaching his work. This absence might leave some readers unsatisfied with Hasumi’s analyses, but if you are at all like Hasumi and interested in unseating the primacy of “look[ing] at the screen through thinking instead of think[ing] about what we see,” this book is an essential intervention.
This book was picked out for me in a gift package from bookseller and friend of the newsletter Lance S.—thanks, Lance!
This book was brought to my attention last year in a review of it by friend of the newsletter
in her substack.This sometimes still happens today! See: Glenn Powell.
Though I did figuratively hold my breath a bit at the beginning; since he is writing mostly from memory, I wondered if he was getting all the details right. A handful of translator’s footnotes indicate points where he did in fact misremember some things, though there are no serious aberrations.