THE EUROPEAN ART MOVIE: PUTTING ON A SHOW

PUTTING ON A SHOW: THE EUROPEAN ART MOVIE
The great film-makers of European art cinema are now silent. Why should we value what they achieved? Why did their work so easily descend into pastiche and self-parody? And how far was their appeal based on their freedom to explore sexuality in an 'adult' way?
by Thomas Elsaesser
Originally published in Sight and Sound, April 1994
"I don't want to make films again...This film [After the Rehearsal] was supposed to be small, fun, and unpretentious...Two mountainous shadows rise and loom over me. First: Who the hell is really interested in this kind of introverted mirror aria? Second: Does there exist a truth, in the very belly of this drama, that I can't put my finger on, and so remains inaccessible to my feelings and intuition?...We should have thrown ourselves directly into filming...Instead we rehearsed, discussed, analyzed, penetrated carefully and respectfully, just as we do in the theatre, almost as if the author were one of our dear departed." (Ingmar Bergman, 25-26 March 1983, quoted in Images—My Life in Film.)
Ingmar Bergman is hardly a name contemporary cinema makes much use of, except as an adjective, usually applied to Woody Allen films that the reviewers find embarrassing. But it has not always been so: in the early and mid-60s Bergman had enormous prestige, swelling in a rising arc from The Seventh Seal (1956) to The Silence (1963) and Persona (1966) before subsiding fitfully with Hour of the Wolf (1967) and Shame (1968). It was the time of film clubs and the Academy Cinema, and I distinctly remember a programming meeting of the Sussex University film society which broke up in disarray over the question of whether it was possible to call both Wild Strawberries and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance great films (we settled for Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and were lynched by our audience). The row led me to start a film magazine, having discovered in Cahiers du cinéma Godard's eulogy 'Bergmanorama' practically next to his piece on Sam Fuller's Forty Guns. For at the height of middle-class Bergmanomania (in the pages of Sight and Sound, for instance) and Movie's 'Nicholas, not Satyajit,' Godard taught us that the cinema (or le cinéma) was one and indivisible. Especially when, like Godard, you were intent on reinventing it.
"Summer with Monika is the most original film by the most original of filmmakers. It's for today's cinema what Birth of a Nation was for the classical cinema, it's And God Created Woman, but fully achieved, without putting a foot wrong, a film of a total lucidity with regards to both its dramatic and moral structure as well as its mise-en-scene." (Godard in Arts, 30 July 1958.) Reading what Bergman has to say about Summer with Monika in Images ("I have never made a less complicated film. We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom") and then watching it on video, Godard's enthusiasm is understandable: it is a glorified, glorious home movie, a hymn to a young woman's sensuality, and for the director of A bout de souffle clearly an open invitation to mix Rossellini and Rebel without a Cause.
Reviews in Britain were more circumspect. In The Listener (9 July 1959) John Weightman, "after recently assimilating a new batch of four films by Ingmar Bergman, made between 1949 and 1953," reflects on the director's "extraordinary unevenness of quality. How can he be at once so subtle and so unsubtle?" Weightman disliked Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, but liked Summer with Monika, along with Three Strange Loves (aka Thirst) and A Lesson in Love, mainly because of its poetic (i.e. neo-realist) qualities: Bergman "reflects the instability of the couple's relationship in the changing mood of water and sky," the acting is of "uncanny accuracy," and in Three Strange Loves and Monika "the two young husbands are perfect examples of the decent, naive, Scandinavian male who is driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." The last point is nicely offset by Bergman's description (in The Magic Lantern) of how he fell in love with Harriet Andersson during the making of Summer with Monika, and how pleased they were when it turned out that they had to re-shoot most of the outdoor footage because a faulty machine at the lab tore up several thousand metres of the negative.
But Weightman ends his review on a now familiar note: "In putting all these characters and moments of life on to the screen in so many brilliant, if fragmentary episodes, Bergman has done something for Sweden that no-one, to my knowledge, is doing for England. But there may be a parallel in France. Two or three young French directors, like Bergman, have deliberately turned down attractive foreign offers and international stars in order to produce films that have a local, home-made or hand-made character. The camera is again being used as a private eye, as a means of expressing a single yet complex view. This return to the artisan tradition is an interesting development, even though some of the initial products have all the defects of first novels...The cinema is such a rich art form and the poetry of the camera so much more facile than poetry in language, that it is easy for the filmmaker to get drunk on the possibilities of his medium. I think Bergman is slightly drunk in this way."
Quick Hollywood, slow Europe
Weightman's essay contains such a handy compendium of the terms which made Bergman and others the icons of auteur cinema that it prompts the question of what has happened to those towering representatives of European art cinema? Or more precisely, what can still hold together the idea of the 'auteur' and that of a 'national cinema' (as it also applied to the late Fellini, or to New German Cinema in the 70s, or British cinema in the Thatcher 80s)? Weightman already sees what Bergman has "done for Sweden" in the double perspective we have inherited: the quintessential and clichéd of a nation's character embodied in personal or 'poetic' cinema, and the defensive stance of "hand-made" films against slick entertainment. For behind the question of the fate of art cinema, of course, lurks that other one, debated ad nauseam, aired afresh every year at Cannes or Berlin: the future of European cinema vis à vis Hollywood (whether "attractive foreign offers" or France's GATT reactions about its cinematic patrimony). A few years ago, a Channel 4 programme Pictures of Europe neatly assembled all the standard arguments, voiced with varying degrees of pessimism by David Puttnam and Richard Attenborough, Bertrand Tavernier and Paul Verhoeven, Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders and Istvan Szabo. One of the least sentimental was Dusan Makavejev, who probably has more reason than most to be wary of the idea of national cinema, but who also needs to believe in auteur cinema: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen; living in the twentieth century means learning to be American."
In academic film studies, the Hollywood versus Europe question seems at times like the founding myth of the discipline, so much so that it is usually discussed under separate headings: the economic case (Thomas Guback's chapter in Tino Balio's The American Film Industry, Kristin Thompson's Exporting Entertainment, Ian Jarvie's Hollywood's Overseas Campaign); the cultural case (a UCLA- and BFI-sponsored conference in London last year was partly devoted to the topic); and the formal case (either early cinema scholars' debate about Europe's deep staging and slow cutting versus Hollywood's shallow staging and fast cutting, or a difference in story-telling). This last distinction is outlined by David Bordwell in Narration and the Fiction Film, where character-centred causality, question-and-answer logic, problem-solving routines, deadline plot structures and a mutual cueing system of word, sound and image are seen as typical of 'classical' cinema, while other narrative conventions are self-conscious and strategic deviations from the classical norm. Film studies, for once, does not seem totally out of touch with the views of the industry. The norm/deviancy argument could be seen as repeating, at the level of film theory, the hegemony of Hollywood at the cultural and economic level, since all other film styles merely reconfirm the power of the dominant by their very strategies of displacing and circumventing it. Similarly the opposition Europe/Hollywood, as worked out around early cinema, has been echoed since the 20s in the Hollywood complaint that European pictures are too slow for American audiences, a point taken up by many European directors and actors who have worked in both industries.
In Pictures of Europe, Paul Verhoeven and Jean-Jacques Annaud described American speed as a "positive quality," as did Beineix, Zanussi and Luc Besson. Puttnam and Almodóovar were more even-handed, while Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde preferred the slower delivery of dialogue and less hectic action of European cinema, along with—not surprisingly—Wim Wenders, Bertrand Tavernier and Liv Ullmann. Paul Schrader thought that it boiled down to a fundamentally different attitude to the world: "American movies are based on the assumption that life presents you with problems, while European films are based on the conviction that life confronts you with dilemmas—and while problems are something you solve, dilemmas cannot be solved, they're merely probed or investigated." Schrader's distinction helps tease out some of the formal implications: the norm/deviancy model, for instance, could be criticized for assuming the validity of the problem-solving model for both kinds of cinema. And while his theory doesn't work too well for comedies, which never pretend to solve the issues they raise, it might explain why a happy ending in a European art film is felt to be a cop-out, a fundamentally unserious mode of closure. After all, isn't one of the characteristics of 'modern' cinema (until recently synonymous with the art film) its metaphysical doubt about master narratives of progress, preferring to be skeptical of linear time and the efficacy of action? Such is the view of Gilles Deleuze, who in his Bergson-inspired study of cinema holds a more dynamic view of Godard's distinction between "action" and "reflection," contrasting instead the movement-image of classical cinema with the time-image of modern cinema.
Transatlantic crossing
Of course, the problem-solving model is not intended to characterize a film-maker's personal beliefs; it is merely posited as the norm underlying, if not both kinds of cinema, then both kinds of audience. American, or 'classical,' films are the dominant because they are made ('tailored' was the term already used by King Vidor) for an audience used to Hollywood (and which audience isn't?), while European filmmakers are said to express themselves rather than (ad)dress the audience. But if one assumes that art cinema merely sets its audiences different kinds of tasks, such as inferring the characters' motivations (as in The Silence), reconstructing the time scheme (as in Cries and Whispers) or guessing what 'really' happened and what was merely imagined (as in Persona), then the difference is one of genre or expectation: the tasks of the art film are intuitively recognized by the spectator and either avoided as a chore or sought as a challenge. And one should remember that among audiences watching art films are also American spectators—in fact, it was the US distribution practice of the art-house circuit which gave the term 'art cinema' its currently accepted meaning.
Indeed, this may be the rub, the point where a 'cultural' view differs from the cognitive case. By the logic of reception studies, it is ultimately audiences who decide how a film is to be understood, and they often take their cue not only from title, poster, actors or national origin, but from the place where a film is shown, in which case an art film is simply every film screened at an art-house cinema, including old Hollywood movies, as in Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller retrospectives: the cinema, one and indivisible. It's something of a lame definition, and a 'cultural' argument might avoid the tautology by viewing the Hollywood/Europe opposition merely as a special case of a more general process in which art and other films have assigned and reassigned to them identities and meanings according to often apparently superficial characteristics, but which on closer inspection provide an instructive map of movie culture that ignores all kinds of stylistic boundaries but speaks eloquently of the life of films in history. One could even call it a map of misreadings. European films intended for one kind of (national) audience or made within a particular kind of aesthetic framework or ideology, for instance, undergo a sea change as they cross the Atlantic and on coming back find themselves bearing the stamp of yet another cultural currency. The same is true of Hollywood films: what auteur theory saw in them was not what the studios or even the directors intended, but this did not stop another generation of American viewers from appreciating what the Cahiers critics extracted from them.
If this is now a commonplace about Hollywood, it is just as true about European art cinema. The qualities for which film-makers were praised were not necessarily what the audiences liked about their movies, and what made the films famous was not always what made them successful. In the case of Italian neo-realism, for instance, the film-makers' aesthetic-moral agenda included a political engagement, a social conscience, a humanist vision. Subjects such as post-war unemployment or the exploitation of farm labour by the big landowners were part of what made neo-realism a 'realist' cinema, while the fact that it did not use stars but faces from the crowd made it a 'poetic' cinema. Yet a film like Rome, Open City about the Italian resistance braving the German Gestapo with communist partisans and Catholic priests making common cause against the enemy—represented only a particular (and short-lived) political compromise, while with established performers such as Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi it was not exactly a movie that used lay actors. Rome, Open City became a success abroad for many reasons, including its erotic, melodramatic and atmospheric qualities. In one often reproduced shot there is a glimpse of Anna Magnani's exposed thighs as she falls, gunned down by the Germans, while in another scene a glamorous German female agent seduces a young Italian woman into a lesbian affair and supplies her with cocaine. To American audiences, unused to such fare, the labels 'art' and 'European' began to connote a very particular kind of realism, to do with explicit depiction of sex and drugs rather than political or aesthetic commitment.
Bergman is crucial here. Respected in the early 60s for his films of existential angst and bleak depictions of religious doubt, he was able to get finance for his films from Svensk Filmindustri in part because in the art houses of America graphic portrayals of sexual jealousy or violence as in Sawdust and Tinsel or The Virgin Spring, or of a woman masturbating (in The Silence) defined adult cinema for the generation prior to the 'sexual revolution.' When in the mid-60s other film-makers in Europe (Denmark, Germany) began to make films for which the label 'adult' was a well-understood euphemism, and when the Americans themselves relaxed censorship, the art-film export suffered a decline as an economic factor for European national cinemas (in Italy, for instance). But it remained a cultural and artistic force, above all for subsequent generations of more or less mainstream American directors from Arthur Penn to Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese to Francis Ford Coppola, and also for the academy: without the European art and auteur cinema, film studies might never have found a home in American universities.
What can we call this re-assignment of meaning, this fluctuation of critical, cultural and economic currency between one country and another? A misunderstanding of the filmmaker's intention? An acknowledgment that as many Bergmans exist as there are audiences recognizing something of novelty interest or spiritual value in his films? Or just an integral part of what we mean by 'art cinema' (and, finally, by any form of cinema), where the primary economic use-value is either irrelevant (because of government subsidies, as in the case of Bergman), or has already been harvested, leaving a film or a film-maker's work to find its status on another scale of values? It is what forms a 'canon' (see recent Sight and Sound essays by Peter Wollen and Ian Christie), or makes a film a 'classic' (see the slim volumes in the BFI Publishing series).
In which case, the old idea of European films as expressive of their national identities would appear far-fetched. It would suggest that 'national cinema' makes sense only as a relation, not as an essence, being dependent on other kinds of film-making, such as commercial/international, to which it supplies the other side of the coin and thus functions as the subordinate term. Yet a national cinema by its very definition must not know that it is a relative or negative term, for then it would lose its virginity and become that national whore which is the heritage film. Instead, the temptation persists to look beyond the binarism towards something that defines a national cinema 'positively,' such as "the decent, naive, Scandinavian male...driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." Another positive definition is of a national history as a counter-identity. Such might be the case with the films of Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, fanning out towards a broader media interest in Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas in which (to us) complicated national and post-colonial histories set up tantalizing fields of differentiation, self-differentiation and protest. For these films, international (i.e. European) festivals are the markets that can assign different kinds of value, from politico-voyeuristic curiosity to auteur status, setting in motion the circulation of new cultural capital beyond the prospect of economic circulation (art-cinema distribution, a television sale).
One conceivable conclusion is that both the old Hollywood hegemony argument and the post-modern paradigm (it's what audiences make of films that decides their value) hide a more interesting relationship in which national cinemas and Hollywood are not only communicating vessels, but (to change the metaphor) exist in a space set up like a hall of mirrors, in which recognition, imaginary identity and miscognition enjoy equal status. It suggests that Bergman's carefully staged self-doubt, Weightman's prophetic faith in his early poetic cinema and American audiences' frisson at the 'mature' director's candid look at sexual obsessions and violent marital strife may have a common denominator. Retrospectively, negatively, by a kind of paring away, they delineate the slim ground occupied by an auteur who also, like Bergman, has to signify a national cinema: high culture themes, stylistic expressivity, that indeterminacy of reference critics prized as 'realism.' By contrast French cinema is a national cinema with such a diversity of strands that it makes its auteurs (Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Rivette) almost marginal figures in the overall constellation.
Auteur cinema today may not be dead, but what we mean by an auteur has shifted somewhat: for Europe and America, it is no longer about self-doubt or self-expression, metaphysical themes or a realist aesthetic. The themes that still identify Bergman as an auteur would today be mere affectations, a filmmaker's white carnation in his button-hole. Instead, auteurs now dissimulate such signatures of selfhood as Bergman sported, even when they believe or doubt as passionately as he did. Authority and authenticity lie nowadays in the way film-makers use the cinema's resources, which is to say in their command of the generic, the expressive, the excessive, the visual and the visceral. From David Lynch to Jane Campion, from Jonathan Demme to Stephen Frears, from Luc Besson to Dario Argento—all are auteurs and all are valued for their capacity to concentrate on a tour de force, demonstrating qualities not so far removed, finally, from Bergman, "drunk on the possibilities of his medium."
Bergman and Corman
Reading Bergman's Images—My Life in Film (in fact two years' worth of interviews with Lasse Bergström with the questions cut out and bits from the director's work books and The Magic Lantern pasted in) with this in mind leaves one a little disappointed. One learns about Bergman's dislike of colour (because it takes away mystery), the importance of lighting (and of Sven Nykvist), and that some of his early films were devised in order to experiment with complicated camera movements. But he says next to nothing about many of the other things that make him a great film director—his use of close-ups, his work on the soundtrack, the composition of incredibly complex yet fluid action spaces within the frame in both indoor and outside scenes. Biographical details, childhood memories, moral introspection, the theatre, actors and actresses, music and music-making make up a loosely woven narrative that discards chronology and groups the films under such oddly coy titles as 'Dreams Dreamers,' 'Jests Jesters,' 'Miscreance Credence,' 'Farces Frolics.' Often Bergman confesses of this or that film that he doesn't have much to say about its making. Contrary to the title, there is little here about images. Instead, what holds the book together is a daunting effort to account for the process of story-conception, of what mood to be in when writing, what memory to follow up on, what dream to cross-fertilize with an incident he has read about, what well of anguish to tap when the plot seems to wander off in the wrong direction.
It reminds one of how much legitimation and cultural capital Bergman the film director still derived from writing, from being an author as well as an auteur, and at the same time how removed he was from the routines of Hollywood scriptwriting—from story-boarding or using the script as the production's financial and technical blueprint. In this, he conforms to the cliché of the European director: improvisation on the set or on location, the most intense work taking place with the actors, the film taking shape as the director penetrates the inner truth of the various motifs that the story or situation first suggested to him. Bergman, the Important Artist.
The notion that Bergman's films are autobiographical has both given them coherence and authenticated them as important. In a sense, Images supports some of the earnest exegeses of his work: one finds the theme of the artist caught between imagining himself a god and knowing he is a charlatan and conjurer; the motif of the lost companion/partner in an alien city, a war zone, an isolated hospital; the transfer of identity and the destructive energies of the heterosexual couple. But Bergman is also candid about his own compliance with his admirers' interpretative projections. Images opens with the admission that Bergman on Bergman, a book of interviews from 1968, was "hypocritical" because he was too anxious to please. And in a similar vein, he now thinks the notion, endorsed by himself in the preface to Vilgot Sjöman's Diary with Ingmar Bergman, that Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence form a trilogy is a "rationalization after the fact": "the 'trilogy' has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnapps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol." (And yet a look at the filmographies of Godard, Antonioni, Truffaut, Wenders, Herzog, Kieslowski shows how important a prop the idea of the trilogy is for the self-identity of the European auteur.)
Reading Images a little against the grain of its own declaration of authenticity, it seems just conceivable that Bergman's claim to being one of the cinema's great auteurs rests most firmly on his ability to dissimulate: that the big themes, the flaunting of moral doubt and metaphysical pain, represent not a personal plight transfigured into art but the doubly necessary pre-text for a cinematic tour de force. The big themes were doubly necessary, I am suggesting, because they helped to define his cinema as a national cinema and because they allowed him to reinvent himself as a filmmaker: prerequisites for creating an oeuvre that could be recognized as such at a time when Hollywood still had genres and stars rather than directors as stars.
As to Bergman the figurehead of a national cinema, Images makes clear how many overt and covert threads connect his films to the key authors and themes of Scandinavian literature. His immense achievement was to have recognized and made his own dramatic situations, themes and characters that echoed those of the great Scandinavian playwrights, Strindberg and Ibsen especially, and to have used his lifelong work in the theatre as both a permanent rehearsal of his film ideas in progress, and as the place to forge the stock company of actors and actresses who give his films their unmistakeable look, feel and physical identity: Harriet Andersson and Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. Even so private a film as Persona uses Strindberg's one-act play The Stronger; even so ostensibly an autobiographical work as Fanny and Alexander borrows, apart from its explicit references to Hamlet, motifs, names and allusions from Ibsen's Wild Duck and Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata and Dreamplay.
Beyond their role of giving him a form (the chamber play) and a set of dramatic conflicts (Ibsen's bourgeois family falling apart through the "life-lie"; Strindberg's couple tearing each other to pieces in sexual anguish and hatred), the dramatists Bergman is attached to remind one of the importance of the texture of speech and voice for our idea of a national cinema, and indeed for the European art cinema as a whole. This suggests that one function of auteur cinema as a national cinema, before the advent of television, was to transcribe features of a nation's cultural tradition as figured in other art forms (the novel, theatre, opera) and to represent them in the cinema. One can follow this process in Bergman's career, where the films from the late 50s onwards tend to be more or less self-consciously crafted images, first of the Nordic middle-ages and then of a middle-class Sweden. From The Seventh Seal to The Virgin Spring and The Magician, from Wild Strawberries to Hour of the Wolf, from Cries and Whispers to Fanny and Alexander, there is an uneasy acknowledgment of the identity others have thrust upon him as a national icon. One response is parody or pastiche: is it merely hindsight that discovers in Bergman's big themes a wonderful excuse for putting on a show? Re-seeing The Seventh Seal I was amazed and amused by its Grand-Guignolesque elements, not just Death and the strolling players but even the young girl's death at the stake. Its deftly staged spectacle, atmospheric touches, wonderful sleights of hand and sarcastic humour prompted the perhaps blasphemous thought that Max von Sydow's Knight back from the Crusades was closer in spirit to Vincent Price in a Roger Corman film than to Dreyer's Day of Wrath or Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc.
Hence, perhaps, a trauma that seems to have haunted Bergman briefly, even more urgently than his arrest by bungling Swedish bureaucrats for tax fraud: the fear of an arrest of his creativity. The tax business resulted in a six-year-long self-exile to Germany, and seems to have wounded him to the quick. But so did the pun in a French review of Autumn Sonata (with Ingrid Bergman) which suggested that "Bergman was not only directing Bergman, but doing Bergman." Images is in a sense the record of having laid that ghost to rest, for it gives rise to the theme of an artist becoming a pastiche of himself, a fear Bergman sees confirmed in the later work of Tarkovsky, Fellini and especially of Buñuel, whom he accuses of a lifetime of self-parody. Tying in with the "Schnapps-Idee" of the auteur trilogy, self-parody is perhaps the fate Bergman believes lies in store for all European auteurs who outlive both the economic and cultural moment of the national cinema with which they are identified. From more recent times, the cases of Herzog and Wenders come to mind (though the counter-examples are as interesting: Rossellini, when he began to make his great historical films for television, or Godard, when he took on video as if as a way of taking back his own earlier films, commenting on them by spraying them with ever more metaphysical 'graffiti'). In Bergman's case, the farewell to the cinema was not only the signal to carry on with the theatre, but it also led him to reinvent himself as an autobiographer, novelist, scenarist, and the self-reflexive, slyly exhibitionist essayist he shows himself in Images, treating his big themes with an irony not always present when he was turning them into films.
Ghosts and dreams
So how does one go about writing Bergman back into the contemporary cinema, into a film history other than that of the European auteur/national cinema? I would probably start not with Wild Strawberries (usually considered his stylistic breakthrough to a 'modern' cinema), but with a film from eight years earlier which strikes me, for much of its 83 minutes, as being as timelessly 'modern' as all great films are: Three Strange Loves (1949), which though cast in the form of a journey, rather like Wild Strawberries, has a searing visual intelligence, a pulse, a body, a shape, a fury, as if made by someone "drunk on the possibilities of his medium." Bearing in mind the febrile energy and extraordinary urgency with which Three Strange Loves moves between its characters' past and present predicaments and the various people to whom the central couple were or are tied, that old art-cinema staple of the reality/illusion divide, which is one of Bergman's big themes in so many of his films, takes on a new meaning, becoming part of the heroic effort to wrest from cinema, that medium of time and space, a logic neither enslaved to chronological time nor to physical space, but instead creating another reality altogether.
In his best moments Bergman manages to render palpable a sense of indeterminacy such as has rarely existed in the cinema since the great silent European films of the 20s (Murnau, Lang, Dreyer): not psychological or psychoanalytical, but 'phenomenal.' In this sense, Bergman inscribes himself in an art-cinema, non-classical tradition, as one of those directors whose craft goes into making possible those imperceptible transitions between past and present, inner and outer space, memory, dream and anticipation which also give contemporary post-classical cinema its intellectual energy and emotional urgency. Bergman, in order to achieve this kind of energy, experimented in Three Strange Loves with an extraordinary fluid camera and complex camera set-ups. Realizing how much more difficult it was to achieve spatial dislocation in the sound film, he nevertheless did so brilliantly in some of his subsequent films—through the soundtrack in The Silence and the lighting in Persona, as well as through the floating time of presence and memory, anticipation and traumatic recollection of Cries and Whispers.
In this respect, Bergman's film-making is as modern as Godard thought it was. Three Strange Loves to this day gives one the feeling that this is the kind of cinema that every generation has to reinvent for itself, that the cinema always starts again with this kind of vulnerability and radicalness. If it means being branded as art cinema, so be it, at least until it becomes the prisoner of the body it seems fated to create for itself, that of an auteur's cinema pastiching its own cultural self-importance.
Liv Ullmann and Bob Hope
One of the most poignant passages in Images occurs when Bergman discusses Liv Ullmann's primal scream at the climax of Face to Face: "Dino De Laurentiis was delighted with the film, which received rave reviews in America. Now when I see Face to Face I remember an old farce with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. It's called Road to Morocco. They have been shipwrecked and come floating on a raft in front of a projected New York in the background. In the final scene, Bob Hope throws himself to the ground and begins to scream and foam at the mouth. The others stare at him in astonishment and ask what in the world he is doing. He immediately calms down and says: 'This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.' When I see Face to Face and Liv Ullmann's incredibly loyal effort on my behalf, I still can't help but think of Road to Morocco."

© Sight and SoundPUTTING ON A SHOW: THE EUROPEAN ART MOVIE
The great film-makers of European art cinema are now silent. Why should we value what they achieved? Why did their work so easily descend into pastiche and self-parody? And how far was their appeal based on their freedom to explore sexuality in an 'adult' way?
by Thomas Elsaesser
Originally published in Sight and Sound, April 1994
Poner en la sombra: el cine arte europeo
Los grandes realizadores del cine arte europeo ahora están en silencio. Cómo debemos valorar sus logros? ¿Porqué sus trabajos han descendido fácilmente al pastiche y la autoparodia? Y cuan lejos está su atracción basado en su libertad para explotar la sexualidad de una manera “adulta”?
"I don't want to make films again...This film [After the Rehearsal] was supposed to be small, fun, and unpretentious...Two mountainous shadows rise and loom over me. First: Who the hell is really interested in this kind of introverted mirror aria? Second: Does there exist a truth, in the very belly of this drama, that I can't put my finger on, and so remains inaccessible to my feelings and intuition?...We should have thrown ourselves directly into filming...Instead we rehearsed, discussed, analyzed, penetrated carefully and respectfully, just as we do in the theatre, almost as if the author were one of our dear departed." (Ingmar Bergman, 25-26 March 1983, quoted in Images—My Life in Film.)
No quiero volver a hacer filmes otra vez… Esta película [Después de ensayo] se suponía pequeña, divertida, sin pretensiones… Dos enormes sombras se levantaron y aparecieron sobre mí. Primero: ¿Quién diablos está realmente interesado en esta clase de aria introvertida menor? Segundo: ¿Existe alguna verdad en las entrañas de este drama
Ingmar Bergman is hardly a name contemporary cinema makes much use of, except as an adjective, usually applied to Woody Allen films that the reviewers find embarrassing. But it has not always been so: in the early and mid-60s Bergman had enormous prestige, swelling in a rising arc from The Seventh Seal (1956) to The Silence (1963) and Persona (1966) before subsiding fitfully with Hour of the Wolf (1967) and Shame (1968). It was the time of film clubs and the Academy Cinema, and I distinctly remember a programming meeting of the Sussex University film society which broke up in disarray over the question of whether it was possible to call both Wild Strawberries and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance great films (we settled for Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and were lynched by our audience). The row led me to start a film magazine, having discovered in Cahiers du cinéma Godard's eulogy 'Bergmanorama' practically next to his piece on Sam Fuller's Forty Guns. For at the height of middle-class Bergmanomania (in the pages of Sight and Sound, for instance) and Movie's 'Nicholas, not Satyajit,' Godard taught us that the cinema (or le cinéma) was one and indivisible. Especially when, like Godard, you were intent on reinventing it.
"Summer with Monika is the most original film by the most original of filmmakers. It's for today's cinema what Birth of a Nation was for the classical cinema, it's And God Created Woman, but fully achieved, without putting a foot wrong, a film of a total lucidity with regards to both its dramatic and moral structure as well as its mise-en-scene." (Godard in Arts, 30 July 1958.) Reading what Bergman has to say about Summer with Monika in Images ("I have never made a less complicated film. We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom") and then watching it on video, Godard's enthusiasm is understandable: it is a glorified, glorious home movie, a hymn to a young woman's sensuality, and for the director of A bout de souffle clearly an open invitation to mix Rossellini and Rebel without a Cause.
Reviews in Britain were more circumspect. In The Listener (9 July 1959) John Weightman, "after recently assimilating a new batch of four films by Ingmar Bergman, made between 1949 and 1953," reflects on the director's "extraordinary unevenness of quality. How can he be at once so subtle and so unsubtle?" Weightman disliked Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, but liked Summer with Monika, along with Three Strange Loves (aka Thirst) and A Lesson in Love, mainly because of its poetic (i.e. neo-realist) qualities: Bergman "reflects the instability of the couple's relationship in the changing mood of water and sky," the acting is of "uncanny accuracy," and in Three Strange Loves and Monika "the two young husbands are perfect examples of the decent, naive, Scandinavian male who is driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." The last point is nicely offset by Bergman's description (in The Magic Lantern) of how he fell in love with Harriet Andersson during the making of Summer with Monika, and how pleased they were when it turned out that they had to re-shoot most of the outdoor footage because a faulty machine at the lab tore up several thousand metres of the negative.
But Weightman ends his review on a now familiar note: "In putting all these characters and moments of life on to the screen in so many brilliant, if fragmentary episodes, Bergman has done something for Sweden that no-one, to my knowledge, is doing for England. But there may be a parallel in France. Two or three young French directors, like Bergman, have deliberately turned down attractive foreign offers and international stars in order to produce films that have a local, home-made or hand-made character. The camera is again being used as a private eye, as a means of expressing a single yet complex view. This return to the artisan tradition is an interesting development, even though some of the initial products have all the defects of first novels...The cinema is such a rich art form and the poetry of the camera so much more facile than poetry in language, that it is easy for the filmmaker to get drunk on the possibilities of his medium. I think Bergman is slightly drunk in this way."
Quick Hollywood, slow Europe
Weightman's essay contains such a handy compendium of the terms which made Bergman and others the icons of auteur cinema that it prompts the question of what has happened to those towering representatives of European art cinema? Or more precisely, what can still hold together the idea of the 'auteur' and that of a 'national cinema' (as it also applied to the late Fellini, or to New German Cinema in the 70s, or British cinema in the Thatcher 80s)? Weightman already sees what Bergman has "done for Sweden" in the double perspective we have inherited: the quintessential and clichéd of a nation's character embodied in personal or 'poetic' cinema, and the defensive stance of "hand-made" films against slick entertainment. For behind the question of the fate of art cinema, of course, lurks that other one, debated ad nauseam, aired afresh every year at Cannes or Berlin: the future of European cinema vis à vis Hollywood (whether "attractive foreign offers" or France's GATT reactions about its cinematic patrimony). A few years ago, a Channel 4 programme Pictures of Europe neatly assembled all the standard arguments, voiced with varying degrees of pessimism by David Puttnam and Richard Attenborough, Bertrand Tavernier and Paul Verhoeven, Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders and Istvan Szabo. One of the least sentimental was Dusan Makavejev, who probably has more reason than most to be wary of the idea of national cinema, but who also needs to believe in auteur cinema: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen; living in the twentieth century means learning to be American."
In academic film studies, the Hollywood versus Europe question seems at times like the founding myth of the discipline, so much so that it is usually discussed under separate headings: the economic case (Thomas Guback's chapter in Tino Balio's The American Film Industry, Kristin Thompson's Exporting Entertainment, Ian Jarvie's Hollywood's Overseas Campaign); the cultural case (a UCLA- and BFI-sponsored conference in London last year was partly devoted to the topic); and the formal case (either early cinema scholars' debate about Europe's deep staging and slow cutting versus Hollywood's shallow staging and fast cutting, or a difference in story-telling). This last distinction is outlined by David Bordwell in Narration and the Fiction Film, where character-centred causality, question-and-answer logic, problem-solving routines, deadline plot structures and a mutual cueing system of word, sound and image are seen as typical of 'classical' cinema, while other narrative conventions are self-conscious and strategic deviations from the classical norm. Film studies, for once, does not seem totally out of touch with the views of the industry. The norm/deviancy argument could be seen as repeating, at the level of film theory, the hegemony of Hollywood at the cultural and economic level, since all other film styles merely reconfirm the power of the dominant by their very strategies of displacing and circumventing it. Similarly the opposition Europe/Hollywood, as worked out around early cinema, has been echoed since the 20s in the Hollywood complaint that European pictures are too slow for American audiences, a point taken up by many European directors and actors who have worked in both industries.
In Pictures of Europe, Paul Verhoeven and Jean-Jacques Annaud described American speed as a "positive quality," as did Beineix, Zanussi and Luc Besson. Puttnam and Almodóovar were more even-handed, while Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde preferred the slower delivery of dialogue and less hectic action of European cinema, along with—not surprisingly—Wim Wenders, Bertrand Tavernier and Liv Ullmann. Paul Schrader thought that it boiled down to a fundamentally different attitude to the world: "American movies are based on the assumption that life presents you with problems, while European films are based on the conviction that life confronts you with dilemmas—and while problems are something you solve, dilemmas cannot be solved, they're merely probed or investigated." Schrader's distinction helps tease out some of the formal implications: the norm/deviancy model, for instance, could be criticized for assuming the validity of the problem-solving model for both kinds of cinema. And while his theory doesn't work too well for comedies, which never pretend to solve the issues they raise, it might explain why a happy ending in a European art film is felt to be a cop-out, a fundamentally unserious mode of closure. After all, isn't one of the characteristics of 'modern' cinema (until recently synonymous with the art film) its metaphysical doubt about master narratives of progress, preferring to be skeptical of linear time and the efficacy of action? Such is the view of Gilles Deleuze, who in his Bergson-inspired study of cinema holds a more dynamic view of Godard's distinction between "action" and "reflection," contrasting instead the movement-image of classical cinema with the time-image of modern cinema.
Transatlantic crossing
Of course, the problem-solving model is not intended to characterize a film-maker's personal beliefs; it is merely posited as the norm underlying, if not both kinds of cinema, then both kinds of audience. American, or 'classical,' films are the dominant because they are made ('tailored' was the term already used by King Vidor) for an audience used to Hollywood (and which audience isn't?), while European filmmakers are said to express themselves rather than (ad)dress the audience. But if one assumes that art cinema merely sets its audiences different kinds of tasks, such as inferring the characters' motivations (as in The Silence), reconstructing the time scheme (as in Cries and Whispers) or guessing what 'really' happened and what was merely imagined (as in Persona), then the difference is one of genre or expectation: the tasks of the art film are intuitively recognized by the spectator and either avoided as a chore or sought as a challenge. And one should remember that among audiences watching art films are also American spectators—in fact, it was the US distribution practice of the art-house circuit which gave the term 'art cinema' its currently accepted meaning.
Indeed, this may be the rub, the point where a 'cultural' view differs from the cognitive case. By the logic of reception studies, it is ultimately audiences who decide how a film is to be understood, and they often take their cue not only from title, poster, actors or national origin, but from the place where a film is shown, in which case an art film is simply every film screened at an art-house cinema, including old Hollywood movies, as in Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller retrospectives: the cinema, one and indivisible. It's something of a lame definition, and a 'cultural' argument might avoid the tautology by viewing the Hollywood/Europe opposition merely as a special case of a more general process in which art and other films have assigned and reassigned to them identities and meanings according to often apparently superficial characteristics, but which on closer inspection provide an instructive map of movie culture that ignores all kinds of stylistic boundaries but speaks eloquently of the life of films in history. One could even call it a map of misreadings. European films intended for one kind of (national) audience or made within a particular kind of aesthetic framework or ideology, for instance, undergo a sea change as they cross the Atlantic and on coming back find themselves bearing the stamp of yet another cultural currency. The same is true of Hollywood films: what auteur theory saw in them was not what the studios or even the directors intended, but this did not stop another generation of American viewers from appreciating what the Cahiers critics extracted from them.
If this is now a commonplace about Hollywood, it is just as true about European art cinema. The qualities for which film-makers were praised were not necessarily what the audiences liked about their movies, and what made the films famous was not always what made them successful. In the case of Italian neo-realism, for instance, the film-makers' aesthetic-moral agenda included a political engagement, a social conscience, a humanist vision. Subjects such as post-war unemployment or the exploitation of farm labour by the big landowners were part of what made neo-realism a 'realist' cinema, while the fact that it did not use stars but faces from the crowd made it a 'poetic' cinema. Yet a film like Rome, Open City about the Italian resistance braving the German Gestapo with communist partisans and Catholic priests making common cause against the enemy—represented only a particular (and short-lived) political compromise, while with established performers such as Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi it was not exactly a movie that used lay actors. Rome, Open City became a success abroad for many reasons, including its erotic, melodramatic and atmospheric qualities. In one often reproduced shot there is a glimpse of Anna Magnani's exposed thighs as she falls, gunned down by the Germans, while in another scene a glamorous German female agent seduces a young Italian woman into a lesbian affair and supplies her with cocaine. To American audiences, unused to such fare, the labels 'art' and 'European' began to connote a very particular kind of realism, to do with explicit depiction of sex and drugs rather than political or aesthetic commitment.
Bergman is crucial here. Respected in the early 60s for his films of existential angst and bleak depictions of religious doubt, he was able to get finance for his films from Svensk Filmindustri in part because in the art houses of America graphic portrayals of sexual jealousy or violence as in Sawdust and Tinsel or The Virgin Spring, or of a woman masturbating (in The Silence) defined adult cinema for the generation prior to the 'sexual revolution.' When in the mid-60s other film-makers in Europe (Denmark, Germany) began to make films for which the label 'adult' was a well-understood euphemism, and when the Americans themselves relaxed censorship, the art-film export suffered a decline as an economic factor for European national cinemas (in Italy, for instance). But it remained a cultural and artistic force, above all for subsequent generations of more or less mainstream American directors from Arthur Penn to Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese to Francis Ford Coppola, and also for the academy: without the European art and auteur cinema, film studies might never have found a home in American universities.
What can we call this re-assignment of meaning, this fluctuation of critical, cultural and economic currency between one country and another? A misunderstanding of the filmmaker's intention? An acknowledgment that as many Bergmans exist as there are audiences recognizing something of novelty interest or spiritual value in his films? Or just an integral part of what we mean by 'art cinema' (and, finally, by any form of cinema), where the primary economic use-value is either irrelevant (because of government subsidies, as in the case of Bergman), or has already been harvested, leaving a film or a film-maker's work to find its status on another scale of values? It is what forms a 'canon' (see recent Sight and Sound essays by Peter Wollen and Ian Christie), or makes a film a 'classic' (see the slim volumes in the BFI Publishing series).
In which case, the old idea of European films as expressive of their national identities would appear far-fetched. It would suggest that 'national cinema' makes sense only as a relation, not as an essence, being dependent on other kinds of film-making, such as commercial/international, to which it supplies the other side of the coin and thus functions as the subordinate term. Yet a national cinema by its very definition must not know that it is a relative or negative term, for then it would lose its virginity and become that national whore which is the heritage film. Instead, the temptation persists to look beyond the binarism towards something that defines a national cinema 'positively,' such as "the decent, naive, Scandinavian male...driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." Another positive definition is of a national history as a counter-identity. Such might be the case with the films of Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, fanning out towards a broader media interest in Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas in which (to us) complicated national and post-colonial histories set up tantalizing fields of differentiation, self-differentiation and protest. For these films, international (i.e. European) festivals are the markets that can assign different kinds of value, from politico-voyeuristic curiosity to auteur status, setting in motion the circulation of new cultural capital beyond the prospect of economic circulation (art-cinema distribution, a television sale).
One conceivable conclusion is that both the old Hollywood hegemony argument and the post-modern paradigm (it's what audiences make of films that decides their value) hide a more interesting relationship in which national cinemas and Hollywood are not only communicating vessels, but (to change the metaphor) exist in a space set up like a hall of mirrors, in which recognition, imaginary identity and miscognition enjoy equal status. It suggests that Bergman's carefully staged self-doubt, Weightman's prophetic faith in his early poetic cinema and American audiences' frisson at the 'mature' director's candid look at sexual obsessions and violent marital strife may have a common denominator. Retrospectively, negatively, by a kind of paring away, they delineate the slim ground occupied by an auteur who also, like Bergman, has to signify a national cinema: high culture themes, stylistic expressivity, that indeterminacy of reference critics prized as 'realism.' By contrast French cinema is a national cinema with such a diversity of strands that it makes its auteurs (Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Rivette) almost marginal figures in the overall constellation.
Auteur cinema today may not be dead, but what we mean by an auteur has shifted somewhat: for Europe and America, it is no longer about self-doubt or self-expression, metaphysical themes or a realist aesthetic. The themes that still identify Bergman as an auteur would today be mere affectations, a filmmaker's white carnation in his button-hole. Instead, auteurs now dissimulate such signatures of selfhood as Bergman sported, even when they believe or doubt as passionately as he did. Authority and authenticity lie nowadays in the way film-makers use the cinema's resources, which is to say in their command of the generic, the expressive, the excessive, the visual and the visceral. From David Lynch to Jane Campion, from Jonathan Demme to Stephen Frears, from Luc Besson to Dario Argento—all are auteurs and all are valued for their capacity to concentrate on a tour de force, demonstrating qualities not so far removed, finally, from Bergman, "drunk on the possibilities of his medium."
Bergman and Corman
Reading Bergman's Images—My Life in Film (in fact two years' worth of interviews with Lasse Bergström with the questions cut out and bits from the director's work books and The Magic Lantern pasted in) with this in mind leaves one a little disappointed. One learns about Bergman's dislike of colour (because it takes away mystery), the importance of lighting (and of Sven Nykvist), and that some of his early films were devised in order to experiment with complicated camera movements. But he says next to nothing about many of the other things that make him a great film director—his use of close-ups, his work on the soundtrack, the composition of incredibly complex yet fluid action spaces within the frame in both indoor and outside scenes. Biographical details, childhood memories, moral introspection, the theatre, actors and actresses, music and music-making make up a loosely woven narrative that discards chronology and groups the films under such oddly coy titles as 'Dreams Dreamers,' 'Jests Jesters,' 'Miscreance Credence,' 'Farces Frolics.' Often Bergman confesses of this or that film that he doesn't have much to say about its making. Contrary to the title, there is little here about images. Instead, what holds the book together is a daunting effort to account for the process of story-conception, of what mood to be in when writing, what memory to follow up on, what dream to cross-fertilize with an incident he has read about, what well of anguish to tap when the plot seems to wander off in the wrong direction.
It reminds one of how much legitimation and cultural capital Bergman the film director still derived from writing, from being an author as well as an auteur, and at the same time how removed he was from the routines of Hollywood scriptwriting—from story-boarding or using the script as the production's financial and technical blueprint. In this, he conforms to the cliché of the European director: improvisation on the set or on location, the most intense work taking place with the actors, the film taking shape as the director penetrates the inner truth of the various motifs that the story or situation first suggested to him. Bergman, the Important Artist.
The notion that Bergman's films are autobiographical has both given them coherence and authenticated them as important. In a sense, Images supports some of the earnest exegeses of his work: one finds the theme of the artist caught between imagining himself a god and knowing he is a charlatan and conjurer; the motif of the lost companion/partner in an alien city, a war zone, an isolated hospital; the transfer of identity and the destructive energies of the heterosexual couple. But Bergman is also candid about his own compliance with his admirers' interpretative projections. Images opens with the admission that Bergman on Bergman, a book of interviews from 1968, was "hypocritical" because he was too anxious to please. And in a similar vein, he now thinks the notion, endorsed by himself in the preface to Vilgot Sjöman's Diary with Ingmar Bergman, that Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence form a trilogy is a "rationalization after the fact": "the 'trilogy' has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnapps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol." (And yet a look at the filmographies of Godard, Antonioni, Truffaut, Wenders, Herzog, Kieslowski shows how important a prop the idea of the trilogy is for the self-identity of the European auteur.)
Reading Images a little against the grain of its own declaration of authenticity, it seems just conceivable that Bergman's claim to being one of the cinema's great auteurs rests most firmly on his ability to dissimulate: that the big themes, the flaunting of moral doubt and metaphysical pain, represent not a personal plight transfigured into art but the doubly necessary pre-text for a cinematic tour de force. The big themes were doubly necessary, I am suggesting, because they helped to define his cinema as a national cinema and because they allowed him to reinvent himself as a filmmaker: prerequisites for creating an oeuvre that could be recognized as such at a time when Hollywood still had genres and stars rather than directors as stars.
As to Bergman the figurehead of a national cinema, Images makes clear how many overt and covert threads connect his films to the key authors and themes of Scandinavian literature. His immense achievement was to have recognized and made his own dramatic situations, themes and characters that echoed those of the great Scandinavian playwrights, Strindberg and Ibsen especially, and to have used his lifelong work in the theatre as both a permanent rehearsal of his film ideas in progress, and as the place to forge the stock company of actors and actresses who give his films their unmistakeable look, feel and physical identity: Harriet Andersson and Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. Even so private a film as Persona uses Strindberg's one-act play The Stronger; even so ostensibly an autobiographical work as Fanny and Alexander borrows, apart from its explicit references to Hamlet, motifs, names and allusions from Ibsen's Wild Duck and Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata and Dreamplay.
Beyond their role of giving him a form (the chamber play) and a set of dramatic conflicts (Ibsen's bourgeois family falling apart through the "life-lie"; Strindberg's couple tearing each other to pieces in sexual anguish and hatred), the dramatists Bergman is attached to remind one of the importance of the texture of speech and voice for our idea of a national cinema, and indeed for the European art cinema as a whole. This suggests that one function of auteur cinema as a national cinema, before the advent of television, was to transcribe features of a nation's cultural tradition as figured in other art forms (the novel, theatre, opera) and to represent them in the cinema. One can follow this process in Bergman's career, where the films from the late 50s onwards tend to be more or less self-consciously crafted images, first of the Nordic middle-ages and then of a middle-class Sweden. From The Seventh Seal to The Virgin Spring and The Magician, from Wild Strawberries to Hour of the Wolf, from Cries and Whispers to Fanny and Alexander, there is an uneasy acknowledgment of the identity others have thrust upon him as a national icon. One response is parody or pastiche: is it merely hindsight that discovers in Bergman's big themes a wonderful excuse for putting on a show? Re-seeing The Seventh Seal I was amazed and amused by its Grand-Guignolesque elements, not just Death and the strolling players but even the young girl's death at the stake. Its deftly staged spectacle, atmospheric touches, wonderful sleights of hand and sarcastic humour prompted the perhaps blasphemous thought that Max von Sydow's Knight back from the Crusades was closer in spirit to Vincent Price in a Roger Corman film than to Dreyer's Day of Wrath or Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc.
Hence, perhaps, a trauma that seems to have haunted Bergman briefly, even more urgently than his arrest by bungling Swedish bureaucrats for tax fraud: the fear of an arrest of his creativity. The tax business resulted in a six-year-long self-exile to Germany, and seems to have wounded him to the quick. But so did the pun in a French review of Autumn Sonata (with Ingrid Bergman) which suggested that "Bergman was not only directing Bergman, but doing Bergman." Images is in a sense the record of having laid that ghost to rest, for it gives rise to the theme of an artist becoming a pastiche of himself, a fear Bergman sees confirmed in the later work of Tarkovsky, Fellini and especially of Buñuel, whom he accuses of a lifetime of self-parody. Tying in with the "Schnapps-Idee" of the auteur trilogy, self-parody is perhaps the fate Bergman believes lies in store for all European auteurs who outlive both the economic and cultural moment of the national cinema with which they are identified. From more recent times, the cases of Herzog and Wenders come to mind (though the counter-examples are as interesting: Rossellini, when he began to make his great historical films for television, or Godard, when he took on video as if as a way of taking back his own earlier films, commenting on them by spraying them with ever more metaphysical 'graffiti'). In Bergman's case, the farewell to the cinema was not only the signal to carry on with the theatre, but it also led him to reinvent himself as an autobiographer, novelist, scenarist, and the self-reflexive, slyly exhibitionist essayist he shows himself in Images, treating his big themes with an irony not always present when he was turning them into films.
Ghosts and dreams
So how does one go about writing Bergman back into the contemporary cinema, into a film history other than that of the European auteur/national cinema? I would probably start not with Wild Strawberries (usually considered his stylistic breakthrough to a 'modern' cinema), but with a film from eight years earlier which strikes me, for much of its 83 minutes, as being as timelessly 'modern' as all great films are: Three Strange Loves (1949), which though cast in the form of a journey, rather like Wild Strawberries, has a searing visual intelligence, a pulse, a body, a shape, a fury, as if made by someone "drunk on the possibilities of his medium." Bearing in mind the febrile energy and extraordinary urgency with which Three Strange Loves moves between its characters' past and present predicaments and the various people to whom the central couple were or are tied, that old art-cinema staple of the reality/illusion divide, which is one of Bergman's big themes in so many of his films, takes on a new meaning, becoming part of the heroic effort to wrest from cinema, that medium of time and space, a logic neither enslaved to chronological time nor to physical space, but instead creating another reality altogether.
In his best moments Bergman manages to render palpable a sense of indeterminacy such as has rarely existed in the cinema since the great silent European films of the 20s (Murnau, Lang, Dreyer): not psychological or psychoanalytical, but 'phenomenal.' In this sense, Bergman inscribes himself in an art-cinema, non-classical tradition, as one of those directors whose craft goes into making possible those imperceptible transitions between past and present, inner and outer space, memory, dream and anticipation which also give contemporary post-classical cinema its intellectual energy and emotional urgency. Bergman, in order to achieve this kind of energy, experimented in Three Strange Loves with an extraordinary fluid camera and complex camera set-ups. Realizing how much more difficult it was to achieve spatial dislocation in the sound film, he nevertheless did so brilliantly in some of his subsequent films—through the soundtrack in The Silence and the lighting in Persona, as well as through the floating time of presence and memory, anticipation and traumatic recollection of Cries and Whispers.
In this respect, Bergman's film-making is as modern as Godard thought it was. Three Strange Loves to this day gives one the feeling that this is the kind of cinema that every generation has to reinvent for itself, that the cinema always starts again with this kind of vulnerability and radicalness. If it means being branded as art cinema, so be it, at least until it becomes the prisoner of the body it seems fated to create for itself, that of an auteur's cinema pastiching its own cultural self-importance.
Liv Ullmann and Bob Hope
One of the most poignant passages in Images occurs when Bergman discusses Liv Ullmann's primal scream at the climax of Face to Face: "Dino De Laurentiis was delighted with the film, which received rave reviews in America. Now when I see Face to Face I remember an old farce with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. It's called Road to Morocco. They have been shipwrecked and come floating on a raft in front of a projected New York in the background. In the final scene, Bob Hope throws himself to the ground and begins to scream and foam at the mouth. The others stare at him in astonishment and ask what in the world he is doing. He immediately calms down and says: 'This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.' When I see Face to Face and Liv Ullmann's incredibly loyal effort on my behalf, I still can't help but think of Road to Morocco."

© Sight and Sound

Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer

Notes for
Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer
In this book about Japanese cinema, Burch intends to couch the discussion of the history of film styles not in terms of universal values but in norms and deviations in practices within a specific social context. More specifically, he identifies essential differences between Japanese and Western modes of representation through a Marxist approach. He argues that since the Japanese seem to have a disdain for film theory (an erroneous assumption), one must look at the art itself, identifying a few "masters" who 1) de-construct Western modes of filmmaking and, 2) refine and systemetize specifically Japanese traits. Burch argues to shift the "Golden Age" of Japanese cinema from the 50's to the 30's. At the same time, his sights are set on a bigger picture; he intends to look at the national context of Japanese cinema to change the way we think about film history as a whole.

1. A System of Contradictions
Burch contends that the pertinent traits of Japanese aesthetics were defined almost entirely between the ninth and twelfth centuries (in the Heian period). He asks why other countries (like China, India, and Egypt) adopted Western modes of representation wholesale, along with all the limitations and ideological baggage that come with it. He partly attributes this difference of filmic and traditional modes to the historical circumstances of colonization. Japan had to luck to avoid being colonized, and even created an infrastructure for the film industry independent of outside forces.
In this chapter, Burch points out a pair of contradictory traits that often come up in discussions about Japan, that is the Japanese "faculty for assimilation" or "lack of originality" (depending on the writer's inclinations). Burch rightly calls them stereotypes that mystify the culture, and he intends to reveal the underlying ideological assumptions behind such claims. Whether Japanese are adept at assimilation and transformation ("making things uniquely Japanese" as it is often put) or are mired in stagnant conservatism (miming China before and the United States in the postwar period), each notion invokes the value of originality. However, Burch argues that in Japan originality has never been a virtue. Before the Meiji Restoration and the entrance of capitalism, artists were not the sole creator and proprietor of their work. There was no concept of plagiarism. Tied to this are the terms superposition and supersession. In the West, one period replaces another. In Japan, Burch identifies a fixative effect in which different types of art did not supplant each other, but co-existed to the present day (superposition). These factors are crucial for understanding the development of cinema in Japan.

2. A System of Signs
Because of superposition and the lack of a concept of plagiarism, artists may relate their art to other everything that came before it. Burch turns to the writing system and Heian poetry as examples. He describes the adoption of Chinese characters and their adaptation to Japanese language. Most important is the development of the two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana. In order to construct a sentence, one must combine at least hiragana with Chinese characters (katakana is reserved for foreign loan words). You can think of the difference between the kana and characters (kanji ) as analogue vs. digital. What Burch finds significant is that both co-exist simultaneously. Neither the phonetic or non-phonetic components are privileged. The language may thereby afford access to both a linear mode of linguistic representation, such as that in the West, and to an "Oriental mode" which it is an implicit critique of linearity. The inspiration for this argument ultimately comes from French philosophy and literary criticism, especially Derrida's critique of Western metaphysics and Barthes' fanciful essays on Japan. Combining these ideas with his own understanding of the development of cinematic narrative, Burch writes: "The linearization of writing and the linear conception of speech are rooted in the Western sense of time based on movement in space." (p. 40) Arguing that the "digital" linguistic mode of Chinese characters provides the foundation for a very different basis for narrative, Burch draws a connection (an analogy? metaphor?) between non-linear language and the indifference to linear causality he finds in the modes of filmic representation in the silent period. In the next chapter he shows how this works in poetry.

3. A Boundless Text
Burch quotes a Heian poem at length, laying out the concepts of polysemy and intertextuality. These two processes engage the reader in an act of creation in which "the profound equivalence of reading and writing speaks directly to modern artistic practice and theory. (he quotes Eisenstein)
The "boundless text" he offers contains, explicitly or implicitly, all the basic theoretical challenges that Japan offers Western thought and practice:
· An inclination to read a given text in relation to a body of texts.
· No value placed on originality and no taboos on "borrowing," both of which are based on Western individualism.
· No privileging of a linear approach to representation.
· No precedence of content over form as in the West.

Part 2 A Frozen Stream?
4. A Machine Appears
Burch lays out a very brief summary of the early Japanese cinema based on Anderson and Richie's book, placing it in the context of a fascination for things Western after the Meiji restoration, and one facet of the Pure Cinema Movement. He mentions, in passing, the influence various arts felt from the West and describes the shinpa movement in theater. This is a theater based and what the Japanese thought Western theater was like, which produces oddities such as Hamlet on a bicycle. It is this transformation of the art by way of Japanese ideology that Burch leaves dangling before us; he'll assert the differences between Western and Japanese modes of representation in silent film are based on this ideological difference.

5. A Parenthesis on Film History
But first, he's going to examine the process by which 19th century ideologies of representation came to determine the representational modes of Western film. This is probably the most important chapter of the book, as it constitutes a radical repositioning of the major figures at the dawn of cinema by looking at them from the ground of Japanese cinema. Nearly all narratives of the invention of cinema identify Lumiere with non-fiction and Melies with fiction. Burch intends to switch the historical division in film to Lumiere & Melies vs. Americans Dickson & Raff & Gammon et al.
"I regard the work of Melies and Lumiere, however, as two aspects of the same phenomenon. Conversely, the contradiction between the films shot by the Lumieres and their cameramen, and some of those produced for the Edison company during the first few years by Dickson and Raff and Gammon is I believe absolutely fundamental" (p. 61).
The people working for Edison were interested in the "total reproduction of life," an "essential aspiration of the bourgeoisie with regard to representation." (p. 61). The Lumieres were still the direct heirs of Muybridge and Co., as they were interested in the silent reproduction of perceptual movement. Burch describes the Lumiere's work as non-centered spacially (not guiding the gaze of the spectator) and temporally (often having no beginning or end). The films were also non-linear viewing experiences, since the clips were often showed more than once. Burch compares these early films to recent modernist films.
Burch also points out differences in their methods (Edison and Dickson put the camera in their Black Maria, prefiguring the sound stages of the 30's) while Lumieres set it up outside, recording things with an almost scientific impulse. Melies worked in a studio, but to "construct a world as radically and avowedly artificial as possible." (p. 62) Even the language they used reveals the difference: "The neologisms coined by Edison (Vitascope) and the Lumiere brothers (Cinématographe) are also emblematic of their antithetical positions: a 'vision of life' as opposed to 'an inscription of movement'."(p. 62) Burch places Porter in a middle ground between the "Lumiere/Edison contradiction", citing the medium close-up of The Great Train Robbery (1903) (which could be tacked on either the beginning or end) and the bedroom rescue in The Life of an American Fireman (1902) (shown two times from inside and outside) as impulses toward the Lumiere mode of representation. At the same time, Porter's work in the development of reverse field, cross-cutting and ellipsis places also puts him on the Edison side as they were to constitute the future Hollywood style. By WWI, the adoption of reverse field editing and the eyeline match were the last steps in breaking down the barrier of 'alienation' which informed the relationship between the early film and its essentially working-class audience. With the search for a better audience (which brought middle-class norms into the mode of representation) and the coming of sound, the project initiated by Smith, Porter, Griffith and Co. was completed.
Burch takes on previous film historians, who describe Japanese cinema as constantly catching up to the rest of the world until its "golden age" in the 1950s. He asserts that the creative lag most experts see in the silent Japanese film is based on an ideological assumption, a "fundamental incompatibility between the West's developing 'codes of illusionism' and Japanese indifference to 'illusionism' in the Western sense." (p. 66) At the end of the chapter, he once again draws a line between the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Shimizu, and Naruse and the most radical films of the 60's and 70's (including Godard and Warhol). Before tracing the development of Japanese separation from Western codes, however, he wants to look for its origin.

6. A Rule and its Ubiquity
This chapter introduces presentational vs. representation styles in a discussion of kabuki. Some characteristics:
· Audience shouts comments during the performance
· Use of oyama, female impersonators
· Use of visible stage hands dressed in black outfits
· Free contraction and dilation of narrative time
· Polysemy and intertextuality of the 'libretto
· Rejection of illusionist depth in set design and blocking
Burch then quotes Barthes on bunraku puppet theater and asserts this presentational style in traditional arts directly influenced silent, and even sound, film.

7. Bulwarks of Tradition
Now Burch begins discussing presentational style in Japanese cinema. He talks about the benshi , the narrator who "translates" the film at one side of the screen. In the West, the benshi had always been credited with holding Japanese film back from what it could have been. Burch wishes to recoup their position, claiming they played an historically positive role in the resistance to Hollywood codes. He sees Japanese film of the 20's and 30's as a "store house" of the Primitive modes of representation. The benshi's political maneuvering preserved this style and their act of reading the film relieved the film itself of the burden of narrative. In the dominant cinema of the West, the titles suspended representation momentarily; in Japanese cinema, the benshi often made up lines and changed the meaning of the story. Every film, foreign or Japanese, lost the possibility of transparency because the benshi was simultaneously reading the film for them. In addition, some seats in Japanese theaters were turned toward the projector, allowing the spectator to view both the "effective and effected gestures" (using the language Barthes described bunraku with, implying a connection between the two).
Many scholars have accused early Japanese film of remaining primitive, simplistic, rough. Burch once again wants to expose the ideological assumptions underlying such assertions. He gives examples of Japanese silents which reveal a mastery of Western style, then says, "the Western codes had impinged upon Japanese perception, but Japan was on the whole not interested in them as a system; they were merely used on occasion to produce special dramatic effects." He gives three Japanese attitudes toward Western mode of decoupage : utter unconcern, occasional use of specific techniques in their Western signifying context (swish pans, dissolves), and mastery (by directors like Ozu and Mizoguchi).
Burch then brings kabuki back into the discussion, identifying several conventions that appear in early film (sets, symbolic actions, oyama, tableaux (a kabuki version of what you see in American silents like A Corner in Wheat ), etc. These codes, which had become naturalized in the cinema, began to be systematically excluded in the teens and twenties. Burch speculates a conflict between them and emerging Western codes and tastes whose outcome would determine the entire course of Japanese cinema.

Part 3 Cross-Currents
8. Transformational Modules
Burch asks, what do we make of Japanese use of a Western machine in a medium largely influenced by capitalism in in light of their faculty for assimilation and transforming elements borrowed from foreign culture? He calls this a process of radicalization (first of Chinese culture, then Western) and he will inventory "transformational modules" which "bear directly upon the ways in which the codes developing in the cinema of the West between 1900 and 1920 were transformed, displaced, and truncated in Japan during the 1920's and 1930's." (p. 90) Japanese react to foreign ideas, artifacts and techniques by wholesale acceptance, global rejection, or transformation/adaptation. Burch says acceptance or rejection depends upon a given element's usefulness to the ruling class. The catagory of adaptation and transformation concerns him most and he cites three examples: the ritualization of Indo-Chinese Buddhist logic, introduction of linear perspective, and adaptations of Western clothing during the Meiji era. These three attitudes --- acceptance/rejection/adaptation --- co-exist and comprise the underlying forces in the development of Japanese modes of cinematic representation in the 20's and 30s.

9. Lines and Spaces
Burch describes the Pure Cinema Movement, a movement in the 1920's to emulate Hollywood cinema. Shochiku Co. turns from live performance (kabuki and shinpa) to cinema, importing technicians from Sessue Hayakawa's Hollywood entourage. They begin to replace oyama with real women, use real locations and hope to control, if not eliminate, the benshi. This movement is an instance of wholesale adoption. They also adopted Western codes of editing as they perceived them. This was all consistent with the spirit of the Meiji Restoration, although Burch attributes it to a political climate affected by a fast-rising proletariat and a new liberal middle-class who united to oppose the post-feudal oligarchy. The movement was shortlived because of political pressure from benshi and oyama groups, the 1923 earthquakes affect on the film industry, and --- most important for Burch --- Japanese ultimate rejection of Western modes of representation.

10. The Fate of Alien Modes
The films in the pseudo-American style emphasized visual aspects of Japanese society that appeared Western: clothes, make-up, gesticulations, sets, etc. But Burch is more interested in the transformation of modes of representation, which he analyses along three axes: surface/depth, centering/decentering; continuity/discontinuity. He has already discussed how the West resolved these issues in chapter 5, now he'll look at Japan.
He describes in detail Souls on the Road (1921), which was influenced by D.W. Griffith's Intolerance and which he feels is far more complex. It's a film designed to imitate Western codes and, at the same time, be so complex and use so many titles that it would make benshi obsolete. For Burch, it actually ended up radicalizing the Western modes.

11. Displacements and Condensations
This chapter covers the early development of chambera or swordplay films, particularly those of Ito and specifically in the adoption and radicalization of editing codes.

12. Surface and Depth
Burch attributes the frontality of Japanese images to the force of modes of representation in traditional art, as well as the mixture of primitive Western editing and the architecture in Japanese homes (which naturally take 90 degree angles on rectangular surfaces and contain little or no furniture). Depth producing oblique angles in cutaways and close-ups would destroy a perceived unity. Aspects of the pro-filmic space which lend themselves to a Western approach (the hallways with their sliding doors) seem to have been ignored.

Part 5 A Chain is Broken
23. Film and Democracy
In 1852, Perry opens Japan "in the name of Western mercantile imperialism." In 1962, samurai kill a Brit and an English ship razes part of Kagoshima in retaliation. The Japanese are impressed and respond by establishing deep economic ties. After the war, the Americans have a similar experience as they are welcomed with a obsequiousness no one had expected. Burch quotes a journalist for a range of explanations, one of which he singles out as a dominant factor in post WWII cinema: "The Occupation program sought to restore and extend the trends which had existed in the 20's. The ruling class was now able to exploit the workers unimpeded by feudalistic mores and structures. The workers, in turn, enjoyed unions, parliamentary democracy, social security, etc. The peasants were given ownership of land. Out of this class struggle, mutations arise in the cinema. As was seen before in the 20's, when the contradictions of capitalism developed, so did a need for "Western-style" films. A similar process occurs following the war. Masters of Burch's Golden Age (Naruse, Mizoguchi et al) "cleave closely to the Western mode of representation." Only Ozu remains true to the 20s, yet becomes "fossilized".
Burch offers a sketchy history of the post-war period against which he'll place Kurosawa. He divides films here between those which serve and contested bourgeois interests. On the right, he identifies "pure vehicles for dominant ideology": Western-style dramas and Western aesthetizations of traditional material (Rashomon, Gate of Hell ). On the left, he sees films dealing with problems censored in the past. The best known ones are Shindo's Children of the Atom Bomb (1953) and The Human Condition (1959-61) by Kobayashi.
A third catagory develops out of these basic two near the end of the occupation. He describes it as a sociological film of various shades, not committed to any particular class position, and represented best by the films of Kinoshita. Related to this catagory is the 'human drama' set in the lower classes (often called rumpen mono, literally "lumpen thing"). It is here that Kurosawa began working.
Burch sees little work of any worth in any of the directors of this period, outside of Kurosawa and Ichikawa, "a director who never developed a systemics comparable to those encountered in the major films of Kurosawa but who must nevertheless less be counted as the first stylist of the period." This period in the 50s is generally considered the golden age by most critics. Burch calls it a "dark period" marked by only one lasting body of work, the mature films of Kurosawa.

24. Kurosawa Akira
Burch puts him in the company of Lange, Eisenstein, Sternberg, and Dreyer. He subscribes to the widely held notion that Kurosawa mastered the Western mode of representation before building on it and surpassing it.
He picks out a scene from The Most Beautiful (1944) (of a woman at a microscope) which he compares to Potemkin and Ozu's so-called pillow shots. Burch identifies a second period in Kurosawa's career from 1946-50, a new manner of social thought and representation based on neo-realism with a heavy dose of pathos. He gives examples and lists features common to Kurosawa's mature work: disjunctiveness, pathos, excess, and stubbornness of this characters.
Rashomon : The first film to reach a Western audience is also the first to bridge the gap between the 50s and the 20s and 30s genre of chambera sword films. He also says it's the first film to display the director's "rough hewn geometry". Before this, the films had an organic linearity and invisible continuity. Rashomon, on the other hand, is remarkably free from those rules.
At this point (pp. 298-299) Burch draws a rather surprising parallel between Kurosawa and Ozu. Kurosawa's consistent employment of 180 degree jump cuts, with its accompanying abrupt change in eyeline and screen direction, harks back to Ozu and Naruse. Further, Kurosawa uses other editing techniques that foreground the articulations smoothed over in Hollywood style editing: frequent and sharply contrasting juxtapositions of CU and LS, of moving and fixed shots, or shots with contrary movement, as well as the hard edged wipe (this last point is mentioned quite often by other critics, though rarely contextualized). Ozu uses techniques like jump cuts freely without the slightest attempt to match anything (in the Western sense). Kurosawa, on the other hand, always resolves the disruptions his editing creates. "Ambiguity in Kurosawa --- as in Eisenstein and nearly all the classical Western masters --- is an element of tension to be answered by one of resolution; never is it a categorical indifference to univalence or linearity as it is in Ozu and more generally in the classical cinema of Japan." (p. 299)
Eisenstein is another interesting connection Burch makes. He compares the reversals of position, eyeline and screen direction to Eisenstein's dialectics of montage units, and compares the forest sequence in Throne of Blood to the baby carriage on the Odessa steps.
Burch then discusses Ikiru, particularly in relation to its structure and that 'rough-hewn geometry'. Not surprisingly, the content doesn't excite him, being "marred by its complicity with the reformist ideology dominant in that period" and the "typically petty bourgeois doctrine of the heroic individual as agent of social change." (p. 306) Next he attempts to recoup Record of a Living Being, claiming it was attacked and/or ignored on ideological grounds by the bourgeois press.
"Cobweb Castle (Throne of Blood) ...is indisputably Kurosawa's finest achievement, largely because it carries furthest the rationalization process of his geometry." (310) It is designed upon principle of juxtaposing moments of extreme violence with those of static, restrained tension (a characteristic of Kurosawa he discusses earlier). This occurs from scene to scene and even shot to shot (in the sequence where Washizu see Miki's ghost). The resolution of this dichotomy between tension and relaxation is resolved in the last scene. "This bravura passage is usually recognized by Western critics as such, but nothing more; it is seen as grotesque and gratuitous or brilliant but gratuitous. On the contrary, it is the very keystone of the film's formal structure. Here at last that tense, horizontal alternation between scenes of decentered frenzy and dramatic but static scenes is resolved into a vertical orgasm of on-screen violence." (p. 317)
Burch mentions Hidden Fortress, observing that long after Hollywood shied away from wide-screen, Hong Kong and Japan continued using it. The Hong Kong approach to wide-screen is similar to Hollywood with respect for centering, for diagonal rather than symmetrical balance, and for the clarity of depth and the like. Japanese composition, on the other hand, is de-centered, centripetal, using geometrical foreground elements and frontal angles....all characteristic of the Golden Age of the 30s. He goes further to compare this composition to ukiyo-e wood block prints and screens as far back as the Muromachi period (14th to 16th century).
Burch then quickly passes over the films in Kurosawa's "fourth manner", which he says come nowhere near the masterpieces of the 50's. He treats Yojimbo (1961) in the same manner: "it is truly nothing more than a fusion of the latter-day chambera tradition with the Hollywood Western, which gave birth to that Cinecitta hybrid, the spaghetti Western." His denigration of Yojimbo is telling. For a writer interested in the juncture of East and West (more like the lack of it), one would think he would pounce on a film that stands between the Hollywood western, the samurai film, and the spaghetti western. Furthermore, despite his populist leanings, he ignores what was one of the biggest hits in Japanese cinema. However, there is the danger of finding a Kurosawa tainted by Hollywood codes.
He spends a couple paragraphs talking about High and Low (1963), a modern-day detective story. He admires the film's structure and dislikes its humanistic themes. He dismisses Red Beard (1965) and praises Dodeskaden (1972) as an attempt by an old master to keep up with the times.

Part 6 Post-Scriptum
25. Oshima Nagisa
Burch compares Oshima to Godard, like everyone else, but asserts that characterization is not completely accurate. He perceives a contradiction between class struggle as the motor of history vs. ideology of the self-fulfilling individual; he also feels Oshima has been torn by the desire to reach a wide audience and the need to experiment. Oshima seems "to function within several separate ideological frameworks: that of traditional Japan, which obviously both fascinates and repels him; that of a Western (cosmopolitan) bourgeoisie, still problematic for the Japanese Left... And somewhere, in all of that, is Marxism."

26. Independence: Its Rewards and Penalties
In this last chapter, Burch identifies and discusses film which support his final thesis: "that an authentically modern, revolutionary cinema in Japan must involve a conjunction of traditional artistic practice with elements of a materialist theory of art, dialectical and historical in nature, as it is developing in the West." (pp. 359-360).

Some thoughts.......
These reading notes are intended more to help read through Burch's dense text than summarize the barrage of criticism that the book inspired. A few things, at least, are worth noting:
Burch sets up a questionable polemic between Japan and the West, ignoring all sorts of Western influences that go back as far as the 16th century. He seems outraged that Japanese would allow themselves to be soiled by the West and in doing so, picks and chooses what he sees in traditional arts (his approach unwittingly ends up compatible with neo-nationalist idealizations of Japanese culture). For example, during the Meiji period, kabuki was undergoing changes in acting style, theater design, length of performances, management styles etc. all under the massive changes happening with the influx of ideas from the West; you'd never know it reading Burch. The same thing was happening in painting, literature, scultpture, and other traditional arts. However, Burch wants to avoid this Western convergence, using the ideas of superposition and intertextuality to portrays Japanese art as a "frozen stream": either the art is fossilized, or it succumbs to Western bourgeois ideology (sells out). He idealizes an imagined Japan, just as Barthes did before him, and creates an veritable virginal land on the other side of the Pacific. Not surprisingly, his critics used Edward Said's Orientalism to ground their attack.
What is most important about this book is not the practical criticism about Japanese film, but the attempt (in its theoretical criticism) to shift the big division in film history from the Melies/Lumiere split or Bazin's Realist/Formalist split, to Melies & Lumiere/Porter & Griffith & Dickson etc....between representational and presentational modes. In that sense, his project is pretty impressive. His efforts also directed us to a body of prewar cinema that had been taken for granted up to that point, leading to a complete reevaluation of the films and the role of the benshi.
Those interested in the critiques should look to the following articles for starters: Whitaker, Sheila. review of TTDO, Framework 11 (Autumn 1969): 47-48; Bordwell, David. review of TTDO, Wide Angle 3.4 (1980): 70-73; Polan, Dana B. "Formalism and its Discontents, " Jump Cut 26 (1981): 63-66; Cohen, Robert. "Toward a Theory of Japanese Narrative, " Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6.2 (Spring 1981): 181-200; de Bary, Brett. review of TTDO, Journal of Japanese Studies 8.2 (Summer 82): 405-410; Malcomson, Scott L. "The Pure Land Beyond the Sea: Barthes, Burch and the Uses of Japan," Screen 26.3/4 (May/Aug. 1985): 23-33.