Film Culture (February 1958)

than they should be, and yet many of which are greeted with smiles by the same and other Bosley Crowthers. I think a profound lesson lies in the following easily assimilated fable of fact: Two of the most honest and artistically memorable films to come out of Hollywood were certainly von Stroheim’s Greed and Huston’s Red Badge of Courage; each remains, as is, a superior film standing out easily from the rank and file of commercial productions. But, even if Lillian Ross’s damaging book on Huston’s ordeal in making his film had not been written, the fact remains that, after their respective studios got through with these two movies and they were released, neither von Stroheim nor Huston would look at what had been made of the best, most serious effort of their respective careers. Against the manifest vice of the commercial industry’s bureaucratic editing and revamping system, the Experimentalist, merely by being in sole control (while perhaps working with one or two close collaborators), looms as Filmic Virtue incarnate. The Experimentalist’s chief problem can hardly be the temptation to be popular, as is the commercial film-maker’s; at the same time, now that film societies are growing so fast, the danger of such a temptation remains in the offing. When resisting a genuine vice, however, an artist may stumble on a virtue operating contingently as a “vice.” Exhibitions of the definitely avantgarde category of Experimental are limited in scope by the presence of radical optical styles (such as the systematic distortion of anamorphic lenses) as well as of esoteric subject matter and approaches. When assessing the “problems” of Experimental Film, it is important to remember that the phenomenon of the moving photograph appeared at a moment when there took place a radical change in aesthetic taste on the high level: when the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Expressionists, and then the Cubists and the Futurists appeared in the visual medium of painting, and Symbolism and Surrealism rose up in literature. As a result. stage décor became symbolic, fantastic, and abstract. as these twentieth-century movements gained speed, in turn influencing the visual style of such epoch-making films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Berlin: Symphony of a City, and The Passion of Joan of Arc. To be sure, those three films were primarily designed for popular markets. chiefly in Europe. But already several painters and poets, among them the poet-painter Cocteau and the photographer-painter Man Ray, had essayed poems in plastic; that is, forms in motion, not as things but as forms or symbols. Hence, in the very domain of the new visual art, “the movies,” the twentieth-century struggle of painting and sculpture to dispense with naturalistic and classic forms found a potent ally in the radical inspiration of Film Experimentalists. Basically, the legend that the commercial movies have gotten no further than nineteenth-century painting is true. Yet it is unfair to conclude, therefore, that photography as such invalidates the film as an art of creative caliber. Still artistically and creatively possible, it seems to me, are the visual novel and the visual fable: such, indeed, as Cocteau’s myth films, which have influenced avantgarde film-making almost as much as his Blood of Illustrations: (From top to bottom) Oscar Fischinger, Kenneth Anger, Frank Stauffacher and James Broughton, Francis Lee — five of the leading experimental film-makers in America. (Courtesy of Cinema 16.)