Film Culture (Winter 1962/3)

what he felt were inaccurate judgments for the sake of dramatic paradoxes. He was, if anything, generous to a fault, seeking in every film some vestige of the cinematic art. That he would seek justice for Huston vis-a-vis Minnelli on even the secondary levels of creation indicates the scrupulousness of his critical personality. However, my second point would seem to contradict my first. Bazin was wrong in this instance insofar as any critic can be said to be wrong in retrospect. We are dealing here with Minnelli in his Lust for Life period and Huston in his Moby Dick period. Both films can be considered failures on almost any level. The miscasting alone is disastrous. The snarling force of Kirk Douglas as the tormented Van Gogh, the brutish insensibility of Anthony Quinn as Gauguin, and the nervously scraping tension between these two absurdly limited actors, deface Minnelli’s meticulously objective decor, itself inappropriate for the mood of its subject. The director’s presentation of the paintings themselves is singularly unperceptive in the repeated failure to maintain the proper optical distance from canvases which arouse the spectator less by their detailed draughtsmanship than by the shock of a gestalt wholeness. As for Moby Dick, Gregory Peck’s Ahab deliberates long enough to let all the demons flee the Pequod, taking Melville’s Lear-like fantasies with them. Huston’s epic technique with its casually shifting camera viewpoint then drifts on an intellectually becalmed sea toward a fitting rendezvous with a rubber whale. These two films are neither the best nor the worst of their time. The question is which deserves the harder review. And there’s the rub. At the time, Huston’s stock in America was higher than Minnelli’s. Most critics expected Huston to do “big” things, and, if they thought about it all, expected Minnelli to stick to “small” things like musicals. Although neither film was a critical failure, audiences stayed away in large enough numbers to make the cultural respectability of the projects suspect. On the whole, Lust for Life was more successful with the audiences it did reach than was Moby Dick. In retrospect, Moby Dick represents the turning downward of Huston as a director to be taken seriously. By contrast, Lust for Life is simply an isolated episode in the erratic career of an interesting stylist. The exact size of Minnelli’s talent may inspire controversy, but he does represent something in the cinema today. Huston is virtually a forgotten man with a few actors’ Classics behind him surviving as the ruins of a once-promising career. Both Eric Rohmer, who denigrated Huston in 1957, and Jean Domarchi, who was kind to Minnelli that same year, somehow saw the future more clearly on an auteur level than did Bazin. As Santayana has remarked: “It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.” If the auteur critics of the Fifties had not scored so many coups of clairvoyance, the auteur theory would not be worth discussing in the Sixties. I must add that, at the time, I would have agreed with Bazin on this and every other objection to the auteur theory, but subsequent history, that history about which Bazin was always so mystical, has substantially confirmed most of the principles of the auteur theory. Ironically, most of the original supporters of the auteur theory have now abandoned it. Some have discovered more useful politiques as directors and would-be directors. Others have succumbed to a European-oriented pragmatism where intention is now more nearly equal to talent in critical relevance. Luc Moullet’s belated discovery that Samuel Fuller was, in fact, fifty years old, signaled a reorientation of Cahiers away from the American cinema. (The handwriting was already on the wall when Truffaut remarked recently that where he and his colleagues had “discovered” auteurs, his successors have “invented” them.) Bazin then explores the implications of Giraudoux’ epigram: “There are no works; there are only authors.” Truffaut has seized upon this paradox as the battle-cry of la politique des auteurs. Bazin casually demonstrates how the contrary can be argued with equal probability of truth or error. He subsequently dredges up the equivalents of Wellington’s Victory for Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Flaubert and Gide to document his point. Bazin then yields some ground to Rohmer’s argument that the history of art does not confirm the decline with age of authentic geniuses like Titian, Rembrandt, Beethoven, or nearer to us, Bonnard, Matisse and Stravinsky. Bazin agrees with Rohmer that it is inconsistent to attribute senility only to aging film directors while at the same time honoring the gnarled austerity of Rembrandt’s later style. This is one of the crucial propositions of the auteur theory because it refutes the popular theory of decline for aging giants like Renoir and Chaplin, and asserts instead that as a director becomes older, he is likely to become more profoundly personal FILM CULTURE 3