Archives for March 18, 2004

I’m going to be appearing next month on Studio 360, Kurt Andersen’s radio show. To this end, I was chatting with the producer about critics of the past whom I admire, and I mentioned that I thought the film criticism of James Agee to be grossly overrated (though not without merit). That opinion cuts sharply against the grain of received taste, and it’s not one I’ve always held: I used to admire Agee a lot more than I do now.

One thing that caused me to change my mind was Agee’s preposterously effusive praise for Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. Turner Classic Movies has been working its way through the Chaplin oeuvre all month, so I took a look at Monsieur Verdoux the other day, and found it no more amusing on reacquaintance. But, then, I’ve never liked Chaplin, whom I simply don’t find funny at all, whereas I think Buster Keaton is not merely funny but one of the very few silent filmmakers in any genre whose best work remains fully viable today.

I got sick of writing tonight, decided to do a little channel surfing to clear my head, and saw that The Gold Rush, by common consent Chaplin’s finest feature-length film, was showing on TCM in the re-edited version Chaplin released in 1942 (he removed the original title cards and substituted his own spoken narration). I thought I ought to give the old boy one more try, so I turned it on…and I just couldn’t stick it out to the end. I didn’t laugh once.

All this reminded me that not long after 9/11, I went to see Buster Keaton’s The General at New York’s Film Forum, which isn’t all that far from Ground Zero. I wrote about the experience a few days later in my Washington Post column:

To me, it suggests a portfolio of Civil War photographs by Mathew Brady into which a slapstick comedian of genius has somehow inadvertently wandered. The Film Forum showed a handsome-looking print of “The General” two weeks ago as part of its recent Keaton retrospective, and people were lined up halfway down the block to get into the 7:30 showing, which featured live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner. No doubt the audience was lousy with film-studies majors, but that didn’t keep them from laughing themselves silly at Keaton’s divine foolery. Where there are laughs, there is hope.

I wonder whether The Gold Rush would have made that emotionally battered audience laugh nearly so hard–if at all.

Maybe it’s just me, but it’s my impression that Chaplin’s films, unlike Keaton’s, are now widely thought to have aged poorly. As so often, David Thomson read my mind before the fact:

Intuitively, he sensed how ready the viewers were to have their fantasies indulged. But that instinct usually lacked artistic intelligence, real human sympathy, and even humor. Chaplin’s isolation barred him from working with anyone else. He needed to fulfil every creative function on a film, whether it is scripiting, composing, or directing actors. He is isolated, too, in the sense that his later films seem as cut off from any known period or reality as the earlier ones….Chaplin looked like a great instinct narrowed by the absence of the other qualities that would mature an artist.

James Agee, of course, thought otherwise. So much the worse for him, I fear.

“‘That’s an old attitude.'”

“‘It may be old, but I am currently holding it.'”

Jon Hassler, Staggerford

I’m still tied to the tracks. For now:

– Courtesy of Symphony X, a fascinating samizdata.net posting by Brian Mickelthwait on Dmitri Shostakovich, the greatest Russian composer of the twentieth century:

Shostakovich was almost certainly a better composer after Stalin had given him his philistine going-over following the first performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, than he would have been if Stalin had left him alone. Although both are very fine, I prefer Symphony Number 5 (“A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism”) to Symphony Number 4.

Had Shostakovich continued unmolested along the musical path he was travelling before Stalin’s denunciation of him, I don’t think he would merely have become just another boring sub-Schoenbergian modernist. He was too interesting a composer for that already. But I do not think his subsequent music would have stirred the heart in the way his actual subsequent music actually does stir mine, and I do not think I am the only one who feels this way.

Thanks to Stalin, if that is an excusable phrase, Shostakovich was forced to write what is now called ‘crossover’ music, that is, music which is just about entitled to remain in the classical racks in the shops, but which also gives the bourgeoisie, such as me, something to sing along to and get excited about. Shostakovich had always written film music as well as the serious stuff. What Stalin and his attack dogs did was force him to combine the two styles. He might well have ended up doing this anyway, but who can be sure?

What Stalin also did for Shostakovich was to make his music matter more. Thanks to Stalin (that phrase again!) every note composed by Shostakovich became a matter of life and death

Courtesy of Mixolydian Mode, this hair-raising quote from John Tavener, the “holy minimalist” composer:

I have always been drawn more to the archetypal levels of human experience and human types, which is why I think I was drawn to Stravinsky and revolted by Schoenberg. Schoenberg was for me the filthy, rotten ‘dirt dump’ of the twentieth century. I personally could not stand the angst-ridden sound of decay in his music, the vile post-Freudian world. Basically, I do not respond to the so-called ‘Germanic Tradition,’ whose by now rotting corpse — the hideous sound world of its fabricated complexity — smothers archetypal experience that I have always sought.

For more of the same, go here.

The Jazz Museum in Harlem is gradually taking shape. Nat Hentoff has a piece about it in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

When Charlie Parker died in 1955, drummer and leader Art Blakey–a persistent proselytizer for jazz–said forlornly, “I doubt if many black kids knew who Charlie Parker was.” Soon, there will be a vivid source of immersion in jazz past and future. And since the music has long been an international language, tourists from around the world will be coming to Harlem in ever greater numbers. They won’t see a statue of Charlie Parker, but they’ll be in his presence, along with that of his progenitors….

Take a look.