Naremore - An invention without a future essays on cinema

An Invention without a Future

BY JAMES NAREMORE

The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel

Filmguide to Psycho

The Magic World of Orson Welles

Acting in the Cinema

The Films of Vincente Minnelli

More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

On Kubrick

Sweet Smell of Success

An Invention without a Future

Essays on Cinema

JAMES NAREMORE

University of California Press

BERKELEYLOS ANGELESLONDON

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University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Naremore, James.

An invention without a future : essays on cinema / James Naremore.

pagescm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27973-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-520-27974-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-520-95794-7 (ebook)

1. Motion pictures.I. Title.

PN1995.N33952014

791.43dc23

2013032932

Manufactured in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 ( R 1997) ( Permanence of Paper ).

For Darlene, as always

Contents

Acknowledgments

Different versions of several essays in this book were published elsewhere or were commissioned as public lectures. I am grateful to the following publishers and institutions:

Authorship, Auteurism, and Cultural Politics derives from Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism, in Film Quarterly (Fall 1990) and Authorship, in A Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).

The Reign of Adaptation, in a different form, appeared in Distinguished Lecturer Series (Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study, no. 10) and as the Introduction to Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2000).

Notes on Acting in Cinema was originally published as Acting in the Cinema, in The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook (London: BFI, 2005).

Imitation, Eccentricity, and Impersonation in Movie Acting is a revised and expanded version of a lecture entitled Film Acting and the Arts of Imitation, presented to the conference of the Group for the Study of the Actor in Cinema at the Cinmathque de Nice, France; the lecture was later published in the proceedings of the conference and in Film Quarterly (Summer 2012).

The Death and Rebirth of Rhetoric, in a shorter version, was a conference paper in a panel organized at the Society of Cinema Studies in 2000 and later published in the online journal Senses of Cinema (April 2000).

Hawks, Chandler, Bogart, Bacall: The Big Sleep originated as the keynote address for the Noir Festival at the New School in New York, 2011. It was also delivered at the Key Figures in Film Studies lectures sponsored by Kings College London and the British Film Institute; at Middlebury College; and at the University of Iowa Annual Film Studies Lecture in 2011.

Uptown Folk: Blackness and Entertainment in Cabin in the Sky, in a slightly different form, was published in Arizona Quarterly (Winter 1992).

Hitchcock and Humor originally appeared in Strategies (May 2001).

Hitchcock at the Margins of Noir was published in Alfred Hitchcock Centenary Essays, ed. Richard Allen and S. Ishii Gonzales (London: BFI 1999).

Spies and Lovers: North by Northwest was the Introduction to North by Northwest, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993).

Welles, Hollywood, and Heart of Darkness, under a different title, was a lecture at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007 and later published in True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, ed. Colin McCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Orson Welles and Movie Acting is derived from Orson Welles and the Direction of Actors, in Action!, ed. Paolo Bertetto (Rome: Fondazione Cinema per Roma, 2007) and The Actor as Director, in Perspectives on Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1995).

Welles and Kubrick: Two Forms of Exile was a lecture in the Symposium on Orson Welles and International Cinema at Yale University in 2007.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a revised version of my introduction to John Hustons screenplay of the film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979).

The Return of The Dead was published in Perspectives on John Huston, ed. Stephen Cooper (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994).

Andrew Sarris is a revised version of An ABC of Reading Andrew Sarris, in Citizen Sarris, ed. Emmanuel Levy (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001).

James Agee, in a shorter version, was presented as a lecture for the Graduate Colloquium in Cinema and Media Studies, UCLA, 2012.

At the University of California Press I owe thanks to my editor, Mary Francis, for her patience, promptness, and wise responsiveness; to Lea Jacobs and the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their useful suggestions; to Rose Vekony for gracefully shepherding the book through production; and to copy editor Sharron Wood for her care and expertise, which saved me from many embarrassing errors.

The following individuals were instrumental in giving me information or opportunities to publish essays and present lectures: Charles Affron, Mirella Affron, Richard Allen, Dudley Andrew, Sarah Cooper, Corey Creekmur, Christophe Damour, Rhidian Davis, Richard Dyer, Christian Keathley, Robert Lupone, Robert Lyons, Colin MacCabe, Kathleen McHugh, Jim Miller, Michael Morgan, Chon Noriega, Gilberto Perez, Robert Polito, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Robert Stam, Steven Ungar, Helene Valmary, Ginette Vincendeau, Christian Viviani, Rob White, and Susan White.

Introduction

An Invention without a Future

The cinema is an invention without a future.

Attributed to LOUIS LUMIRE , 1895

In twenty-five years there will be very few scoffers at the movies; in fifty years the most cultivated men will be reading movie literature; in a hundred years such men as von Stroheim and Murnau will be spoken of as reverently as Mozart or Dickens are today, and The Last Laugh will be as enduring a work of Art as Vanity Fair.

JAMES AGEE , The Moving Picture, Bulletin of the Phillips Exeter Academy, 1926

Until such time as there is a past of some sort... a past which has been examined, has been subjected to a critical, a theoretical analysis, there can be no future.... This body of material, whatever it is, then imposes upon us the responsibility of inventing it.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON , The Invention without a Future, 1979

In the past seventy-five years we have seen the end of Hollywoods classic studio system, the rise and decline of network television, the development of tent-pole exhibitions and huge marketing campaigns, the emergence of digital cinema, and a variety of ups and downs in the world of independent and international art films. As the millennium arrived, the U.S. film industry found new ways of controlling production and exhibition, digital technology altered the look and even the physical basis of cinema, most people watched movies at home, and the Internet was on the verge of supplanting all delivery systems for words, sound, and images. Film study in the academy had grown significantly, but universities were replacing aesthetics with sociology or anthropology and had become preoccupied with new media. The deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in 2007 seemed to put a full stop to what had been a period of intense cinephilia, and there was widespread discussion of postcinema or the death of cinema, as if feature-length movies were going the way of God and the novel (whose obituaries were premature).