Re: Viggo. Just a hunch, but using the new Amazon search feature already, David? :)

As for Greenaway, as artsy-fartsy as the man can be with his films (and, apparently, his remarks), he's STILL more perverse and audacious than Godard ever will be. "8 1/2 Women" was, to my mind, his funniest film. I even managed to convert a few cinema-malingerers over to Greenaway with a few showings of that DVD. A large part of "8 1/2"'s success had to do with the fact that, much to the surprise of everyone, Greenaway let his hair down. No forced allegory for Mother Britain (like "The Cook, et al."), no deliberate attempts to shock ("Baby of Macon"), no embrace of fetishism for the hell of it ("Pillow Book") -- just a guy enjoying the living hell out of filmmaking, crackling the screen up with wit, no matter HOW taboo the subject (including father-son incest and much more). THAT'S why Greenaway still matters in my book. Stacked next to Godard, Greenaway is that brilliant, oddball professor whose weaknesses you tolerate, while Godard is just a bitter intellectual sitting in the cafe whom nobody ever talks to.

Hey, Ed,

Sorry I haven't replied sooner; I've been out and about, what fun.

Actually, I have played a little with the Amazon search-inside thingie. Not enough to form an opinion about it yet, and I haven't followed any discussion of it, but my first impression is that it's a little helpful in that you can discover whether or not a book you may be interested in actually addresses what you're hoping it will. But you can't read them, far as I can tell. Amazon is still a store, not a library, obviously.

Anyway, re: Ackerman, no, I just remembered that passage and used the good ol' fashioned index to find it again. Wonderful book, by the way!

Now, then, Godard. I have to respectfully disagree. Godard, IMHO, is extraordinarily self-aware of his position as a provocateur, but - if you'll forgive a brief moment of sweeping overgeneralization - like most French provocateurs, he feels less of a need to wear his smirk on his sleeve than a Brit or American might. Though, in his films of ten, twenty years ago, you could actually see that smirk, right there on his face, plain as day; it's less visible now, but for a thorough treatment of his cinema-is-dead position, do check the "Is Cinema Really Dead?" chapter, and specifically, pp. 28 - 30 in Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars. Rosenbaum, you can tell, as both an admirer of Godard and cinema advocate, is troubled, but does what I think is a convincing job of verbally chopping his way toward a position that can accept both Godard's statements within the context of his body of work and a persistent belief that cinema will go on, in one form or another.

About Greenaway, well, yes, I like his films, too. But each time I've heard his spiel - and I mean heard his spiel, because the truly grating tone doesn't come off the same in print - and it's been a couple of times for me now, I've come away with a lower regard for the work as well. Sorry, can't help it.

Greenaway's strongest point is this: Cinema does little more than illustrate literature. And his prime examples, at least the last time I heard, which was this summer, are Lord of the Rings and the slew of comic book movies which, of course, were dominating the screens even as he was talking. Now, the comic book thing is an interesting little subject that ought to be set off by itself in that it would seem to, well, illustrate almost the opposite point, a genre of literature heading in the opposite direction. He can sneer at Spider-Man (and he does), but he conveniently ignores more 'sophisticated' 'graphic novels' by the likes of Daniel Clowes, Neil Gaiman, etc., etc. But that's a tangent.

In the case of LOTR, or for that matter, The Human Stain, Cold Mountain, that sort of thing, or more appropriately, something like, say, The Usual Suspects, which wasn't directly based on a book (was it?), but is firmly rooted in a cinematic tradition of noirs that were (Chandler, Cain, etc.), he ignores the uniquely cinematic innovations to even the most generic forms of storytelling. Never mind that he also conveniently ignores an entire century's worth of experimental work that specifically addresses, questions, toys with the nature the medium, etc.

What bothers me about Greenaway is that he pooh-poohs narrative in the most elitist fashion imaginable. And I'm simply not convinced narrative is going away or ought to; even as I am convinced that there will always be a need to explore alternatives and variations. In other words, yes, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I certainly wouldn't want to put a bullet in cinema's head for the sake of a 92-suitcase gesamtkunstwerk that requires me to load dozens of DVDs and web sites. Ugh.

David: Thanks for the lengthy reply.

Re: Amazon. Well, it's definitely a helpful technology, specifically for the reasons you've mentioned. A truly searchable online library has been any self-respecting geek's wish fulfillment for quite some time, but who knew that it would waltz hand-in-hand with the biggest online retailer? I'm troubled by the idea that the Search Inside the Book feature doesn't so much exist for scholarly use (though it could be a tremendous boon for libraries, if Bezos decided to pull a Carnegie) or for convenience's sake; rather, it was something built more with the idea of tracking an individual user's every search term, representing a form of data mining above and beyond the unctuous pale of collaborative filtering. And when you consider A9, the search engine Amazon's developing to compete with Google, and Amazon's control of the IMDB (to move this conversation back into cinema), it's a troubling precedent to set.

Thanks for the lead on the Rosenbaum book. I was referring specifically to Godard's later work. Godard felt the need to rip into Hollywood with In Praise of Love and, whatever the validity of his argument, it struck me as a peurile approach. The same kind of deliberately confrontational juvenilia that you actually see, in situ, on the Criterion DVD of Stolen Kisses. On that DVD, there's some great footage of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival. During that year, Henri Langlois was ejected as director from the Cinemathetique Francaise, which, understandably, caused nothing less than a shitstorm among the nouvelle vague. Simultaneously, students and workers were striking across France. And the filmmakers attending Cannes were faced with a quandary: Should they form solidarity with the whole contretemps?

In the footage, Milos Forman is the first to withdraw his film, The Fireman's Ball, from the competition. And Godard is there, fulminating at the assholes and assorted folks he'd like to see shot down with a gun (and there's some sardonic asides from the assembled filmmakers, who are amused by Godard's predictable response). But it is Francois Truffaut's calm voice of reason that ultimately convinces the filmmakers to mobilize and close down the festival. And I can't help but draw a metaphor with Truffaut's quiet subtext and Godard's deliberate assault on the senses within their respective work.

Where Truffaut dared to move away from the visual experimentation of Jules and Jim into quiet studies of human behavior like Stolen Kisses, Godard, to my mind, failed to improve upon his innovations. For all of the glory of Weekend's traffic jam sequence, for all of Contempt's wicked satire, and for all of Pierrot le Fou's exquisite experimentation with sound, there are all those nauseating trips back to the same well that have marked nearly every Godard film after First Name: Carmen. Godard hates Hollywood. Godard wants to see the world overthrown. Godard wants to annoy you. To phrase it in Godard-like terms, it's like being around an old man hitting a beehive with a stick. The old man hasn't learned anything over the years and he's best avoided.

I haven't heard Greenaway speak, but I can only imagine his professorial tone. I will say that, unlike Godard, Greenaway has never ONCE tried to cloak his "cinema as literature" within pulp trappings. He's an elitist, yes, but he has a very specific idea of what literature entails. Looking at his films, he seems more concerned with placing cinema on a level close to Chaucer and Shakespeare, which is nothing less than ambitious-as-hell and, yes, has my perpetual admiration. The ultimate question, however, is whether anyone is willing to make the kind of demands that Greenaway encroaches upon his viewers -- a position, ironically enough, not unlike the central character in The Draughtsman's Contract.

Personally, I believe that cinema has room for both approaches. The other night, I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark (recently issued on DVD) for the first time in five years and was amazed at how well the film stood up. It is popular narrative, yes, but it is also narrative that (thanks largely to Lawrence Kasdan's masterfully moody script) uses the same ingredients behind any solid narrative: atmosphere, a sense of wonder and developing conflict. If there is any lesson to be learned here, it is that, much like the difference between a taut Donald E. Westlake novel written for a popular audience and the Byzantine offerings of William Gaddis, elements of narrative can be equally prevalent in both highbrow and "lowbrow" forms. Ultimately, it's a filmmaker's own sensibilities that determine how these elements are used and innovated throughout the course of an ouevre.

Here's the full text of Greenaway's speech:
http://www.filmfestival.nl/hfm/hfm_tekst/hfm_t05a12.htm

Some of his points are already fait accompli or pretty criticism-proof. What matters is execution, and that's where his revolutionary new narratives fall down, landing alongside the failed video-game-meets-film for video-meets-film's sake projects like...

Just one thing that bugs me: His promise, "I give you frequent doses of the text on screen." He's delivered on that promise before, and it always relegates the text to decoration; whatever content there is is rendered illegible and irrelevant.

If what he's actually considering is programming a cinematic user experience, he's still pretending he needs to invent the wheel. In the mean time, other filmmakers are riding by him on bikes and skates.

Greg: Yeah, I'd have to agree that Greenaway comes across as sanctimonious at the end. But you could equally argue that Hollywood blockbusters DO program the cinematic user experience. You have the build-up to the release date, product placement and test screenings to perfect an audience-friendly response and move the inevitable soft drinks or Boba Fett underwear, the online speculation, copies of scripts and JPEGs disseminated among fanboys on the Internet, the tie-in merchandise, the nine months until the DVD (with the commentary and supplements) hits, all representing further programming. To the point where people stand in line for weeks and actually believe that dreck like "The Matrix: Reloaded" and the current Star Wars trilogy is actually worthwhile.

scott thill's interview was indeed an in-depth glimpse into viggo mortensen, the artist and person. thill's morphizm interview (the link is at the bottom of the salon article) was likewise insightful. it might surprise you still that viggo went to the anti-occupation of iraq rally in washington just this saturday, oct. 25. he read a poem he wrote called "Back to Babylon". it was quite moving, a very intelligently written piece. if you'd like to see a video clip of the event or read the poem, go to www.houseoftelcontar.com.

Thanks for the pointer, alab. I'll definitely include that in the next round of "shorts."

Ed, you make several strong points and you make them well. Personally, I think we need Godard right where he is, though maybe that's an opinion that's grown too hardened over the years. I'll have to look at In Praise of Love again, but I seem to remember startling moments of beauty in there, not just sheer, unadulterated bitterness.

But I think we're all, you, Greg and I, heading towards agreement here: Cinema's death is still quite a way down the road.