Guest Post: Andrew Seal on Canon Formation and the Sight & Sound Poll

Guest blogger Andrew Seal follows up today on my post from last week on the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. Andrew is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale.  His dissertation concerns politics and print culture in the twentieth century Midwest. His other research interests include Jewish studies, queer studies, and 20th/21st century US literature.

Thanks, first of all, to Ben Alpers for allowing me to respond at greater length than a comment might allow to his very sharp and insightful post about the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. He is very right to see the poll as a valuable resource in trying to get a handle on many of the kinds of questions which intellectual historians might ask about film criticism and (mostly elite) film consumption.

It is especially valuable, as he notes, as a snapshot of contemporary cultural politics surrounding canons, which has certainly changed in the past twenty or even ten years, although perhaps not quite, I think, the way that Ben argues it has. Ben makes the case that the positive responses to the Sight & Sound canon reflect an embrace of a sort of DIY approach to canon formation, where even the most authoritative canons are seen more as “conversation-starters,” and less as tools for indoctrination or discrimination. Furthermore, he very compellingly links this new attitude toward the massive increase in casual availability of all kinds of films—an increase which has made it possible for an avid cineaste to feel that she is, as Ben says, “no longer constrained by the programming choices of others.”

Yet I would argue that, far from reflecting a “mixtape” approach to canon formation, the 2012 Sight & Sound poll still shows all the fingerprints of a quite deliberately programmed approach to the cinema and to its history. Less important than the relatively anarchic, “make-your-own-queue” influences of YouTube and Netflix have been the still quite top-down institutions like the Criterion Collection of DVDs, the New York arts cinemas like Film Forum and the IFC Center, and prestigious film festivals like those at Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, and Venice.


First let me say why I think it has been rather difficult to see this less anarchic spirit in the coverage of the release of the 2012 poll. First of all, a huge percentage of discussion of the poll has centered around what is, in my opinion, a non-issue: the toppling of Citizen Kane from the number one spot in the critics’ poll (by Vertigo) and in the directors’ poll (by Tokyo Story). As Ben noted in the comments to his post, “no film came close to appearing on a majority of ballots,” but not only that, the difference between Kane and the two films displacing it was, proportionately, pretty small: Kane appeared on only 4% fewer ballots than Vertigo in the critics’ poll, and less than 2% fewer than Tokyo Story in the directors’. Yet this switch has been granted enormous magnitude: in the words of the Scott Tobias of the Onion AV Club, it’s “like having to orbit around a different sun.”

Secondly and somewhat contradictorily, as that Onion AV Club article also points out, the rest of the top of the list has remained remarkably steady (or stodgy) over the decades and resolutely resistant to more recent films: the “newest” film in the critics’ Top Ten is 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out two years before Paul Thomas Anderson, director of There Will Be Blood, was born. Together, these two factors—the Citizen Kane shake-up and the stodginess—make it seem as if the voters are collectively both a little capricious (why the ascendancy of Vertigo after all these years?) and also not paying close attention to the ongoing development of cinema (can it really be the case that nothing since 1968 deserves the hyper-immortalization of Top Ten status?). The picture one might be forgiven for forming is of a voter exploring the back catalogue of films somewhat idiosyncratically, championing a few favorites, but generally insulating herself from newer, fresher currents, or, more charitably, remaining aloof from trendy directors-of-the-moment and cause célèbres.

 I think this picture is inaccurate, though, and a closer look at the whole 2012 list compared to the whole 2002 list shows why. First off, it’s important to note that Sight & Sound itself has made impressive efforts to adapt to a quite different landscape of film criticism and production; most significantly, it has massively expanded its voting pool: from 145 critics in 2002 to 846 in 2012 (a nearly six-fold increase!) and from 108 directors in 2002 to 359 in 2012 (about three-and-a-third times larger). This expansion has meant that the total number of films voted for has increased abundantly as well, but not quite in line with the ballooning of voters: from 884 films in 2002 to 2556 in 2012—an impressive enlargement, but less than three-fold.

Moreover, a detailed look at what the new films on the 2012 list are indicates that this healthy but not overwhelming expansion of the canon also seems to be along some definite, and relatively specific, lines. As Tobias notes in the Onion AV Club article cited above, the one big change in the Top Ten is the introduction of the Soviet documentarian Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and this greater enthusiasm for non-narrative film extends strongly to the broader field. While I can’t, unfortunately, be precise in quantifying how many documentaries, avant-garde shorts, and pieces of filmic installation art have been added (Sight & Sound doesn’t have a column for genre, and it would be rather laborious—and subjective—for me to supply it), I can approximate it by listing some of the non-narrative or experimental directors who gained the most from the poll’s expansion: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who had no films in 2002 and now have fifteen; Stan Brakhage, whose tally increased by nine; the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who went up from a single film to ten; and Robert Beavers, Jan Svankmajer, and Bruce Baillie, none of whom were represented in 2002, but who each have seven films listed in 2012. By contrast, Federico Fellini, whose films are artsy but not, I would argue, truly experimental, lost four films from 2002 to 2012. (For more, I have created a spreadsheet with all the data mentioned above and below in this post; it can be found here.)

Most of these non-narrative directors’ films are not available via Netflix, and one would have to look fairly hard to find many of them on YouTube or other free streaming sites (I’m speaking from experience here). And that’s also the point—if one is on one’s own, one has to look hard for them, and to know where to look and what to look for. The presence of so many non-narrative films on the 2012 list suggests to me that the changes between 2002 and 2012 are not due to casual exploration, but rather to focused and guided recuperation of certain films and certain kinds of films.

The Criterion Collection is probably the most famous and most admired effort along these lines and, while it doesn’t have a large number of experimental or documentary films in its inventory, its influence on the list is fairly evident. Alongside the more mainstream re-releases of fairly well-known classics, Criterion runs a series called Eclipse, which “is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.” Almost every Eclipse series contains a film that was new on the 2012 Sight & Sound list. A striking number of other new Criterion releases also joined the 2012 list.

The films selected for the Criterion Collection have often been recovered first at New York art cinemas like IFC or Film Forum: a sensible connection, after all, because the curatorial and technical restoration of a film is an expensive and labor-intensive process, and, while the Criterion Collection’s yearly output is impressive, the number of films that can be restored is quite limited, and it is wise to get both a theatrical re-release and a deluxe DVD/Blu-Ray out of each restored film print.

Finally, I think it’s worth putting some numbers out there to check whether the poll’s reputation for stodginess holds over the broader list. (Again, the data for this can be found in the spreadsheet linked above.) Over the full 2012 list (all critics and all directors), the median year of production is 1973, and the average year for the 2012 list is about 1972. So both the median and the mean for the list as a whole are four or five years later than the “newest” film in the Top Ten. Not only that, but both figures represent a full seven-year advance over the 2002 list (median: 1966; mean: 1965). Moving a list this size seven years in just a decade is fairly impressive, and suggests a much more than random movement in the voting pool.

Which leads me to my last, and most conjectural, point, which, like my sense that there are many more non-narrative films in this poll’s results, is more impressionistic than quantified. It seems to me that there are far more films in the 2012 list which are from the global south and from the old Soviet bloc than there were in 2002, and I think it is this, largely, that is pushing the median year forward in time, as more of these nation’s film industries only really took off in the last third of the 20th century, or at the very least only after World War II. This shift is paralleled by what I believe to be a (proportional) decline in the number of films in the 2012 list which could be considered products of Classical Hollywood Cinema, and I would point to this chart to back this claim up.





The decades of greatest change between 2002 and 2012—other than the 2000s, for obvious reasons—are the 1950s and the 1940s. The percentage of films from these two decades declined from 15.3% and 10.2% (respectively) in 2002 to 10.1% and 5.8% in 2012. Now, not all of these films are necessarily Hollywood products, but if we’re talking the 1940s and 1950s, a lot of them are. Furthermore, I did a little bit of checking, and only about three-fourths (663 of 884) of the films on the 2002 list repeated on the 2012 list (in the spreadsheet, I’ve marked the years of those films in italics), and it seems to me that Classical Hollywood Cinema is over-represented in those that didn’t return.

The availability of films from the global South and from ex-Soviet bloc countries on DVD or streaming has swelled since 2002, but it is still much more difficult to view even some of the most acclaimed products of these parts of the world than it is to see a product of Classical Hollywood Cinema. It’s a little easier if one has a multi-region DVD player (which I imagine many professional critics do), but I would offer that the best possibility for seeing these films is not home viewing and not even an arts cinema, but at one of the many international film festivals.

As much as I love Classical Hollywood Cinema, I personally find these shifts very healthy, and I hope they do presage greater availability of some of these (for now) obscure classics. But the shape of the 2012 Sight & Sound list is not really the product of critics and directors programming their own viewing. At festivals, through the Criterion Collection, at arts cinemas, the choices are very much decided, not deliberated. I think most cineastes are happy with that—Criterion and the others do an exceptional job of dusting off mouldering gems. But it is important not to confuse satisfaction with the current arrangement of taste-making and gate-keeping institutions with autonomy. If the Sight & Sound poll teaches us something about how canons work today, I’d say it tells us that the institutions which form canons have gotten better at selling them, not that they’ve ceded authority to make—or re-make—them.

Michael Powell, Alfred Hitchcock, and Cinematic Reputation

Alfred Hitchcock's Self-Portrait
(from the opening title sequence of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents)

[This post kicks off the USIH Blog's participation in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III.  This year's blogathon, which began yesterday, May 13, and runs through Friday, May 18, focuses on Alfred Hitchcock.  Money is being raised for the National Film Preservation Foundation's The White Shadow Project, which will record Michael Mortilla's score to this 1924 silent that Hitchcock wrote and on which he worked as an Assistant Director, and will make the movie available for free streaming online.  Those interested in donating can click this link or the thumbnail announcing the blogathon over in the right margin.  For the Love of Film III is being cohosted by Farran Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Rod Heath of This Island Rod.]

I

In his two-volume autobiography, the magnificent A Life in Movies (1986) and the messier but still fascinating Million-Dollar Movie (1992), Michael Powell writes extensively about his fellow English-born director, Alfred Hitchcock.  Seven years his junior, Powell evinces great admiration for Hitchcock, calling him, along with Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin, one of "three great artists [who] have saved the film business from going completely off the rails in my time" (ALIM, 183).  But despite his repeated praise for Hitchcock, Powell's feelings about him appear to be more complicated than he is willing to explicitly admit.

In ALIM, Powell reports a story from the time in the late 1920s when he  was working as the head of the stills department of British International Pictures, where Hitchcock had established himself as a director. Hitchcock took a shine to Powell and insisted that he personally take stills for his movies.  According to Powell, while completing The Manxman (1929), Hitchcock asked him to help improve the final act of the screenplay for Blackmail (1929), which would become Hitchcock's first sound movie:

When we came to the chase through the streets, I broached an idea that I had been maturing for a while. 

"Hitch! Don't let's do an ordinary chase through the streets like you did in The Lodger. Let's take it into some bizarre location that is entertaining in itself." 

"What do you mean? What do you think Michael means, Alma?"  Alma [Hitchcock's wife and screenwriting collaborator] looked encouragingly at me. 

I had been thinking of my visits to the British Museum Reading Room to see my grandfather, and the impression that had been made upon me by his bent figure, at his desk, dwarfed by the height of the shelves and topped by the glass dome over the whole vast room, and I went on: "Let's have him slip into the British Museum at night and get chased through rooms full of Egyptian mummies and Elgin Marbles, and climb higher to escape, and be cornered and then fall through the glass dome of the Reading Room and break his neck." 

Hitch, being a Londoner, had never been near the British Museum Reading Room, but he saw the possibilities of the idea, and so I think I can make a modest claim to being the inventor of the Hitchcock Climax, unveiled to the world through the chase in Blackmail, and which led us all on many a delightful dance from Tower Bridge to Mount Rushmore, from the Statue of Liberty to you name it. (ALIM, 193)

Powell says no more about this and immediately moves on to other matters (he would, in a sense, try his own hand at a Hitchcock Climax in his second collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, Contraband(1940)).  But this little anecdote is, I think, very telling.


 Not only does Powell claim to have invented the Hitchcock Climax (apparently after much careful thought), but, at least initially, Hitchcock doesn't even understand the idea before Powell spells it out to him in great detail.  And Powell at least implicitly relates Hitchcock's lack of understanding to the defective nature of the latter's Englishness.  Powell writes, just before relating the above anecdote about Blackmail, that Hitchcock, as a Cockney from the East End, had a great way with lower-middle class characters and actors, and possessed a "knowledge of London [that] was peculiar and delightful, east of Temple Bar."  But his knowledge of the West End, according to Powell, was limited and entirely conventional.  And "beyond city streets," "Hitch was not enthralled by local colour" (ALIM 193, 191).

Contrast this with Powell, the self-described "Man of Kent," who opens A Life in Movies with a long and poetic invocation of the Kentish countryside in which he grew up, and whose films, more often than not, are positively obsessed with local color, from Canada to Uruguay, Monte Carlo to London, Scotland to Shropshire, the Himalayas to the Netherlands, Heaven itself to Kent.  Powell, it should be added, never draws this contrast with Hitchcock explicitly. But it is as clear as day to any reader of his autobiography.

Instead, Powell largely discusses Hitchcock as a parallel figure to himself.  And the most significant parallel he draws, by the time we get to volume two of the autobiography, Million-Dollar Movie, involves one of the great themes of Powell's books: the quest for artistic independence within a motion-picture industry that seems structurally designed to destroy it.  Powell correctly sees Hitchcock, like himself, as a seeker of such independence. The one great difference between the two directors' quests--and here Powell is explicit in drawing the contrast--is that Powell and his partner in movie-making Emeric Pressburger sought their independence by keeping their distance from Hollywood while, fairly early in his career, Hitchcock moved to California and tried to find independence in the belly of the beast.

This, in turn, becomes the theme of another Powell anecdote about Hitchcock, this one appearing in Million-Dollar Movie.  In March, 1952, Powell travelled to the U.S. in a small plane largely, he reports, for the experience of flying over the Greenland icecap.  But once in the U.S., Powell meets in New York with a wide array of past and potential artistic collaborators and financiers, including his old friend Raymond Massey, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Arthur Loew, and David O. Selznick.  All want to work with Powell and are willing to shower him with money. But Powell, untempted, dislikes and rejects the proposals and repeatedly insists on his artistic independence. (MDM, 182-194)

Flying on to Hollywood, Powell arranges meetings with a number of figures who have maintained their artistic integrity: tea with Igor Stravinsky and dinner with Alma and Alfred Hitchcock.  Hollywood, Powell judges, had been very hard on Hitchcock, precisely because he had successfully asserted his artistic independence:

Hitch was off-balance--neuritis.  He'd had it for nearly half a year, and it was souring his life.  He had won too much independence for himself, too much responsibility for his choice of paths through the Hollywood jungle.  They were narrow and dangerous trails, and one never knew where they led; sometimes nowhere, sometimes to the open country, where he was a master among masters, and all the time invisible. But near, he could hear the crashing of great beasts, their sudden roar as they charged, and their snarls as they fought and tore over the quivering flesh of their victim. 

For make no mistake, these Hollywood monsters didn't want Hitch to succeed. They don't want any artist to succeed on his own.  They fear the creative talent. Possessing none, they claim the power of money. Possessing the money, they claim the credit, too. It was in this twilight world that Hitch was preparing and making his films.  He had thought he could play the Hollywood game as well as these beasts.  Later he would put stars like Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren under contract to him personally, and this would make his enemies fear him, and envy him, even more.  Mostly they tried to seduce him and buy him back by offering enormous sums of money at a time when he was struggling to finance his own productions and knew only too well how underfinanced he was. It was a heroic struggle, conducted mostly in secrecy except to his agent, and it went on for years. 

The strain on Hitch was enormous. Only Alma, and a few devoted friends, knew how great it was.  I think that I love Hitchcock more than all his films, for the struggle that he put up to keep the independence of the filmmaker in Hollywood. And in the end, it was a true Hitchcock picture, Psycho--no stars, just know-how--that saved him from going to the wall . . . (MDM, 198)

With the major difference of Hitchcock's decision to pursue his career in Hollywood, Powell emphasizes the similarities between his career aspirations and Hitchcock's and his great admiration for his fellow director. And he returns to these similarities--and their mutual admiration--as he summarizes his long relationship with Hitchcock and concludes his discussion of his 1952 dinner with Alma and Alfred...though he concludes with an ambiguous contrast:

I had known and loved Hitch, as a friend and fellow craftsman, for forty years. At first glance, each recognized in the other the same confidence, the same mastery of the medium.  For a year or more Hitch held out his hand to me in what had become for me a strange land, England.  Abroad, in Europe [at the beginning of their careers], Hitch with UFA and I with MGM and Rex Ingram in France had once and for all caught a glimpse of the grail.  That glimpse was enough for us for the rest of our lives and careers.  Hitch's way was to impose himself upon the world, to exploit that marvelous personality and quick wit; mine--well, we shall see what mine was, when we come to the end of this very long book. (MDM, 199-200)

But Powell fails to mention another significant similarity between himself and Hitchcock. And he declines to discuss, at least directly, what appears to me (and I suspect to Powell as well) to be the most significant difference between their careers.

II

Both Powell and Hitchcock were unusual not only in their quests for artistic independence but in their desire to create a kind of cinematic brand identity for themselves. And both, for a time, succeeded magnificently.

Like few other directors of his generation, Hitchcock put his mark on his films.  Hitchcock movies practically became a genre unto themselves. His famous cameos ensured that the public recognized not only Hitchcock movies, but Hitchcock himself...indeed part of the fun of going to a Hitchcock film was finding how the director would manage to get himself on screen.  By the early 1940s, Hitchcock's name was appearing prominently above the title on publicity materials for his films (see this site for a great survey of Hitchcock posters from around the world).

The great success of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series, which began in 1955, expanded to become the Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, and finally went off the air in 1965, helped cement Hitchcock's brand identity.  To this day, what's best remembered about the long-running series is its iconic opening, which featured a nine-line self-portrait, the director himself in silhouette, and a mordantly witty introduction by Hitchcock:

By the time Psycho came out in 1960, Hitchcock was front-and-center in much of the publicity around his film:

Powell's branding of his films was more collaborative, but just as distinct. Starting with One of our Aircraft if Missing (1942), their fourth film together, Powell shared with his screenwriter and producing partner Emeric Pressburger the unusual title card: "Written, Produced, and Directed by..."And the two became collectively "The Archers," a name that was soon accompanied by a distinctive image at the start of their films:

During the time of their greatest fame--and among cinephiles to this day--that arrow hitting the bullseye held as much promise as Hitchcock's name above the title.  Martin Scorsese, who fell in love with Powell's films as a child and became very close to Powell late in his life, has said that "every time I saw The Archers logo, I knew I was in for something special."

But even as both Powell and Hitchcock began to reach the greatest heights of their fame, and had carved out a good measure of artistic independence for themselves, in the late 1940s, when Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) became a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic and Hitchcock was in the midst of a long series of cinematic masterpieces including Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), Notorious! (1946), and Rope (1948), their careers were in certain ways beginning to diverge.

Hitchcock's great popular success and critical reputation would only grow through the '50s and into the '60s.

In contrast, in the 1950s, Powells career stumbled and his collaboration with Pressburger came to an end. Their final three movies together--Oh....Rosalinda! (1955), The Battle of the River Plate (1956), and Ill Met By Moonlight (1957)--were not up to the standard of most of their earlier work (though The Battle of the River Plate was a big box-office hit, at least in the UK).  And while Hitchcock's critical reputation continued to soar, the Archers' reputation, always mixed, fell, as even their greatest films often came to be regarded as over-the-top fantasies, especially as British filmmakers began to produce the grittier, kitchen sink movies of the late 1950s and 1960s.

But the body-blow to Powell's career came with the release of his second film after the break-up of his collaboration with Pressburger, Peeping Tom (1960).  Extravagantly denounced by British film critics ("it's a long time since a film disgusted me as much"--Caroline Lejeune, The Observer; "the sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing"-- Isobel Quigley, The Spectator; "alternately dull and repellent"--Derek Hill, Tribune; "I was shocked to the core to find a director of his standing befouling the screen with such perverted nonsense"--Nina Hibbin, The Daily Worker; an "exercise in the lower reaches of the psychopathic"--Dilys Powell, Sunday Times), the film effectively ended Powell's career as a director in his home country; during the final three decades of his life, he would direct a few films in Australia as well as a British television production.  His independence and his brand were in tatters.

In Million-Dollar Movie, Powell describes Peeping Tom's reception in some detail (those quoted reviews are taken form pp. 293-295).  But in his discussion of what was in many ways the greatest disaster of his career, Powell doesn't draw attention to an oft-noted contrast: the very different reception that Hitchcock's similarly boundary-crossing Psycho received that very same year.  This is the unstated poignancy of Powell's comment, nearly a hundred pages earlier in his autobiography, about the positive role that Psycho played in Hitchcock's career:  "And in the end, it was a true Hitchcock picture, Psycho--no stars, just know-how--that saved him from going to the wall."  Psycho saved Hitchcock; Peeping Tom doomed Powell.

III

We are now in the fourth decade of an ongoing Michael Powell revival.  Long esteemed by the generation of American filmmakers who created the "New Hollywood" of the late 1960s and early 1970s,  Powell spent much of the final decade of his life hanging out with Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. In the early 1980s, he was Senior Director in Residence at Coppola's short-lived Zoetrope Studios. In 1984, he married Scorsese's long-time editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.  By the late 1970s, critics and cinephiles on both sides of the Atlantic began to return to the great films of the Archers...and to Powell's once despised Peeping Tom.  Powell, who passed away in 1990, lived to see the full recovery of his critical reputation; Million Dollar Movie's discussion of Peeping Tom is framed by the fact that Powell's movie had already been vindicated in the eyes of critics.  The critical reverence for Powell has only grown since his death.  Most of the Archers' films, as well as The Edge of the World (1937), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and Peeping Tom, are widely available on DVD and BluRay.  Many of these films have been lavishly restored.

But the great acclaim that Powell has received since the late 1970s does not hold a candle to Hitchcock's reputation among the general public. Perhaps it never can.  Hitchcock is today one of the few filmmakers of his generation who remains a household name. Even those who've never seen any of his films associate him with suspense and have some sense of the basis of his fame.  The opening title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock Presents remains one of the most parodied thirty-seconds of television.

In comparison, Michael Powell, at least in this country, is a relatively obscure figure. Cinephiles know him well; everyone else draws a blank when you mention his name. 

All of which brings us back to Powell's "modest claim" that he invented the Hitchcock Climax. Though the story is told almost as a throw-away in the midst of one of Powell's many discussions of Hitchcock as a fellow craftsman with whom he shared deep mutual respect, I can't help but think that there's a significant amount of pain lurking in the background of this tale. I have no reason to doubt that, as Powell reports, he and Hitchcock saw each other as fellow artistic geniuses.  But among all but the most cinematically knowledgable, Hitchcock's fame is far, far greater. And Powell knew this well. 

 

Let's talk about sex...film critics and the sex scene

Ben's recent post on teaching the 1960s and our running conversations regarding the culture wars, prompted me to revisit an essay I wrote for a volume edited by Eric Schaeffer on the movies and the sexual revolution. My contribution is on the film critics and the sex scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Below is an excerpt from that essay on an episode that I found just amusing as well as interesting.

Many American critics writing in the late 1960s saw the sex scene as part of a larger, radical revolution that had begun to sweep through movie culture with the advent of the French New Wave and the elevation of their profession to intellectual respectability. Movies had matured as an art, and audiences all over the world had come to embrace cinema as a vital, as well as a popular, cultural expression. Expectations among critics and moviegoers were very high when the sexual revolution came to the big screen. Thus when critics viewed sex films they did so in terms similar to those they used to champion art films and condemn Hollywood’s tired genre pictures. It was not surprising, therefore, to hear critics rail against sex films for being devoid of intellectual substance. And yet, at the same time many had to admit that collectively these films reflected the heightened expectations of this sexually liberated era. Thus it was possible at once to dismiss most sex movies as commercial trash and accept that some sex films someday might be worth real thought.[1]

In her 1967 essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” Sontag provided insight into the desire for real thought about real sex. Her vision coupled the image of the heroic artist with the liberated audience joined together in a revolutionary project of transgressing boundaries. The artist would offend public norms so that the audience could acknowledge and participate in what amounted to a radical cultural crime. She called this the “poetry of transgression.” “He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.”[2]

Critics had the task of mediating this cultural crime for audiences. Moviegoers made easy accomplices – they became rebels by simply seeing sex movies. But they also wanted confirmation from critics that this cultural rebellion was for real. For their part, critics risked ruining the moment by talking too much – sex films were not going to remake filmmaking by introducing new techniques or even new narrative structures. The important thing was the sex – nudity, naked bodies, erotic scenes, lovemaking in the raw – this was the stuff that audiences finally had a chance to see. Moreover, critics had to be careful not to sound anachronistic when writing about the easy exploitation of cinematic sex. No critic wanted to suffer the same kind of fate as Bosley Crowther – the powerful New York Times critic who was rhetorically crucified by his colleagues and moviegoers for panning Bonnie and Clyde (1967) because he found it excessively violent. Crowther’s tragic mistake had been to misunderstand the rise of New Hollywood and the visceral connection it had with audiences. Like violent movies, sex films projected a new intellectual freedom and a stylized social revolution.

It took the ironic mind of Andy Warhol to reveal where movie culture was headed. In 1969, he released F*** (retitled, Blue Movie). He made a blunt statement and as result provided with excruciating clarity the implications of the emerging sex scene. No one knew how to deal with this sexual turn. New York City officials reacted as they had in the past by attempting to confiscate, prosecute, and ban the film. When Blue Movie went before a panel of city judges, it was a film critic, the precise and prescient Parker Tyler, who had to explain that the film showed “attitudes of the cool world toward sex…an indifference to emotions, everything in a cool way.” What were the judges preventing, then, if the film failed to do anything? Was it obscene or pornographic if it wasn’t titillating? And what were critics left to discuss? Was it good or bad; art or entertainment; banal or significant?[3]

So, here it was, the scene censors and moral guardians had most feared – two people having real sex on a movie screen. But this wasn’t a stag film; this was film by a major American artist. Moreover, this was reality, not a depiction of reality or a simulation of the real thing. Parker Tyler noted at the time: “This film is not meant to represent; it is meant to be. And therein, like it or leave it, lies its great, really cool distinction.” Blue Movie was different than any sex film yet created, and at the same time so commonplace as to suggest a future no one in 1969 could possible have understood. After all, sex happens, and now it had happened in an art film. But how would one critique it? Tyler suggested you couldn’t. “F*** is not a sexploitation film… In those, everything is calculated, however gauchely, to provide an illusion of erotic pleasure or lust, whether by innuendo of supposed actual copulation. F*** is definitely not as exciting as possible to the emotions. Which is the one sole reason why it is so exciting to the intelligence.” In this way, Warhol established a dichotomy for movie culture as he had for the art world – one could either accept cinematic sex or reject it, there would be no unifying theory, no mise-en-sex.[4]

Warhol’s artistic achievement had been to reduce the desires moviegoers had harbored for years to single sexual acts and then parody the emotions one felt. One might want to think deeply about a Warhol movie but doing so risked realizing that you had failed to enjoy the sex. One could approach a Warhol film just hoping for a turn-on only come away feeling cool, not hot. In short, his films were anti-aesthetic statements. What you wanted to find wasn’t there. Yet, by creating this anti-blue movie, Warhol also revealed something about exploitation pictures that had both preceded Warhol and capitalized on the fame of sex in the underground. Writing in Films and Filming, critic Colin Heard wondered if the time wasn’t “ripe for a similar reassessment of Whip’s Women, The Animal, The Taming and so on. If artistic justifications can be read into one particular case, there’s no reason why this method of criticism can’t be applied wholesale.”[5]

Heard touched upon a concern that persisted among critics throughout this period, that criticism would be either so expansive that any film no matter how exploitative could be found redeemable or that criticism would simply become irrelevant. Many mainstream critics never paid attention to sexploitation, but that didn’t mean they didn’t care about sex. What critics hoped for was a test case, a film that used sex in a way that was smart and significant. In the same year Blue Movie hit screens, so did I am Curious (Yellow), a Swedish film that attracted critical acclaim and popular attention.

Critics wrote about this film with verve and commitment. Never had a film with a reputation built on sex elicited this much ink. It was the film that became the first touchstone for a critical debate over the cinematic sexual revolution. The editor of Film Quarterly Ernest Callenbach established the terms of the debate: “The general current toward more literal and extended portrayal of sexual behavior on the screen is clearly enduring, broad, and deep. So is the debate it occasions, as is natural for a revolutionary development in public mores – which is, moreover, connected with other tender questions of cultural revolution.” He claimed that this moment so significant that all the totality of film history would have to be called “foreplay cinema” since up until the late 1960s, all films were merely trying to get their protagonists into bed. Of course, to make this statement Callenbach had willfully overlooked the films exposed in sex magazines. Nonetheless, for mainstream film criticism, Callenbach’s report was appropriate. He told readers that he found this new climax “not very interesting…for most adults – or indeed very stimulating erotically.” The sex scene, he concluded, lacked any aesthetic punch and thus turned out to be a major turn off. “In short, where everything is permitted it may be even harder to do it right.”[6]

Curious did all right, though, at least at the box office. The film outgrossed the ticket sales at Radio City even though it played at a theater with almost 5500 fewer seats. That distinction made it into almost every article on the film. In its first week it broke all records for art films – if in fact it could be categorized as one – by grossing $79,101. Such success in New York City attracted other suitors. A film distributor in Texas told the magazine he wanted the film because he could make $2 million dollars just in that state alone. “This can no longer be called a film – it’s a social phenomenon,” said another distributor.[7]

Two critics in the New York Times dwelled on the meaning of this phenomenon. In parallel columns Vincent Canby and Rex Reed took shots at each other and the film. For Canby, the film was a “wise, serious, sometimes deadpannedly funny movie about the politics of life – and of moviemaking.” And he explained that even though the movie was not his favorite kind because it did not appeal to him “on all levels,” he felt compelled to defend it.”[8]

Canby argued that using sex in this movie to sell it was no different from song in The Sound of Music. Furthermore, he concluded that the moral opponents of Curious had to be “right-wing moviegoer[s]” who had deluded themselves by buying the sugar-coated world of Old Hollywood. Curious was not a landmark film, but it did mark another stage in “a revolution in movie mores of really stunning rapidity and effect.” And he observed that the sex scenes were real enough to make one wonder what it was like for the actors to perform them, and to imagine – without much trouble – that in the future these new conventions would most likely be broken.[9]

Reed was his reactionary self. He considered the film part of a “trash explosion” and a movie that was at the “bottom of the garbage dump.” “This genuinely vile and disgusting Swedish meatball is pseudo-pornography at its ugliest and least titillating, and pseudo-sociology at its lowest point of technical ineptitude.” What most “distressed” Reed was the popular reaction to Curious – the movie was a hit. He strongly suggested that the people lined up to see it were a bunch imbeciles being duped by a pretentious filmmaker and a dishonest marketing campaign. “All this pretentious, revolting, cheapjack Grove Press sideshow proves… is that there are as many stupid and provincial no-talents trying the make a fast buck in Sweden as there are in every other part of the world. They’re just more devious about it in Sweden; they call it art there.”

Reed recalled seeing a preview of the film with other critics. Several “talked loudly back to the screen, moaned, and made other gratifying noises. Some even dozed off.” All, according to Reed, were happy to walk out of the theater when the ordeal was over, even Canby. However, the abuse was not over, the projectionist had discovered a misplaced reel. The critics were ushered back into the room and shown what Reed described as sequences that seemed impossible or simply unnecessary to place in the film as a whole – none of it made sense anyway.[10]

Philip Hartung in Commonweal dismissed Curious, saying it lacked little if any social or aesthetic significance. As a statement about the decline of film censorship, he conceded that it was undoubtedly an important document – but for a critic that was a thin line to peddle. Hollis Alpert in Saturday Review saw the film for a second time months after he had watched it as part of his obligation to testify in the legal case against it. Upon viewing it again, Alpert said he saw less and enjoyed more. He liked the film’s politics and the way it used sex to say something about contemporary social issues. In the New Yorker Penelope Gilliat wrote that upon her second viewing she stumbled into a telling scene: she arrived for the last five minutes of the previous show and “noticed that there were no subtitles.” The projectionist fixed the problem, but it didn’t matter much to the audience “who had been sitting through the length of this Swedish-language film and losing the redeeming social worth in its hours of puerile street interviews without missing redemption one bit.” While the public cheered the fall censorship, it had little time for the heroic work of the critic who survived its collapse.

Stanley Kauffmann, the erudite critic for the New Republic, captured this dilemma in brief: “The film seems to me an utterly serious work. But that’s not much of an aesthetic recommendation.” Indeed, critics could discuss the heroic accomplishment of depicting sex on the screen and report on the audience’s euphoria, but so what? Such observations couldn’t pass as criticism. Kauffman explained that what interested him the most about “this quite honest and quite mediocre picture [was] its possible effect on concepts of privacy.” He reasoned “that all of human behavior ought ideally to be available to the serious artist. On the other hand, human beings do need areas of privacy for themselves.” As a critic of the theater as well as the cinema, Kauffmann had seen eroticism, nudity, and sex in as many performative forms as was legally possible in 1969. His conclusion echoed the formalist tradition in which he wrote: “There is more heat in Bibi Andersson’s narrative of an orgy in Persona, as she sits in a chair fully clothed, than in all the genitalia of Sjöman’s film. The more intrusive a film gets in physicality, the less erotically effective it is likely to be with a mature viewer, who is reluctant to let his most private physical experiences be used as items of reference in a theatre.” In a post-censor movie culture, audience morals didn’t need protection, but their aesthetics did.[11]

This was certainly the fear of Andrew Sarris, the most severe formalist among American film critics. Sarris had created a reputation based on his interpretation of the auteur theory and deployed an encyclopedic knowledge of (mostly) Hollywood movies with a razor sharp analysis of their directors. Like almost all other critics, Sarris was happy to bid farewell to censorship, but he too had objections to “sexual intercourse and nudity on screen.” He had no moral or social objections, rather in a series of articles published in the Village Voice, Sight and Sound, and the New York Times, he argued that the closer films came to showing real sex the less ably they would approach drama. “Pornography by its very nature,” he wrote, “is more concerned with certifying its own criminality than with establishing an erotically viable point of view.” So, in this sense Warhol’s film Fuck should have the final statement on the sex act – we’ve seen it, let’s move on. Instead, Sarris feared that Curious and films to follow would “destroy the fictional facade of cinema” by focusing exclusively on sex acts, as if that kind of realism made enough of an artistic point. Exhibitionism was not art, but rather a kind of “nihilism of nudity.” “Apart from the rhetorical reflex of defending the artists against society on every possible occasion, it is difficult,” he argued, “ to become concerned, much less inspired, by the issued involved in Blue Movie, I am Curious (Yellow) and all the other cheerlessly carnal exercises in film-making.”[12]

Obviously Sarris didn’t have much use for concentrating on the social and cultural significance of movies, thus most of the sex films of this period did not impress him. “The evolution of the sexploitation movie in America deserves a separate chapter heading, though mainly sociological and only marginally aesthetic.” Yet, in an astute observation made in the Times, Sarris thought that part of the problem with sex films had little to do with the films themselves – most made few pretensions to be anything but skin flicks. What annoyed critics like himself was the media storm that accompanied wave of sex films. In “30 or 40 years no one will mourn the coming of skin,” and like the coming of sound in 1929, the coming of skin in 1969 would not, despite reports to the contrary, bring the end of western civilization. In another Voice essay he concluded: “It is a mistake to overdramatize the situation. The saga of the screen’s liberation is singularly lacking in heart-warming heroics.” There had not been and most likely would not be the kind of history-defining moment that some revolutions provide. The sexual revolution was a big letdown for the cinema. “Doity” movies, as Sarris called exploitation films of the late 1950s and 1960s, had a filmic style that created the only kind of theatrical atmosphere required – “steamy temptation, degraded and disreputable… proceedings.” Elevating sex films to either revolutionary proportions or, even worse, artistic pretensions, destroyed the only suitable context for them.[13]

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[1] For more on the emergence of a new post-censor movie culture, see Raymond J. Haberski, Jr., Freedom to Offend: How New York Remade Movie Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), especially chapters 6 and 8.

[2] Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, reprint, Viking, 1994), 45.

[3] New York Times, (September 17, 1969).

[4] Parker Tyler, Sex, Psyche, Etcetera in the Film (New York: Horizon Press, 1969), 16, 17.

[5] Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception, (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 144; Colin Heard, “Underground U.S.A.,” Films and Filming, 15 (August 1969), 25.

[6]Ernest Callenbach, “Editor’s Notebook,” Film Quarterly, 22 (Summer 1969), 1,2.

[7] “Sex and the Arts: Explosive Scene,” Newsweek (14 April 1969), p. 67.

[8] Vincent Canby, “’I Am Curious (Yes),’” New York Times (23 March 1969).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Rex Reed, “’I Am Curious (No),’” New York Times (23 March 1969).

[11] Stanley Kauffmann, “I am Curious (Yellow),” New Republic, 160 (March 15, 1969), 22, 32.

[12] Andrew Sarris, “The Nihilism of Nudity--II,” Village Voice, (March 27, 1969), 51; Sarris, “A View from New York,” Sight and Sound, 38 (Autumn 1969), 203.

[13] Sarris, “A View from New York,” 203; “If Rhett Loved Scarlett Today…,” New York Times, December 14, 1969); “The Ethos of Doity Movies,” Village Voice, (October 7, 1971), 76.