In 2008, the screenwriter Mark Boal sought an appointment with a retired special-forces operator. Boal was researching a movie about the fruitless search for Osama bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora six years before, and he wanted insight into how U.S. forces gathered intelligence.
The agent agreed to meet, but under strict conditions. Boal would be kept in the dark about where the encounter would take place until just before, when he'd be given directions, via GPS, to what turned out to be a gas station. The meeting would be brief, and there would be no guarantee of an information exchange.
"I showed up and there's this guy by the pump wearing sunglasses," Boal recalled in an interview. "And the first thing he said was, 'Give me a good reason why I should talk to you.' And I'm like, 'Well, nice to meet you too, sir.'" Boal eventually cultivated other sources, acknowledging that as a Hollywood screenwriter it isn't always easy emulating Bob Woodward.'
The zigzag-y process that began at the gas station culminates in the groundbreaking "Zero Dark Thirty," Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow's searing dramatization of a different U.S. mission to target Bin Laden that ended successfully last year in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
When Sony Pictures releases the tense, dense movie on Dec. 19, "Zero Dark Thirty" likely will take its place alongside classics of war cinema such as "The Dirty Dozen," "Apocalypse Now" and "Saving Private Ryan" while simultaneously redefining the form. Few Hollywood action thrillers have contained so many documentary-style aspirations to truth and urgency — and so quickly after an epochal event, to boot.
And never before has a stone-cold-serious American war drama featured a woman both behind the camera and at its center.
"Zero Dark Thirty," in other words, could well stand at the vanguard of a new genre: the viscerally human but post-feminist (and post-political) war film.
Certainly, the master of the dark side had “a murderous fascination with blondes,” as the British Film Institute once noted in a tribute.
And now comes Hollywood’s murderous fascination with Hitchcock’s murderous fascination.
HBO’s “The Girl” depicts the making of “The Birds” and “Marnie,” with Toby Jones playing Hitch and Sienna Miller playing Tippi Hedren, fighting off rapacious birds and rapacious director at the same time.
In theaters, “Hitchcock,” with Anthony Hopkins as the auteur and Helen Mirren as his wife and collaborator, Alma Reville, depicts the making of “Psycho,” with Scarlett Johansson taking Janet Leigh’s place in the shower to be stabbed by that crazed mama’s boy Norman Bates. (The long-suffering Alma at one point erupts at her husband about his glittering fixation, snapping that she is “not one of the contract blondes you badger and torment with your oh-so specific direction.”)
Next spring, A&E will run “Bates Motel,” a prequel series to “Psycho,” featuring a young, creepy Norman, with Vera Farmiga as his (blond) mother.
Why the fresh fascination with the man with the famous profile? Perhaps the more Hollywood churns out rancid movies, the more it appreciates Hitch, who never got an Oscar. (“They take sadistic pleasure in denying me that one little moment,” Hopkins’s Hitchcock says.)
When he was asked about plot construction, the martini-dry director would echo the advice of the 19th-century playwright Victorien Sardou: “Torture the women!” And the Brit would slyly observe: “Blondes make the best victims.”
Well, it's a nice start at the essay, but collapses after that in some post-modern cultural psycho-babble that's not very well related to Alfred Hitchcock. Keep reading at that top link if you're not bothered by Ms. Dowd.
What the heck? A good chance to post the video trailer. The movie looks good, in any case.
As an historian interested in film history, I've often been frustrated with the ways in which historians have tended to use history films in the classroom and to discuss them in the public sphere.
I tend to use movies in the classroom as primary source materials, e.g., I show films made in the 1930s to teach about the 1930s. Films can be wonderful when used this way. Students tend to already be more sophisticated consumers of motion pictures than they are of most other kinds of primary source material. A well-chosen film can teach us both about its subject and about the way films themselves were made and consumed at the time of its creation. Using films in this way is, of course, a luxury available to those of us who teach courses about the last 120 years or so.
Perhaps this latter use of films in the classroom helps explain the dominant way in which (non film-) historians have tended to write for the general public about history films. When dealing with films about the past, historians have tended, first and foremost, to fact-check them. Indeed, volumes and websites have been dedicated to separating "reel history" from "real history" (a pun that ought to be retired, btw).
I have long felt that such an approach to history films was problematic because of its unwillingness to seriously grapple with history films as a filmic genre. And, especially in the last two decades, historians interested in studying film have taken more sophisticated approaches to studying history films.
But recent discussions of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Oliver Stone's Showtime documentary series, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, have highlighted another weakness of historians' fact-checking approach to movies: it does a terrible job conveying to the public what it means to do history.*
Spielberg and Stone have devoted much of their careers to putting American history on film. And though both have (often ostentatiously) employed professional historians to validate their films' take on the past, they have positioned themselves rather differently in relation to the historical mainstream. By and large, Spielberg's history films have tended to reflect the mainstream scholarly consensus about the past; Stone's have tended to be openly iconoclastic and revisionist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, academic historians have tended to prefer Spielberg's films (at least as works of history) to Stone's.
Lincoln, as far as I can tell from reading about the film, fact-checks well. But as any historian would tell you, getting the facts right, while necessary for doing good history, is not sufficient. It is perfectly possible to construct an historical narrative which is accurate, but misleading. Historians are responsible not only for getting the facts right, but for selecting which facts are significant and constructing explanations for why things happened as they did. Non-historians are often unaware of--or even downright hostile to--this aspect of the historical craft.**
While a number of historians have praised Lincoln, which focuses on the passage of the 13th Amendment, others have objected to the way it frames the story of emancipation entirely through the actions of European Americans, while reducing African Americans to the status of onlookers. Prof. Kate Masur, of Northwestern University, published an editorial in the New York Times on November 12 that made this case. And academic bloggers (and friends of this blog) Corey Robin and Aaron Bady have launched similar criticisms of the film. All are well worth reading (as are most other things written by Robin and Bady). But I was particularly struck by the comment thread on Corey's post on Crooked Timber.
As most readers of this blog know, Crooked Timber is an eclectic academic blog that reaches an audience that extends well beyond the academy.*** What's interesting about the comment thread on Corey's post is how many respondents don't quite get why some historians (and historically-oriented social scientists like Robin) object to Lincoln.
Some examples:
EMS: "I’m astonished, though, and rather disgusted that any would criticize this film because there weren’t enough blacks in it, or that black agency in their own emancipation seems to have been omitted. This reminds me of a huge fight I had with my wife over “Tell ‘Em Willie Boy was Here” when she accused Polonsky of anti-feminism, despite the fact the film took place way the hell before there was any such thing as Feminism (except in a few small Eastern precincts). It’s about Lincoln and the 13th amendment. Why the hell should any blacks be in it at all? One could, probably with some force, argue that Spielberg and Kushner are guilty of tokenism. I’d argue it’s just bad film-making. Does every film have to be judged by the inclusion or exclusion of blacks? How about The Red Badge of Courage? Ya wanna make that one all black? One can dislike the choices Spielberg makes, but he’s about emotion more than historical accuracy. What he’s not is a profound thinker. What he is, usually, anyway, is a superior craftsman."
Bloix: "I know all about history from the bottom up, but I believe that there are great people whose acts turned the course of history. Lincoln, Gandhi, King, and Mandela. Their stories are great stories that deserve to be told over and over again, in every era, in every form of art."
Dave: "It may not be the constraints of history or genre driving Spielberg’s choices, but presumably culture as it is presently configured and the master-narrative of the period preclude the possibility of Spielberg telling the kind of story Corey would like. At least, it’s as likely as 'Spielberg’s blinkered vision.' There is no pop culture artifact anywhere telling that story; why be outraged at Spielberg for failing to account for an academic history when no one else does?"
Mark Field: "I saw the movie yesterday and thought it was excellent. I’m not much impressed by this criticism. There are thousands of stories that could be told about the war and about emancipation. There are stories of Thaddeus Stevens, of Frederick Douglas, of millions of unidentified slaves, of Union generals, etc. No movie can easily incorporate them all. And it’s not as if Lincoln was peripheral to the story, not then and not in historical memory. "The fact that Spielberg chose to tell one of these stories — one which fits well the nature of film — doesn’t strike me as anything worth criticizing. It just means there are lots more (good) movies to make."
Harold: "Masur is silly (not for the first time). Tony Kushner made a decision to restrict the story to a time period of two months in the interest of narrative economy, and it worked."
Two thoughts about these (and many other similar) comments:
One repeated trope among Lincoln's defenders in the CT commentariat is the contrast between the requirements of a movie and the requirements of history (or, more specifically, academic history). This line of reasoning is correct...so far as it goes. To the extent that historians expect or want historical dramas to look exactly like academic history, we are bound to be disappointed. And, as I've said above, in the past, many of us have not been careful enough about distinguishing the requirements of one from the requirements of the other. But the fact that a Hollywood historical drama is not a work of academic history does not--and should not--shield it from criticism from the perspective of academic history. Though those of us who seek to criticize a work like Lincoln need to bear in mind what those differences are...and perhaps even foreground them in our criticisms.
This leads to my second thought about these comments: just as, in the past, historians have not always been very sophisticated in the way we treat Hollywood's attempts at telling historical stories, we have also not been very effective at explaining to the public what it is we do and what we expect from works of public history (broadly understood). The crude role of fact-checker nicely fits the public's conception of us as nothing more or less than fonts of knowledge about what happened in the past. But it is in our capacity as interpreters of the past that we have the most interesting things to say about Hollywood's historical fictions. If we don't understand the rather complicated, shifting generic expectations of the historical film, and the various tasks it performs beyond informing its audience about its historical subject, we will not be able to grapple with historical films successfully as interpretations of the past. And if the public doesn't understand what it means to interpret the past, or even that any historical narrative necessarily entails a series of interpretations, our public interventions are likely to be misunderstood or dismissed.
_____________________________________ * I'm not addressing my own opinions on Lincoln or Untold History in this post for a very simple reason: I haven't seen either of them yet. Most of this post concernsreactions to Lincoln, but for a good example of a take on Untold History that takes an unsubtle approach to Stone's take on history, see this piece from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
Hollywood's most successful director turns on a dime and delivers his most restrained, interior film. A celebrated playwright shines an illuminating light on no more than a sliver of a great man's life. A brilliant actor surpasses even himself and makes us see a celebrated figure in ways we hadn't anticipated. This is the power and the surprise of "Lincoln."
Directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Tony Kushner and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president of the United States, "Lincoln" unfolds during the final four months of the chief executive's life as he focuses his energies on a dramatic struggle that has not previously loomed large in political mythology: his determination to get the House of Representatives to pass the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery.
This narrow focus has paradoxically enabled us to see Lincoln whole in a way a more broad-ranging film might have been unable to match. It has also made for a movie whose pleasures are subtle ones, that knows how to reveal the considerable drama inherent in the overarching battle of big ideas over the amendment as well as the small-bore skirmishes of political strategy and the nitty-gritty scramble for congressional votes.
Disappointing news for anyone hoping that Mitt Romney would abandon his political career, pack his worldly belongings into a beat-up VW, and move to Hollywood: a scene featuring the presidential candidate was cut from a forthcoming action film produced by heavyweight Hollywood Harvey Weinstein. The film—which could have been his big breakthrough—was slated to premiere merely two days before the election.
The movie is SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden, a 90-minute drama that will premiere on November 4 on the National Geographic Channel. Directed by John Stockwell (Crazy/Beautiful and Blue Crush), the film will include President Obama at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner and taking a lonesome stroll “thanks to the magic of editing,” as The New York Times puts it. The Romney scene was removed at the behest of the National Geographic Channel, on the grounds that it gave the impression that the former governor had opposed the plan to apprehend Osama bin Laden. According to the channel’s chief executive, Howard T. Owens, “We wouldn’t air this if it were propaganda.”
Shoot, probably better Romney was edited out.
It's airing November 4th? No political favoritism there, no sir. And hey, Weinstein's in the tank. He's been hosting Hollywood fundraisers for the president. I doubt Weinstein will be making a film on the Libya debacle, however. That wouldn't fit the "gutsy call" narrative so well.
Liberal celebrities want all of the adoration that social media engagement has to offer — but none of the accountability that actual engagement requires. For the Hollywood elite, it’s “do as they say, not as they tweet.” But actress and outspoken Obama campaign co-chair Eva Longoria learned a hard lesson this week on Twitter:
Conservatives online are mad as hell and aren’t taking it anymore.
On Tuesday night after the second presidential debate, Longoria shared a “retweet” from one of her 4.4-plus million followers on the micro-blogging network. “I have no idea why any woman/minority can vote for Romney,” the message read. “You have to be stupid to vote for such a racist/misogynistic tw*t.” (I’m editing the vulgarity for family newspapers, but the tweet’s foul reference to a woman’s reproductive organs was neither censored nor disavowed by Longoria on her Twitter timeline.)
On Wednesday morning, the editors at Twitchy.com, my Twitter curation/aggregation site, captured and saved Longoria’s retweet for posterity. Conservative minorities and women raised their voices. A representative sample...
And check the photo of Ms. Hudson standing side-by-side with Katy Perry. I think the pop star's got some catching up to do in the glamour department, interestingly enough.
And also at the link: the phenomenal Alessandra Ambrosio.
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.
I read the first fifty pages of the "The Help" before I put it down, angrily shrugging it off--great, yet another phenomenally successful book about a white person in the South who is magically not racist and another phenomenally successful book about black people told through the perspective of the white person in their lives.
Now a film. I've been reading about it, though I haven't seen it yet. Some of the wide range of opinions I've found expressed by black journalists and historians after the jump. Demetria L. Lucas, a blogger at Essence magazine, refused to see the film because it was yet another movie about black maids--surely it would be "mammy-fied." Her co-worker insisted that she see it, and she was surprised to find it more nuanced than she'd expected:
I showed up full of righteous indignation. I expected to essentially be yet another Mammy movie, i.e., dysfunctional White people as seen in "Ghost," "Driving Miss Daisy," "The Secret Life of Bees," etc., redeem themselves and go on to live happily ever after while the Black people suffer on. ... At its roots, "The Help" is a story about sisterhood between women, showcasing the way we forge bonds and the way we break the ones that should exist.
In the New York Times, Nelson George acknowledges that there is a history of Hollywood discussing the Civil Rights Movement from the point of view of a white person transformed by the black people they interact with. Is it possible for a movie showing the full range of white racism to be made and viewed by whites? He suggests that The Help protects the audience from the depth of violence that characterized that era, on display in the many museums dedicated to the Civil Rights Era in the South which he toured last year. He also asks whether "The Help" harms or is useful to the history of the era and concludes that anything that provokes discussion about the past and the present (working conditions of domestic labor) is useful.
The Association of Black Women Historians offers an open statement about context "to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help." The ABWH argues that "The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism." The Help resuscitates the "Mammy" stereotype: "Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it."
The ABWH contends that the black speech is mischaracterized as a non-region specific black dialect; "In the book, black women refer to the Lord as the “Law,” an irreverent depiction of black vernacular." The book and film also characterize black men as primarily "drunkards, abusive, or absent."
The book and film also ignore much of the reality of the Civil Rights activism in Mississippi; "Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness."
The ABWH concludes:
"We respect the stellar performances of the African American actresses in this film. Indeed, this statement is in no way a criticism of their talent. It is, however, an attempt to provide context for this popular rendition of black life in the Jim Crow South. In the end, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own. The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment."
I read the first fifty pages of the "The Help" before I put it down, angrily shrugging it off--great, yet another phenomenally successful book about a white person in the South who is magically not racist and another phenomenally successful book about black people told through the perspective of the white person in their lives.
Now a film. I've been reading about it, though I haven't seen it yet. Some of the wide range of opinions I've found expressed by black journalists and historians after the jump. Demetria L. Lucas, a blogger at Essence magazine, refused to see the film because it was yet another movie about black maids--surely it would be "mammy-fied." Her co-worker insisted that she see it, and she was surprised to find it more nuanced than she'd expected:
I showed up full of righteous indignation. I expected to essentially be yet another Mammy movie, i.e., dysfunctional White people as seen in "Ghost," "Driving Miss Daisy," "The Secret Life of Bees," etc., redeem themselves and go on to live happily ever after while the Black people suffer on. ... At its roots, "The Help" is a story about sisterhood between women, showcasing the way we forge bonds and the way we break the ones that should exist.
In the New York Times, Nelson George acknowledges that there is a history of Hollywood discussing the Civil Rights Movement from the point of view of a white person transformed by the black people they interact with. Is it possible for a movie showing the full range of white racism to be made and viewed by whites? He suggests that The Help protects the audience from the depth of violence that characterized that era, on display in the many museums dedicated to the Civil Rights Era in the South which he toured last year. He also asks whether "The Help" harms or is useful to the history of the era and concludes that anything that provokes discussion about the past and the present (working conditions of domestic labor) is useful.
The Association of Black Women Historians offers an open statement about context "to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help." The ABWH argues that "The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism." The Help resuscitates the "Mammy" stereotype: "Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it."
The ABWH contends that the black speech is mischaracterized as a non-region specific black dialect; "In the book, black women refer to the Lord as the “Law,” an irreverent depiction of black vernacular." The book and film also characterize black men as primarily "drunkards, abusive, or absent."
The book and film also ignore much of the reality of the Civil Rights activism in Mississippi; "Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness."
The ABWH concludes:
"We respect the stellar performances of the African American actresses in this film. Indeed, this statement is in no way a criticism of their talent. It is, however, an attempt to provide context for this popular rendition of black life in the Jim Crow South. In the end, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own. The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment."
