> > JM: I see no more oddness to the fact that many people under 30 don't
> "get" _film noir_ or many other movies from the thirties and forties
> such as classic musicals, than most people don't get classic opera.
>
> BD: I find it not only odd, but symptomatic of the hyperindividualization
> that affects and debases today's culture.
>
> > JM: The movies from the 30s and 40s and into the 50s were made in a
> way that "feels" as far away from some of us as 18th and 19th century
> opera felt far away to the average Beatles fan.
>
> BD: The cause for these works "feeling" far away is the contemporary
notion
> that works of art must "speak" to an audienced in its own venacular.
> Gone is the understanding that the audience must work at understanding
> how a work of art expresses itself, replaced by the idiocy that the work
is
> supposed to cater to an individual's tastes.
JM: There was nothing in anything I said that should or would lead you to suppose that working to know a strong narrative or poem or piece of music is not rewarding in and of itself. But for some reason you assume that this is what I am saying. In fact it was you who originally said what you are now trying to argue against. I quote:
>BD: What on earth could be hard about learning to love screwball comedy
>and film noir?
>Is it hard to learn how to breathe?
JM: Now what I want to know is what view do you take? I don't mind having a conversation with you, even if you insist upon being dismissive of people, who you don't know and who don't like what you like but having a conversation with you when you say two diametrically opposite things right after another stretches the dialectic a bit too far.
First you say to me that understanding and watching an old art form such as _film noir_ is as easy as breathing. I reply by saying that watching _film noir_, or any other art form that you weren't' brought up with, is something you have to work at it. And not every genre or kind of art is to everyone's taste. Next you abandon your first statement as if you never said it and argue that watching an alien art form is not as easy as breathing but is real work and the reason people don't do it is that they are lazy and stuck in consumer idiocy. So which one of these do you believe? Is it that you need to be dismisive of people who don't have your taste in art? Are you being deliberately contradictory simply because you have a psychological need to be dismissive and look down upon others so it doesn't matter which position you take just so you can be dismissive? Are you even trying to think through the subject? What is it?
Perhaps we can agree on the following: If you are a normal healthy person it is not hard to "learn" to breath, nor is it hard to "learn" to walk, for example. But excellence in any art form ( or science or game for that matter ) is difficult and it is difficult in ways that we don't quite understand. I think that it also can be rewarding. But all art forms are not for everybody, some as a matter of taste and some because we lack the time.
I have to say one thing reading your previous email has made me question how I preach art to others. Now, I know how I must sound when preaching the greatness of Bob Dylan or Vladimir Nabokov's _Pale Fire_ or insisting that my young friends read anything by Shelley, Blake or Wordsworth or that they listen to Frank Sinatra's 1950s trilogy (plus one) of albums of sexual despair or insist upon bringing girlfriends to the opera. I hope I don't sound as arrogant and dismissive as you sound in your above email when I converse with people who are bored by Frank Sinatra or who would rather not spend the time Shelley.
I personally know that there can be aesthetic greatness in a great chess game. But if I say to the people around me, "If you are not willing to learn and work on chess until you can see the aesthetic greatness of Botvinnik's strategy. then you must be a lazy philistine", then I think the people who I say this to would be justified in thinking me intolerant on this subject. You are saying "All people who don't work to like the movies I like must be lazy philistines." That kind of arrogance gets you nowhere as far as I am concerned.
Now as it so happens, my girlfriend who I was particularly talking about in my first email on this subject, does not "get" much of film noir, and many of the movies from the 30s and 40s. She has to work at it, she does so because she truly wants to learn more about movies and also because she wants to understand why I love these movies so much. She also doesn't "get" Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and she is thinking about working at it. But why should she have to? If this music is as alien to her as Greek music is to me why should she be considered dumb or stupid or lazy for not working to hear it and get it? She does not get Bob Dylan and has decided that she doesn't want to. Does this make her lazy?
In fact she loves all kinds of Elizabethan drama, and also seeks out avant garde plays and knows much more about drama of these kinds than I do. Am I lazy or "hyperindividualized" (in your rather nonsensical pseudo-intellectual phrasing) because I am willing to spend the energy to love and learn Shakespeare to some point of real enjoyment but I am not willing to love and learn Marlowe, Ben Jonson, or Thomas Middleton?
> > JM{ Many react to them in the way my younger sister reacts to John
Coltrane
> and Charlie Parker. What is this? Why are you listening to this? How
can
> you tolerate it.? Where's the tune? Why do the notes get stretched so
> much? Why are there so many notes?
>
> BD: Which is so sad. Instead of asking: how can I better understand this
music,
> complaint and accusation leap to her lips since the music doesn't conform
to
> her tastes.
My sister, who you take pity upon because she never heard John Coltrane or Charlie Parker until I brought it home to college< and will probably never learn to like the stuff, now raises two kids, has two jobs, belongs to the PTA and has her own aesthetic values and tastes. And yet somehown she is "so sad" because she doesn't understand this music. And yet she was never accusatory or complaining about the music. That is all in your head. For some reason you accuse others and then project that on others.
Do you listen to Chinese opera? Personally, I love Chinese opera, but it took me a long time to know this. If I decided not to spend the time and let it all rest with the alien high-pitched ache in my ears that Chinese opera first produced in me, would that make me alien and hyperindividualized?
> BD: Also SUNSET BOULEVARD and KISS ME DEADLY.
JM: You have exhibited lack of empathy of the phenomenon you are talking about. You have not thought through what you are saying. You have made two opposing contradictory statements when put together are only united by an exhibition of a psychological need to be dismissive. And then you bring up _Sunset Boulevard_.
Now as I see it you are correct, _Sunset Boulevard_ is a good gateway movie, for many reasons. But one of those reasons is that it illustrates the phenomenon of "distance in art" I started out with in reply to your unthinking observation that reading and seeing art is as easy as breathing. I said
> JM: I see no more oddness to the fact that many people under 30 don't
> "get" _film noir_ or many other movies from the thirties and forties
> such as classic musicals, than most people don't get classic opera.
JM: Well _Sunset Boulevard_ is an illustration of a generational divide in Hollywood. It was made in 1950 only 20 years away from the silent era. By the time I saw the movie as a 13 year old in 1972 I was further away from the making of _Sunset Boulevard_ than _Sunset Boulevard_ was from the silent era. Yet at the time the movie was made, only movie buffs paid attention to the films of that era. Most people, if shown those films wouldn't be able to "get" them. They would seem hackneyed and somehow stilted, overacted, simplistic, etc. It is the same with the way many art critics in the 40s and 50s looked at pre-renaissance non-perspectival art; it "felt" so primitive. You had to learn to look at it. And if you don't learn are you stupid? If you don't learn are you closed minded? Between the silent era and _Sunset Boulevard_ there was great technical and economic change, and the generational shift of the Depression, New Deal, and World War II. Is it any wonder it was hard for that generation to "get" silent films? If you truly understood and thought through some of the minor issues about old art illustrated in _Sunset Boulevard_ you would have been able to comprehend what I was saying in the first place. My advice to you is that you should learn how to work through the issues in the movies you love.
Interestingly, in my personal experience of showing movies to young people today, they "get" the silent films quicker than they get the film noir. I think this is because silent films are deliberately alienating to us, and we make allowances for them the way we automatically make allowances for the artificiality of musicals. It is not as easy to make allowances for the heightened acting, melodrama, and unfamiliar cinematography of films from the 1940s.
>BD: Because wit and strong female characters have been superceded by
JACKASS.
JM: Wrong diagnosis again. The young people I was talking about happened all to be young women and they liked strong female characters and only one of them liked Jackass, I think, because she thought it was an illustration of the stupidity of many young men. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060812/b495ab24/attachment.htm>