Catherine
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org on behalf of Asad Haider Sent: Wed 18/11/2009 13:10 To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] more on why movies suck
> Nah, Hitchcock has more in common with the Coen Bros and even Fincher than
> this implies. He wasn't art house then and wouldn't be now. Okay, I admit
> the conversation is spurious, in a way, we can't know.
>
Well, we certainly know that the Cahiers du Cinema crowd in France were attacked, especially after Truffaut's "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema" essay, as "Hitchcocko-Hawksians" for their canonization of these American directors.
They were heavily criticized by the established French institutions devoted to the "septieme art" (the seventh art--cinema) as well as by the communist press for capitulating to American commercialism. (An interesting account can be found in Colin MacCabe's biography of Godard as well as the myriad sources on Cahiers in general.)
It is probably to Truffaut and co. that we owe the reception of Hitchcock as an artist, by way of the "politique des auteurs"--which really should be translated in the most obvious way as "the author policy," or playfully and tellingly as "author politics," rather than a distortion like "auteur theory." It was precisely in revolt against this Hitchcocko-Hawksian view of cinema that Godard's extremist late 60s/early 70s "Dziga Vertov group" films were produced. They are often even better than his early films, including Tout Va Bien, an astounding materialist analysis of the production of films, and knowledge in general, recently reissued in a beautiful Criterion package. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk