Where Frames of Reference Splinter

 

Which Gets To Be The Highest Art?

That 1975 summer out at USC had us part time in a History of Cinema class with instructor John Schultheiss, who knew his topic and shared greats from a Studio Era at a time when there was less to compete with a Studio Era. How have conditions changed since? Plenty, according to Jeffrey Sconce, who teaches at Northwestern University: “When film studies coalesced as an academic discipline in the 1970’s, it had about 70 years of film history to contend with … Now we’re at 120 or so years and the “classical” era is an even more remote sliver of total film history.” Remote sliver. But that's what hopeless antiquarians like me cling to. Take away my sliver and like S. Holmes, I retire to Sussex and keep bees. Whatever recognition, whatever context or frame of reference the older films had, is gone now. When Dr. Schultheiss showed Double Indemnity, a first time for me, there was comfort of known faces and names. Fred (My Three Sons) MacMurray, Barbara (The Big Valley) Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson (innumerable late shows) were anything but strangers. Each was recognizable going in and no adjustment need be made. Thirty-year-old Double Indemnity from 1944 was hospitable still for us watching in 1975, certainly so for this group of twenty-year-olds. The screening was like any gathering where one gravitates to those they know.

We turn on Netflix or Amazon Prime and scan headers for what’s familiar. Of “recent” titles, those of twenty years back or less, there are increasingly casts of strangers. So why take a chance with strangers? Then comes a Michael Douglas or Diane Keaton, still willing to work for amusement of us who no longer do, at light confections true, but these are what mature palettes stand best. There was one of late, D. Keaton as a long-ago cheerleader who transitions to an old folk’s home where she forms a senior pep squad. They enter a competition against mean teen girls … and win! My life was affirmed just watching, if sobered by Pam Grier as one of the seniors. Pam Grier. Could anything bring mortality so close, yet we watch because here are people we know from far back. Even their roles being diminished is a comfort. Billing which reads “… and Bruce Willis as Arch Stanton,” will occasion a look in, as does Jerry Seinfeld yet doing stand-up, even as his net worth climbs past nine hundred and fifty million. Bless their vitality, though Willis lately retired for reasons of health, three projects awaiting completion or release. How many players voluntarily walk away? Most stay, and are wanted, especially by those who stream and will pause for them. There was only one C. Aubrey Smith during the forties. Now there are a hundred of him. May Robsons too, if better preserved than was she. Meaningful names are at a premium, their number less likely to be replenished. Can stars be born at Netflix? Not rhetorical, but an honest question from someone who doesn’t pretend to understand the modern marketplace.

I had but to look back brief to see it all coming. When NBC premiered Dirty Harry in the mid-seventies, my father glanced up to a thing unfamiliar until Clint Eastwood entered. Well, there’s old Rowdy Yates … and from there he watched. That is me now. I need reassurance of the familiar to venture in, like dogs or cats who must sniff a thing before having a taste. Watching Double Indemnity recent was reminder that it, and a lot of us watching, belong more to that past than today. We know Walter and Phyliss and Keyes, and actors playing them, but how many born since say, 1980, will enter that cave? To paraphrase Neff at the Dictaphone … black-and-white, check … strange way they talk, check … everybody long dead and forgot, check … and what the hell kind of device is this guy talking into? Double Indemnity and kin represent more and more a ghost world. They are the eighteenth-century literature I was assigned to read in college. What entertained once will likelier oppress now, and not just with movies. Music long adored fades from playlists, faceless focus groups ordaining its end. Authors earlier read and enjoyed are listed en masse at Wikipedia as “largely forgotten.” Look for instance at the back cover of a first edition of This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. These titles represented “New Scribner Fiction” in 1920. Recognize a one, even one? I did not, yet all were popular that year. Go the next step … what movies might we recognize from 1920?

Plenty, as it turned out: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Barrymore), The Flapper (Olive Thomas), Last of the Mohicans (Tourneur, Clarence Brown), The Mark of Zorro (Fairbanks), The Penalty (Chaney), Pollyanna (Mary Pickford), Way Down East (Griffith), and Why Change Your Wife? (DeMille). A number of these are available on Blu-Ray. All can be readily seen somewhere. Of Scribner fiction listed for 1920, I’ll guess none remain in print, except This Side of Paradise. Said topic has lately been my tar baby, ongoing bafflement as to why so much, in fact seeming whole of literature from a past century, has gone by boards. “Unreadable” is the term I most often see, so tell me, are 1920 movies from the above list “unwatchable”? Stack up the eight, and given time, we might enjoy them all. The Penalty still wallops. I’m more and more of opinion that film is not only our liveliest art, but maybe a best surviving art. Has anyone surveyed past music or fine art to determine content that pleases still today? Here is part reason I say movies continue to abide: There were always stills for them … and posters … publicity material of every conceivable sort. Online assures such stuff will be everywhere and forever more. Frozen images of Chaney, Pickford, and Fairbanks are never more than a click away, not singly, but by thousands. You Tube is a resource for everyone that ever stood before a camera. I found a very arresting five-minute clip of Olive Thomas (Broadway, Arizona --- 1917) that someone lately uploaded, and the YT sidebar led me to a bio of the star with her life/death laid bare. Novels and their authors had little such advantage. We’re lucky to find a single photograph of ones who scribbled but never performed.

No one need be utterly forgot so long as there is Internet and fans memorializing them digitally. Olive Thomas is still someone’s sweetheart, as evidence ease of reference to her online, and my man George Bancroft sees renewed fame thanks to a half dozen of his features plus innumerable clip and tributes at YT. Above is my own salute, a lobby card of GB from Paramount on Parade which I’m sure will find its way onto sites and Facebooks, more kindling for a Bancroft fire still burning. Found also The Life and Death of George Bancroft (a 14:42 minute salute) which turns out to be someone else entirely, “an American historian and statesman” who lived in the nineteenth century. Greenbriar has uploaded a minimum of 25,000 images since 2005, and I cling to belief that inhabitants of Pluto may well discover George Bancroft and plentiful others from a GPS past. There was never such access to gone faces and films before the Net. Remember examining tiny print of an index that was A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen by Daniel Blum just to find one still from an obscure 20’s title? Today yields permanence for all, truest triumph of image over print. Little stands for literature except what of it was adapted for movies. I read an essay last night about Frank Norris, his work unfamiliar but for Greed and Moran of the Lady Letty, each known thanks not to Norris, but EvS and Rudy. I don’t believe Safety Last and Harold Lloyd will ever go away so long as that iconic photo of him hanging off the clock survives. Things seen lately at You Tube … a videographer wondering if the “Golden Age of Original Cinema” ended in the nineties. The nineties? Yes, that someone’s, many a someone’s, idea of a Golden Age. Point he makes is that this was pre-sequels, pre route without risk that modern industry habitually takes. Plaintiff exhibits as follow: Ed Wood, Pulp Fiction, Good Fellas, The Sixth Sense, Four Weddings and a Funeral. The list goes beyond good ones I named, but point is made. These all were what the speaker grew up with, knows best, clings to, ... and he'd be little more than forty now, if that.

Point is that those who were formed by films during the nineties naturally hew closest to them. They grieve loss of creative spirit that made the era possible. My generation is no longer alone for living in an exalted past. Much younger ones now taste the hemlock. But examine current evidence as supplied by streaming services, from whence much that is original springs. I looked at two last week, The Phantom Thread and The House of Gucci. Both engaged me, each bold in its way. Certainly not like what we’ve seen before. I wonder if those who complain loudest are simply not digging deep enough. Does anyone even know how many movies fill ether that is Amazon Prime, Apple, Netflix, so many others that stream? One You Tuber giddy on digital wealth proposed that “cinema” is the Greatest of All Art Forms, now or ever in the past. His comment column immediately saw correctives. No, it is video games that reach highest toward art, while others propose that virtual reality will wipe slates clean to embark us upon epochs not dreamt of before. I can believe that, but will I live long enough to see it? And who of us might be too timid to step upon moonscape of action narrative to do battle with flesh-eater zombies? How rewarding could such immersion be?