Volume 24, Number 1 · February 3, 1977
Who Makes Movies?
By John Bernard Myers, Reply by Gore Vidal
In response to Who Makes the Movies?
(November 25, 1976)
To the Editors:
Gore Vidal's "Who Makes the Movies" [NYR, November 25] is both dishy and fascinating; his "sight" is "sound" since he has had first hand experience in the studios, and yet I am not convinced by his central argument that movie directors are given more attention than they deserve.
Despite the cribbing and banality of a large part of contemporary film production, despite "the solemn inanity" of the pretensions of les auteurs (mindlessly upheld in America by such suet-brains as Andrew Sarris) the film remains a form of art separate from other visual and theatrical arts. It can easily be demonstrated that film directors created this art: Méliès, D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, G.W. Pabst, Fritz Lang, Abel Gance, René Clair, Robert Flaherty, Alfred Hitchcock, Louis Malle—the list is long.
Contrary to Vidal's belief, the director is not simply a technician who gets in the way of screen writers; the cameraman is not the ultimate source for film expression. Vidal's argument may be justified in relation to the average storytelling movie, but it is not at all relevant when we give our attention to the best and most moving works of film art.
Eisenstein's theory of montage still remains the basic element for serious film. When the director is in the position to control this element (the rhythm of the separate pieces of film spliced to create particular signs, symbols, meanings, tones of feeling), film is an art form quite different from plays, paintings, novels, or poems. Movies which are manufactured to divert mass audiences are indeed usually superior when a talented screen-writer takes over and tells a good story with literate dialogue. Hats off to those who do this.
But this is only one aspect of film. Grierson's Song of Ceylon, a documentary, is a masterpiece because it gives us an experience unlike any other we are likely to find in books, paintings, or still photographs. Gertrude by Karl Dreyer is a somber, philosophic reverie as dour as the darkest thoughts of Kierkegaard. We can repeatedly see Cocteau's Blood of a Poet, Eisenstein's Potemkin, Chaplin's The Gold Rush. Louis Malle's lengthy Phantom India teaches us much we might be unable to learn from any other source.
It was the imagination of directors, obeying the essential aesthetic of film, which has produced the best and most enduring cinema. I think what Gore Vidal really has in the back of his head is an idea rather like the late Nicola Chiaromonte's: that it is not possible for movies to be a serious art.
John Bernard Myers
New York City
Gore Vidal replies:
Honestly, Peter, I try always to educate my opinions before I send them out into the world. But you know how wilful opinions are nowadays! This particular little shaver insisted on reading Classics in the library of the American Academy at Rome instead of studying Drama, Film-making, and Domestic Science at Yale, my dream for him. But even though opinions never turn out the way you would like them to, I think I'll stick by this one.
Now, Peter, I wasn't attacking directors as such, only the auteur theory which has made the director who interprets and illustrates the writer's script the creator of the movie—which he is not. I can't say that I agree that "a good film can sometimes be attributed to almost anyone who might have been on the set." In fact, this is perfect nonsense. But sly nonsense: By spreading all over the place the authorship of a film, Bogdanovich makes it inevitable that, for simple reasons of tidiness, someone must arbitrarily get the credit so why not give it to the official captain of the crew the director? In any case, if all components in the making of a film are to be considered equally "creative" then I would be inclined to give credit not to the director (or composer!), but to the vice-president at the Bank of America who approved the loan that financed the film.
Orson Welles. I have not yet read Bogdanovich's answer to Pauline Kael's book on Citizen Kane. If Bogdanovich has, by this time, indeed "disproved most of Miss Kael's essential 'facts,' " I am surprised. But that would not in any way change my mind about the work of Orson Welles. Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons were amusing, lively films, artistically on a par with such contemporary work as Idiot's Delight by Robert Sherwood, The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand, "Fog" by Carl Sandburg: in other words, highly satisfying well-wrought mainline kitsch.
"Herman Mankiewicz was a talented hack." Well, anyone who wrote (or directed) movies in those days was pretty much of a hack most of the time since the producers were the final arbiter of what would be in the script and on the screen. But, as movies go, the script for Citizen Kane was certainly enjoyable and sharp. Bogdanovich's list of Welles's post-Mankiewicz films as compared to Mankiewicz's post-Welles films only proves that neither was to be involved in another good film (excepting The Magnificent Ambersons and Christmas Holiday) ever again. This is the not unusual fate of movie makers as I discovered, and as Bogdanovich is discovering. You almost can't win.
With characteristic wit, wisdom, and eloquence, John Myers proves my point that ever since the movies began to talk the writer, not the director, is the essential creator of any film. Mr. Myers lists the directors that he admires and except for Louis Malle, they are all silent film directors (Fritz Lang of course worked in both silent and sound). Are the movies really and truly an art form? Nolo contendere.
