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BOOK REVIEWS
| THE CINEASTE INTERVIEWS, 2. Edited by Gary Crowdus and Dan Georgakas. Chicago: Lake View Press, 2002. 286 pp. Softbound $18.95.
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Oral history, although we do not often enough recognize the fact, is the natural domain for serious-minded film commentators. Perhaps our gaze is distracted by the Hollywood gossip of supermarket tabloids (and of slick magazines like Entertainment Weekly, for that matter) who only care about "what's hot and what's not," or what star is hotly pursuing whom (alternatively, getting dumped, overweight, or into drug rehab). Cineaste has since 1970 done something different, featuring along with essays the in-depth interview. Longtime Associate Editor Dan Georgakas and founding editor Gary Crowdus have been at it all along, untiring or at least undiminished in their effort. |
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These editors tell us that thirty years and more down the road, their queries still concern the fusing of art and politics, letting neither of the two slip away; urging controversial issues forward in the interviews without becoming confrontational; and editing out a minimum, while giving the interviewee maximum opportunity after the "face-time" to rethink and rewrite the final result. The first volume of Cineaste interviews concerned actors, scriptwriters, producers, and critics along with directors. Here they begin a new series, in effect, with a volume limited to directors, envisioning future volumes on filmmakers who are not directors—and also not exclusively actors—but also cinematographers and others usually little acknowledged outside the industry proper. |
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For these interviewers, the finished interview becomes, as they say, a "data bank." This phrase should be taken with an industrial-sized grain of salt. It reflects more than anything the nature of the effort to reach around, and ultimately past, the obsessive concern of so many prominent film critics with the director as "auteur," the all-powerful artist (and sometime martyr) struggling against the oligopolis of corporate Hollywood. |
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Much as they might argue about particulars, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and other prestige reviewers of the 1950s–80s shared a similar outlook shaped by the liberablism of the Cold War era, as narrow-minded politically as aesthetically. In doing so, they closed out old-fashioned social history (Martin Ritt was a favorite whipping boy) but also concern with film as a collective enterprise. As the interviewees in this volume reflect, movie-making has always been more complicated than auteur assumptions allowed. The growing role of the actor-star and the influence of Method acting accelerated the changes enormously. |
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There is, to take a case in point, something exceptionally touching about an interview with Jack Lemmon—at a Cuban film festival in effect protesting the Embargo—that demonstrates the extreme seriousness of his acting. Having worked for much of his career on film projects repeatedly turned down (Days of Wine and Roses, and Save the Tiger, for two), and knowing that he would be remembered for his comedies (Some Like It Hot), Lemmon speaks not at all from the box office but from the heart. It is depressing, by contrast, to read Spike Lee, who dodges political and artistic questions with dexterity but returns always to his goal of turning out a successful product. Could the interviewers have gotten something different from Lemmon or Lee? It's an imponderable. |
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Between extremes in sincerity and insincerity, a great deal falls into the bland (Robert Redford, for example, does not seem to have much to say here). And there are specific discussions of films that do not actually encompass the interviewee's life (for example, John Sayles, who does not seem to wish to say much about any subject but his films). Each reader will find favorites based upon taste in cinema and often deeply-held, personal experiences with particular ones—"the film that changed my life." My own favorite interview here would have to be the one with Arthur Penn, no doubt because Penn came out of the 1950s dramatic television that meant so much to my Boomer generation. He carried that feeling for mass culture into the cutting edge cinema of the 1960s–80s, from Bonnie and Clyde (wildly successful as art and commerce) to Little Big Man (not much so either way—but a vital experiment). Milos Foreman, Costa Gravas, Susan Sarandon, Atom Egoyan, Oliver Stone, Tim Robbins, and Akira Kurosawa among others here will prompt readers to see the artists' films in new ways. That may be the greatest accomplishment of an oral history volume benignly posing as something else. |
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| Paul Buhle |
| Brown University |
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