Précis du cinéma Series: Vol I, number 1 (April 1951): “Au-dessous du volcan”, by Alexandre Astruc.

(my translation) “Under the Volcano”

Here Alexandre Astruc refers glancingly to a pair of recent Ingrid Bergman films (Stromboli and Under Capricorn) while holding forth on his metatheory of Protestant vs. Catholic cinema (and religio-cultural-aesthetics in general). The author asserts (and assertion is all you’re gonna get in this piece) that the “mystery of personality” (equivalent to the “mystery of grace”) is the essence of “Anglo-Saxon Cinema”; while Catholic art (and especially, apparently, Italian art) is preoccupied with the spectacle of oppressive natural/political forces (all aspects of God’s furious judgment) bearing down upon so many hapless lumps of human clay.

Catholic Cinema, Astruc contends, is indifferent to the anguish of subjectivity (which, incidentally, is the primary subject of Cinema itself – too bad, Catholics!).  For all of its Earth-shattering brilliance, Rossellini’s film casts Bergman into an ersatz, pyrotechnic Hell that is not one tenth as harrowing as the situations she confronts in Hitchcock’s quiet, soul-contra-soul set-ups.

{Abstractor’s note: you have to love that Astruc went full speed ahead with this wild piece despite the commonly-known fact that Alfred  J. Hitchcock was a Catholic, raised by Jesuits… nevertheless, a fun read!}  

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This is part of a projected ongoing series – a complete re-read of the Cahiers du cinéma.

I’ll try to keep these brief article abstracts free of my own opinions; although, of course, my subjectivity will inevitably play a role. Just looking to survey how this ambitious and influential cultural intervention came together in real time.

I will also be filing these précis in a Letterboxd list, which I hope to turn into something of an informal index for the Cahiers. You can find the list here.

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Précis du cinéma Series: Vol I, number 1 (April 1951): “Dmytryk ou les arêtes vives”, by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze

Issue 1 of the Cahiers du Cinema (April 1951), kicks off with an article entitled (my translation): “Dmytryk or The Rough Edges”, by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. The author looks at Dmytryk as a case study of a director who has come of age during “Cinema’s maturity”.

The article proposes a periodization which dates that metier-milestone (with all of the usual caveats about periodization) to the release of CITIZEN KANE. After that point, directors of Dmytryk’s cohort came into the field with their film lexicons fully loaded & ready to shoot. So what would they shoot?

Doniol-Valcroze admits to only having seen three Dmytryk entries – the ur-noir MURDER MY SWEET, the social problem night terror CROSSFIRE, and the recently-released CHRIST IN CONCRETE (made in exile in Britain after a HUAC-imposed prison term). The article argues that MURDER MY SWEET is just Dmytryk having fun showing off his mastery of Orson’s Cinematic Dictionary. Doniol-Valcroze is more interested in the two later films, both of which he sees as new and flawed struggles toward aesthetic synthesis (he admits that MMS is the most accomplished film). CHRIST IN CONCRETE, in particular, shows the strain of Dmytryk’s attempt to fuse Marxian social critique with Christological symbolism.

That’s it.

++++++++++++++++

This is part of a projected ongoing series – a complete re-read of the Cahiers du cinéma.

I’ll try to keep these brief article abstracts free of my own opinions; although, of course, my subjectivity will inevitably play a role. Just looking to survey how this ambitious and influential cultural intervention came together in real time.

I will also be filing these précis in a Letterboxd list, which I hope to turn into something of an informal index for the Cahiers. You can find the list here.

Read Full Post »