Course: “Mac Mahonism: yesterday and today”
Starting September 19
The subscription form.
Also, a link to the first edition of Narrow Margin magazine and a translation of Rogério Sganzerla’s article on Michel Mourlet’s manifesto:
A View of Cinema
Michel Mourlet, SUR UN ART IGNORÉ. La Table Ronde, Paris, 1965, 246 pages.
French critic Michel Mourlet believes that cinema is an unknown art form. Especially by critics. In this book, he attempts to destroy certain established values and academic positions. But, as the back cover warns, this is not “yet another of those paradoxical aesthetics periodically invented by angry young people, which will not last more than a season.” Mourlet does not forge “an” aesthetic, he does not want any coherence and voluntarily contradicts himself in each chapter. But the unpredictable thing is that at the end of the 200 pages – most of which have already been published in Cahiers du cinéma – one perceives a personal and unique vision of cinema. A critique that is, at the same time, creation; therefore, invention.
After emphasizing misunderstandings about cinema, he goes on, chapter by chapter, explaining that “le cinéma commence avec le parlant”; “qui tout est dans la mise en scène”; “qui De Mille est supérieur à Hitchcock”; “qui la mise en scène est le monde sous le regard d’un homme cherchant la paix.”
What is cinema, according to Michel Mourlet? "The art of choosing violence," arising from the gestures of a human being placed within a setting. It is intuitive filmmakers – mainly North American – who capture human gestures in all their truth. “Il y faut une innocence et une virilité dans ces cinéastes rudes, qui détiennent le privilège.”
One must possess the secret, know how to use sets and actors; one needs “that frankness, that loyalty to the actor’s body, which is the only enigma of mise en scène.” It was an undertaking that Murnau and Griffith were unable to complete, and Hawks, Hitchcock, Renoir, and Rossellini did nothing more than foresee it, without controlling it. It is the “privilege” of Losey, Preminger, Cottafavi, and Lang—the great among the great, according to Mourlet. And also, on a smaller scale: Raoul Walsh, Fuller, Ludwig, Mizoguchi, Don Weis.
Those who arrive at this radical reappropriation of the primitive find two paths to follow: the Brechtian and the non-Brechtian. That is, distancing (cinema vérité, documentary) or adventure, pure spectacle. And it is this trend that the French critic addresses: “true cinematic art consists of stripping the viewer of all distance, plunging them into a state of hypnosis, suspended by an accentuation of gestures, glances, and the slightest movements of the gaze and the body.” The absorption of consciousness by spectacle is called: fascination, abolition of the “I”: before us, a universe whose destiny is to die. “To provoke such tension on the screen – that is the filmmaker’s fundamental project.”
(O Estado de São Paulo, May 6, 1967)
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