PARTISAN REVIEW
book's glossary, which includes definitions of such terms as acetic acid,
camera, censor, cinemagoer ("one who attends cinemas regularly"),
film, studio, and writer ("technician who writes script of a film, or any
part of it" ). There are informative chapters on the separate aspects of
film-making - photography, sound, music, etc. - and a few more
general chapters, including a final one on the question of whether films
can be art, which reaches the correct conclusion that they can but con–
tributes nothing to the discussion. In spite of its pedestrianism - a com–
mon failing among English film critics, who have succeeded in making
the films as legitimate an object of cultured interest as archaeology, pen–
al reform, or bird-watching - the book is a useful compendium of in–
formation, and especially valuable for its emphasis on the film's develop–
ment toward greater verisimilitude and on its character as a medium
of communication.
But there is a basic error in the idea of "appreciation" itself, an
idea that presupposes a homogeneous culture in which a progressive
refinement of taste will lead almost automatically from bad art to good
art. (This error, too, is characteristic of English intellectuals, who have
not yet had to face the problem of middlebrow culture squarely - pre–
cisely because the general cultural level in England is so high.) It is
more than the development of taste that leads one to prefer Kafka to
Somerset Maugham; indeed, the cultivated taste left to itself is perhaps
a little more likely to choose Maugham. And in the films, though it
is obviously desirable to respond as fully as possible to the aesthetic com–
plexities of technique, these "pure" values are at least equalled in
im–
portance by the medium's immense power of communication, which
always raises aesthetic problems that go beyond the boundaries implied
by the idea of "appreciation"; the film "connoisseur" tends to go wrong
in so far as his concern with the "cinematic" causes
him
to ignore these
problems. Mr. Lindgren protects himself by taking the values of middle–
brow culture - the "human values," as he calls them - for granted;
he can thus "appreciate" both Jean Vigo and Noel Coward. (In this
country, where the problem presented by middlebrow culture is at its
sharpest, the errors of serious film criticism are often extreme: one of
the most sensitive of American critics has overvalued such trash as
The
Best Years of Our Lives
and
Key Largo;
another critic, writing in one
of the little magazines, has suggested that the films of Maya Deren are
superior to Chaplin's
Monsieur V erdoux
and Eisenstein's
I van the T er–
rible.
These are contrary errors, but they come from the same source:
a refusal to acknowledge the essential
aesthetic
importance of film con–
tent.)
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