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ANDREW SARRIS
as avant-merde cinema, the mere droppings of dilettantes, would defeat
the whole onward-and-upward purpose of the article. There was no
political point to the editor's benign attitude toward the avant-garde.
He wouldn't have known an avant-garde film if it had uncoiled itself
from its container and wrapped itself around him. He was guided mere–
ly by the rhetorical reflexes of journalistic optimism.
If
it was new
and even slightly publicized, it must be good.
But what journalism has given, journalism can take away when
the wind changes direction in the marketplace. And here I would
agree with the major thrust of the
PR
Statement. The wind
is
chang–
ing discernibly, though not so much from left to right as in a mad
swirl round and round until all legitimate authority has been uprooted.
Intellectuals have finally been forced to confront the massive philistin–
ism of the Left on a Peking stage full of
The Red Detachment of
Chinese Women.
How then can American intellectuals ever again write
or speak the resounding rhetoric of the Popular Front and the Group
Theater and the Artists' Internationale? They simply can't. The dis–
mal drift of history won't let them. When Edmund Wilson declares
that the decade with which he now identifies his sensibility is the
twenties, he is actually confessing his disenchantment with the sup–
posedly rational processes of history.
If
he were more sanguine about
the seventies, he would probably feel closer to the thirties and forties,
decades during which the ideological unity of politics and culture was
an article of faith. Of course, many of the famous mainstays of
Partisan Review
were aware even back in the forties that the Howers
of art generally flourished in the weeds of bourgeois politics far from
the well-tended gardens of the cultural commissars. Since most artists
in the bourgeois West would currently qualify in Mao's China as "sur–
plus people," right and left become even more problema tical as artistic
terms than right and wrong. We are left with marginal distinctions for
the swirling American scene, and I should like to mention some of
these marginal distinctions tentatively in the form of notes:
1. The art forms of time - music, cinema, theater, dance - tend
to resist change more forcibly than do the art forms of space - paint–
ing, sculpture, architecture. (Theater and dance of course combine the
temporal and spatial functions, but it is usually the temporal com–
ponent that tends to remain traditional and the spatial component that
tends to be innovative.) Why? Simply because man's life is measured
temporally in terms of his share of eternity rather than spatially in
terms of his share of infinity. One can look at a hundred paintings
in the time it takes to listen to a single symphony. Hence, hard-core
experimental films become tedious when they last longer than ten min–
utes, boredom being a function more of time than space. Significantly,
boredom has been trumpeted as one of the deliberate strategies of
recent art movements. Indeed, if memory serves me correctly, Susan
Sontag once published a stimulating essay on boredom in these very
pages. The art-show "Happenings" of the sixties were designed to im–
pose temporal boredom on essentially spatial events, and the various
multimedia spectacles were at least incidentally exercises in combin–
ing time and space. It is perhaps the essence of aesthetic conservatism
to bemoan the breakdown of traditional forms and the traditional bar-
