RAYCARNEY
719
themselves attempting to shape an alternative to pop-culture forms of
mass-entertainment. Like the film professors many of them took courses
with, they looked not to America but to Europe for sustaining examples
of a tradition of art cinema. To add insult to injury and to confuse the
issue completely, in the course of the 1970s, even the title of
"independent" was taken away from these filmmakers. Mass-market
reviewers like Pauline Kael, Rex Reed, Gene Shallit, and Vincent Canby
popularized the application of the term to the studio-based work of
directors like Spielberg, Coppola, De Palma, and Lucas. Commercial
movies like
&nnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Mash, Midnight Cowboy,
and
The
Godfather
were championed as marking the expressive limits of the art
form (when, in fact, all they defined were the calculations of the
commercial imagination). The real independents were left without even a
flag to rally around.
Given this context, a reader can imagine my state of expectation as
I picked up James's volume - described on its dust-jacket as the first
comprehensive, critical history of this great, neglected movement. But I
am sorry to report that I turned the pages with an increasingly sinking
heart. Though James mentions some of the works on my list and discusses
a few (though far too few) of them, there are a number of fatally
disabling shortcomings in his approach and only one genuine strength.
To give the good news before the bad, the strong point of
Allegories of
Cinema
is that James analyzes a number of the social, intellectual, and
political hidden agendas that the diverse aesthetic practices in the inde–
pendent movement subserved (usually unknown to the artists themselves).
This is an extremely valuable corrective to the weightless formalism and
uncritical promotionalism of the few previous, and much less substantial,
treatments of the movement - specifically to the work of P. Adams Sit–
ney in
Visionary Film.
Sitney's book is clearly one of the major influences on James's own,
but while Sitney cuts film "texts" away from the social and political
" contexts" that surround them, and more or less takes fllmmakers at their
own word about the meaning of their work (in the process, showing
himself to be captive to the Shelleyan stances and Blakean pronounce–
ments that he ought to be analyzing), James restores some of the cultural
contexts and critical distance necessary for understanding. His finest mo–
ments are when he functions as a provider of intellectual backgrounds for
analysis. His book is far from flawless even in this regard, however. His
writing is jargon-ridden, cliched, stylistically convoluted, and clotted
with fashionable critical buzz words. Like Sitney, James frequently be–
comes a shameless propagandist and apologist for an amazingly narrow
view of artistic expression. (Though his is a slightly different view than
Sitney's: James makes no bones about being under the influence of Al-
