1962: Year of the Slow Burn

Few people would argue that the fashionable films of the year just past are “great” in the timeless sense of the Dreyer, Griffith and Chaplin classics; the cant term is “important.” When you read of a new foreign film’s being “most important,” you’re to understand that you’ll be bored, but it’s good for you. (Who isn’t afraid of Virginia Woolf?) The importance of Resnais and Antonioni, an accepted fact since 1959-60, is rooted quite literally among the ashes of Hiroshima (Mon Amour) and of that volcanic Sicilian isle that was the setting for L’Avventura. Both films were the work of politically self-conscious European aesthetes; both displayed, among other things, the classier neuroses of the Bomb-ridden, such as sex, time, money and architecture. Someone has termed these films somnambulistic cinema; they are also effeminate cinema, anti-heroic and anti-male. The men are architects, who appeal to women—as Mary McCarthy once noted—by combining the artist and the businessman; while the women assume all the burdens of decision. In Truffaut’s last film, Jules and Jim, the central character is neither Jules nor Jim, but an anarchistic bluestocking whom the men passively worship “as a goddess.”

The cinema of Resnais, Antonioni and Truffaut, as it has developed within the last year, is supremely a snob cinema. Antonioni’s The Night contained a plethora of cryptic asides, unattributed quotations, and words to the wise, as well as a systematic style of visual evocation by which disaffected intellectuals the world over can recognize one of their own. Another ’62 release of Truffaut’s, Shoot the Piano Player, confused most audiences with its mixture of genres; but those in the know saw a toney remake of High Sierra (Bogart, Lupino, 1941) whose deliberate factitiousness of plot and locale allowed for a whole series of in-jokes about movies and movie-making.

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Arlene Croce

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Few people would argue that the fashionable films of the year just past are “great” in the timeless sense of the Dreyer, Griffith and Chaplin classics; the cant term is “important.” When you read of a new foreign film’s being “most important,” you’re to understand that you’ll be bored, but it’s good for you. (Who isn’t afraid of Virginia Woolf?) The importance of Resnais and Antonioni, an accepted fact since 1959-60, is rooted quite literally among the ashes of Hiroshima (Mon Amour) and of that volcanic Sicilian isle that was the setting for L’Avventura. Both films were the work of politically self-conscious European aesthetes; both displayed, among other things, the classier neuroses of the Bomb-ridden, such as sex, time, money and architecture. Someone has termed these films somnambulistic cinema; they are also effeminate cinema, anti-heroic and anti-male. The men are architects, who appeal to women—as Mary McCarthy once noted—by combining the artist and the businessman; while the women assume all the burdens of decision. In Truffaut’s last film, Jules and Jim, the central character is neither Jules nor Jim, but an anarchistic bluestocking whom the men passively worship “as a goddess.”

The cinema of Resnais, Antonioni and Truffaut, as it has developed within the last year, is supremely a snob cinema. Antonioni’s The Night contained a plethora of cryptic asides, unattributed quotations, and words to the wise, as well as a systematic style of visual evocation by which disaffected intellectuals the world over can recognize one of their own. Another ’62 release of Truffaut’s, Shoot the Piano Player, confused most audiences with its mixture of genres; but those in the know saw a toney remake of High Sierra (Bogart, Lupino, 1941) whose deliberate factitiousness of plot and locale allowed for a whole series of in-jokes about movies and movie-making.