Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 57, December 2003
Richard Porton
Vagaries of Taste, or How 'Popular' is Popular Culture?:
A Reply to Frigerio
Vittorio
Frigerio 'Aesthetic Contradictions
and Ideological Representations: Anarchist Avant-Garde vs
Swashbuckling Melodrama -- Porton's _Film and the Anarchist
Imagination_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7
no. 53, December 2003 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n53frigerio Since four years have
passed since the publication of _Film and the Anarchist
Imagination_, it's both gratifying, and a little
disconcerting, to be the recipient of one more review. Given
the fact that the book has made much more of a splash with
activists than with academics, I find it of interest that
this unexpected review appears in what could be termed an
academic, or at least a quasi-academic, forum. Dylan Thomas once followed
a public reading of some of his favorite poets with a
self-deprecating introduction to a presentation of his own
work -- 'after the jam now comes the pill'. Vittorio
Frigerio's review of my book, whether unwittingly or not,
starts off with a large portion of what any author would
consider 'jam' -- lavish, dare I say even hyperbolic praise
-- and follows this preamble with the inevitable 'pill' -- a
vigorous recounting of my work's supposedly fatal flaw. As
book review editor for _Cineaste_,
I recognize this strategy as a legitimate critical modus
operandi. I often tell prospective reviewers that we
discourage both puff pieces that read like press releases
and vicious hatchet jobs. Frigerio avoids both of these
pitfalls, but an editor can only feel bemused (and a bit
hypocritical) when he's no longer a neutral observer and is
in fact on the receiving end of such an admirably balanced
review. If I can get away with not
being accused of either false modesty or lack of gratitude,
Frigerio's opening paragraph strikes me as hyperbolic
because I know only too well that I haven't seen every film
that includes 'anarchist characters or themes'. I see my
work as part of an ongoing, collective project. There are a
vast number of films that could be loosely classified as
'anarchist', and Pietro Ferrua in Oregon, Eric Jarry in
Paris, and Marianne Enckell in Lausanne have been able to
view a certain number of movies that I haven't been able to
examine. For the bulk of the
review, however, Frigerio is dismayed by my alleged
'devaluation . . . of the use of popular fiction' and my
presumed 'equation' of the 'anarchist aesthetic' and the
'avant-garde aesthetic'. I am charged with opposing 'art
films' to 'popular' or 'mass films'. What immediately
strikes me in these comments is the vagueness of Frigerio's
accusations and a certain terminological inconsistency, or
even incoherence. While many of the films I celebrate could
be loosely labeled 'art films', very few, if any, could be
claimed as representatives of the hard- core avant-garde.
And despite Frigerio's unhelpful and uninformed comments
concerning Dwight Macdonald -- one of the most incisive (and
perhaps the wittiest) American cultural critics of the
twentieth century -- he glosses over Macdonald and the
Frankfurt School's crucial differentiation between truly
'popular' art and reified, mass produced culture (of which
Hollywood cinema is one of the most prominent examples).
Furthermore, despite what Frigerio blithely intuits, I
sincerely believe that my aesthetic preferences are not
engendered by a pre-determined 'theoretical' agenda. I don't
underestimate the value of practical criticism and I'd argue
that my judgments reflect my engagement with specific films
as a part-time film critic and magazine editor. (Or, since
this dialogue is taking place at _Film-Philosophy_, we could
appeal -- a bit more pretentiously I'd admit -- to Kant's
vaunted 'faculty of taste'.) In addition, Frigerio's fairly
Manichean conflation of popular and mass art (supposedly
antithetical to 'art films') fails to acknowledge that some
of the most prominent practitioners of art cinema -- namely
Fellini and Bunuel -- are profoundly indebted to vital
currents within 'popular art' (however one defines that
fairly amorphous category). It is well known that Bunuel was
both a surrealist and a director with a fondness for
melodrama, and Fellini was famously enthusiastic about the
circus and comic strips. In a similar vein, many of Louis
Feuillade's most ardent fans saw him as both a popular
artist and a de facto surrealist. And don't get me wrong.
Leaving aside the question of anarchism for a second, I am
very fond of the best of Hollywood -- e.g. Chaplin, Keaton,
Hawks's _Bringing up Baby_, Hitchcock's Vertigo_ (a film
that is, arguably, an example of homegrown surrealism as
well as a work of popular art). If I have little interest
in, say, _Star Wars_, the work of Stephen King, or the _Lord
of the Rings_ movies, it's not because I'm a snob but
because I think they're boring. (Once more, I appeal to the
'faculty of taste' rather than to a predetermined agenda.)
Nevertheless, for various reasons that should be obvious,
popular art, and particularly Hollywood cinema, has been
notoriously allergic (a word that Frigerio claims defines my
approach to popular fiction) to accurate portrayals of
politics, history, and, it should go without saying, the
anarchist movement. Of course, in a weakly
argued passage, Frigerio maintains that popular fiction --
'sentimental romance, swashbuckling adventure, and melodrama
form an important part of the fictional arsenal with which
nineteenth-century anarchists viewed themselves'. He is
convinced that these popular genres were 'arguably felt as
providing a better representation of the living conditions
of the people and of the struggle of the militants than the
high brow, modern fragmentary aesthetic of the avant-garde'.
I have already attempted to challenge the assumption that I
am an unregenerate avant-gardist, but I can't really fathom
how he concludes that there was some aesthetic consensus
among nineteenth-century anarchists. (While I obviously
don't want to perpetuate caricatures of anarchists, it is
safe to say that there is some truth to the cliche that they
can't reach a consensus about much of anything except their
opposition to authoritarian strictures.) His emphasis on the
popularity of Zola among anarchists, and Zola's apparent
reverence for 'lachrymose' popular genres, just seems
muddled to me. Anarchists did indeed venerate many of Zola's
works, and it's reasonable enough to detect 'genre
conventions' in his ostensibly 'hyper-realist' novels, but
it seems a bit much to see the author of _Germinal_, a novel
which features a fairly vicious personification of anarchism
(the perfidious Souvraine), as a proponent, however
covertly, of a quasi-populist anarchist aesthetic. It's
important to note that, during the late 19th and early 20th
centurys, actual anarchists (Emma Goldman is the most
prominent name that comes to mind) with an interest in
cultural matters tended to pay homage to, whether rightly or
wrongly, exemplars of 'high culture' such as Ibsen,
Strindberg, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. Largely self-educated and
far from stuffy advocates of a static literary 'canon',
anarchist intellectuals such as Goldman and Rudolf Rocker
believed it was elitist for workers to be denied access to
the classics. For postmodern academics,
nothing is supposedly more emblematic of elitism than a
preference for 'high culture' (a term that is in itself as
problematic and generally unedifying as postmodernism
itself). I suspect that Frigerio's annoyance at some of my
aesthetic preferences is tied to the fetishization of 'the
Popular' by contemporary academics. The anointment of
so-called Popular Culture may be politically correct, but it
also may represent an insidious faux-populism. As Chris
Lehmann, emulating Macdonald, proclaims in his recent
pamphlet _The Revolt of the Masscult_, the blurring of
'mass' into 'popular' culture' conveys 'the comforting
impression that all mass entertainments are . . . freely
chosen'. [1] Or as Lehmann's former colleague at
_The Baffler_ (one of North America's liveliest journals of
cultural criticism), Thomas Frank, observes: 'In academia, where
proclamations of 'cultural radicalism' are routine, we
observe the consolidation of 'Cultural Studies', a pedagogy
that seems tailor-made for the intellectual needs of the
Culture Trust. Beginning with the inoffensive observation
that an audience's reception of a given culture-product is
important and unpredictable, Cultural Studies proceeds to
assert that the facts of corporate cultural production are
therefore irrelevant, that David Geffen and Madonna are
exactly as cool as _Vanity Fair_ says they are (but for
different reasons, dude) and to devise new ways to apply the
label 'elitist' to people who don't like TV. Its rise to
prominence, as Herbert Schiller noted a while ago, coincides
perfectly with the Information Revolution, both temporally
and ideologically.' [2] While in no way shirking
responsibility for any errors that appear in my book, it is
an unfortunate fact of life that well-meaning, although not
entirely knowledgeable copyeditors occasionally add
mistakes. Frigerio chides me for confusing Marcel Duhamel's
series of detective novels, Serie Noire, with _Nada_, the
title of Manchette's novel eventually filmed by Chabrol. I
am well aware of this and originally referred to
'Manchette's Serie Noire novel' -- inelegantly phrased but
accurate. The Verso copyeditor changed this, alas, to
Manchette's 'novel _Serie Noire_'. Although I caught some
copyediting blunders before publication, this was not one
that I noticed until months after publication. (A fair
number of typos have been corrected in the Spanish
translation of the book -- _Cine y anarquismo_ (Barcelona:
Gedisa, 2001). Also, would it be snotty to point out that
Frigerio misspells Dwight Macdonald's surname -- the d is
lower case -- and refers to Alexander Berkman's
never-produced 'treatment', inspired by Nester Makhno's
life, as a 'movie'?) Finally, although the
article in _Revista anarchica_ and the book by Della Casa
(published, it should be noted, a year after my book
appeared) lauded by Frigerio are of interest, I don't see
how they offer any definitive challenge to my discussion of
_Love and Anarchy_ or Anteo Zamboni. It may be true that
Zamboni's failed assassination attempt merely spurred on the
fascists' persecution of the left, but the same accusation
has been leveled at Marinus van der Lubbe, the council
communist who attempted to burn down the Reichstag. Both
Zamboni and van der Lubbe have been dismissed as
pathologically naive (and van der Lubbe was described as a
lunatic by William Shirer). But, whether you regard these
men as misguided or idealistic, in no way do they resemble
Tunin, the country bumpkin, and quite stupid protagonist of
Wertmuller's film. In the final analysis, Frigerio is
invoking this controversy to admonish me once more for
high-handed elitism. I happen to love commedia all'italiana
at its best, (Alberto Sordi is a particular favorite of
mine), but respect, or even reverence for a particular genre
should not be confused with the quest for historical
accuracy. Hoboken, New Jersey,
USA Note 1. Chris Lehmann, _The
Revolt of the Masscult_ (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press,
2003). 2. Thomas Frank, 'Dark
Age: Why Johnny Can't Dissent', _The Baffler_, no. 6, 1994,
pp. 10-11. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Richard Porton, 'Vagaries
of Taste, or How 'Popular' is Popular Culture?: A Reply to
Frigerio', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 57, December 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n57porton>. Read Frigerio's
reply: Vittorio Frigerio,
'Post-modern Bogeymen and the Alibi of 'Good Taste': A Reply
to Porton', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 18, May 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n18frigerio>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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