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- [00:06]
A
Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz.
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B
I'm Nomi Fry.
- [00:12]
C
And I'm Vincent Cunningham. Now, each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. How you guys doing?
- [00:21]
A
Doing great.
- [00:22]
D
Doing good.
- [00:23]
C
Well, the dog days of August.
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D
The dog days.
- [00:29]
C
That's right.
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B
Sorry.
- [00:30]
C
It's been extremely to hear you two interviewing some of our illustrious colleagues this month. We've had Eric Latch. We've had Lauren Collins. I mean, it's been fun.
- [00:41]
B
Oh, it's been fantastic.
- [00:42]
D
What a run.
- [00:44]
C
And now it's my turn. Today I'm talking to none other than Richard Brody.
- [00:50]
B
Hells, yes.
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E
Yes, yes.
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A
My guy, the man, the legend, the beard.
- [00:55]
C
The beard. Coming down from the mountain. I wanted to talk to Richard because he is, yes, a cherished colleague and friend, but he also happens to be one of my very favorite writers and critics. Like, ever. He teaches me something every time I read his work. He has incredible opinions that really get the people going. And most importantly, he writes like a dream. Today we're talking about a lasting point of interest with Richard, the figure of the auteur from the French new wave to a 24. And we're gonna talk about what auteurism did for mid 20th century arthouse cinema and how those ripple effects are showing up today in the works of filmmakers like Spike Lee. And I also want to know how Richard feels about the criticisms of auteur theory that have emerged over the decades, including, I should say, in our very own magazine. The big question I have is what the future holds for the singular artist with a burning vision. So that's today on critics at large, Auteur Theory. Richard, it is so good to have you here. Thank you for coming. On Critics so Large. I can't tell you what an honor it is to have you here, Vincent.
- [02:16]
B
It's an honor to be here, and it's a great pleasure to see you. I've been looking forward to this for a while.
- [02:19]
C
Yeah. So we're gonna talk today about something that I know is important to your formation as a critic, but also as a lover of cinema, which is Auteur Theory. And I think the reason to do this is not so much to put forth like an educational sort of manifesto, but to really. If I could think of an alternate title for this, it would be Just how to Watch a Movie. Just Looking at a Method of Enjoyment, I guess. First of all, before we even get into it, is that how you receive auteurism as an idea, as a way to sort of focus your attention and your enjoyment of the movies?
- [03:01]
B
Well, it's how I receive it personally, but I think it also connects essentially with the very history of the idea. I mean, the very peculiarity of what we're talking about today is the fact that we're using the French word for author to describe good directors.
- [03:18]
F
Yeah.
- [03:19]
B
And the question of why we do so gets to the very notion of what we're looking for in a movie. The reason we're here is that a bunch of young French critics in the late forties and nineteen fifties had this idea. But even more, they had this experience of movies. And the experience of movies that they were having was a sort of immediate communication with the omnipresent but completely invisible director.
- [03:51]
F
Yeah.
- [03:52]
B
And the reason why they had this connection, whether they were watching an obvious art house type movie like films by Robert Barason or Karl Theodore Dreier, or watching Hollywood movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks or Nicholas Ray.
- [04:08]
F
Yeah.
- [04:08]
B
Is that they themselves were not actually critics, they were masquerading as critics. They were all future filmmakers. They wanted to be filmmakers. They were thinking like filmmakers and they connected with filmmakers. They had this experience of an artist present there. They essentially were saying, these are our people, these are the people whom we want to emulate. And what was controversial about it was not that they praised directors as artists. That was a long standing practice and criticism going back to the 1910s.
- [04:46]
F
Yeah.
- [04:47]
B
What was novel was the idea of seeing Hollywood directors working within an ultra commercial, ultra controlling system as the artistic equals of filmmakers working in more forgiving systems. And what's more, discerning through the conventions, through the commercial constraints, the full power of their artistry.
- [05:11]
C
Now, who are we talking about? What are some of the names that are sort of most important in this moment in, as you say, criticism and proto filmmaking?
- [05:21]
B
Well, the Hollywood filmmakers they took to most strongly were Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. So much so that when they started writing in the newly founded Caille du Cinema, which was born in 1951, they got the nickname of the Hitchcock Oxians.
- [05:36]
C
And who are the critics?
- [05:38]
B
Oh, and the critics? Well, the critics are Jean Luc Godard was born in 1930, Francois Truffaut born in 1932, Jacques Rivette who was a couple of years older, Claude Chambre who was around the same age, and Eric Romer who was born in 1920.
- [05:52]
F
Yeah.
- [05:53]
C
It's so interesting because as you say, we're using the French word auteur, but so much of it. There's this kind of transatlantic motion because they're looking at America, the Hollywood movie in specific. And at a certain moment, their insights make it back to America. How does that bouncing, that transatlantic copying of ideas occur, do you think?
- [06:15]
B
Well, it occurs problematically. You know, you opened the discussion by talking about the auteur theory. They didn't call it the auteur theory. They called it the Politique des Auteur policy, but also politics. One of the reasons for their passion for movies, for wanting to be filmmakers and seeing movies creatively, is that Paris is France's Hollywood, France is New York, and France is Washington, D.C. in other words, it is the cultural capital, it is the movie capital, and it's the political capital.
- [06:48]
C
It sounds like a nightmare.
- [06:49]
B
And there's very much of a political. An actual electoral political component to the passion for movies that these critics had. Because there was a great protectionist strain in France at the time, great anti Americanism, both left and right. And they said, no, what matters is the. The politique des auteurs. In other words, our politics is art.
- [07:10]
F
Right.
- [07:11]
B
There are two reasons for this idea's migration to the United States. One is the prime reason why this idea has caught on around the world, which is these future filmmakers became actual filmmakers. So they validated the power of the ideas and the authenticity of their experience by the films that they made, principally the first feature by Truffaut, the 400 blows, and the first feature by Godard, which was Breathless. And in so doing, they sort of set out the alpha and omega of first films. Truffaut, a personal story of his own childhood. Godard, the adaptation of an American genre.
- [07:55]
F
Yes.
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B
The gangster film.
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F
Yeah.
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B
So, in effect, what they gave America and the world was a permanent floating film school. In other words, you wanna be a filmmaker, your school is the movie theater.
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F
Right.
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C
You kind of put forward two ideas that I think have everything to do with even how we watch movies today, which is, on the one hand, the personal, and on the other hand, genre, which is also another way we talk about the Western and its constant applications to American life today.
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F
Right.
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C
How genre is a vehicle for the personal. How did they understand genre as a sort of a place where a filmmaker could imprint his or her own vision?
- [08:37]
B
They understood it paradoxically. And that paradox continues to divide the world of movies to this very day. The paradox was the baby and the bathwater. The baby is the director, and the bathwater is the industry of Hollywood.
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F
Right, Right.
- [08:51]
B
So when Godard made Breathless, he said he believed he was telling a realistic story. And only later, and not that much later, came to realize that he had, in effect, made what he described as Alice in Wonderland. That the Hollywood genres that he received were not images of the world, they were images of Hollywood itself. And what has happened in the course of the years is that in embracing the babies of Hollywood, future filmmakers and future critics have swallowed a whole lot of bathwater. In other words, the genre has become not merely seen as a constraint, but seen as a kind of virtue, a sort of essential matter of filmmaking wrongly.
- [09:41]
C
Well, could we dig into Breathless a little bit and talk about what it does along the lines that you've set forward?
- [09:47]
B
Sure. You know, we're going to be talking a lot more about Breathless later this year when Richard Linklater's film Nouvelle Vague comes out. Because that's essentially a biopic about the making of Breathless.
- [09:55]
F
Right, right, right.
- [09:56]
B
So Breathless is a crime story. Michel Pocard is a petty thief who steals a car, kills a police officer, drives from the south of France up to Paris, reconnects with his American girlfriend and realizes he's being pursued by. That's the story. It's based on an actual crime in Paris in the early 50s.
- [10:28]
C
And the genre trappings of the film, according to the sort of that really funny image you put forward, is that a wink toward Hollywood bathwater? Is that saying filmmakers have always been sort of constrained by glued to this kind of genre drek and the art has been in circumnavigating that.
- [10:55]
B
He didn't see it as drek. On the contrary. That's kind of the strange part that he and his cohort believed what they saw. They believed in the Hollywood conventions as refracted but authentic representations of what was going on, as ways of acceding to forms of experience that a non genre would leave in low relief. They were high relief ways of bringing out certain facets of the world of American society. The problem was that Godard was filming in French society.
- [11:35]
C
But a French society that had been informed in some way by looking at American entertainment.
- [11:40]
B
In some way. But they didn't think of this as entertainment, they thought of this as art. In other words, they essentially thought they were watching Faulkner. Godard in 1952, refers in a piece to the greatest American artist, Howard Hawks. He didn't say the greatest American filmmaker, Howard Hawks. In other words, they thought of Hitchcock and Hawks and Nicholas Ray and Preminger as the equivalent of. Of the great writers of the day, the great painters of the day, the great composers of the day.
- [12:06]
C
He's like Hawks or Richard Wright, this kind of thing.
- [12:10]
B
And that's another one of the peculiarities involved in the formation of the auteur idea or the politique des auteur, namely, the exaltation of what most people considered, you know, mere commercial art, mere entertainment as the great art of the day. Right. So when Godard was working in the gangster form, he kind of thought he was Dostoevsky in a certain way. With Crime and Punishment, it was not, you know, not literally, but he thought that by using genre, he was doing the same thing that, you know, the great writers, not just the great filmmakers, were doing. What happened is that he realized pretty quickly the radical gap between genre conventions and the world as depicted in genre conventions. And his own experience, his own observations, didn't mean that he jettisoned genre. It meant that when he relied on it, he put it through the intense scrutiny of his own critical filter in filmmaking.
- [13:15]
C
In a minute. How the Politique des Auteurs evolved as it crossed the Atlantic. French did not cross the Atlantic. To me, this is critics at large from the New York.
- [13:35]
A
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
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G
I'm Michael Kollori, Wired's Director of consumer tech and culture.
- [13:42]
D
And I'm Lauren Good.
- [13:43]
A
I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is about.
- [13:47]
D
The people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [13:51]
A
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
- [14:01]
G
Right? So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
- [14:08]
A
Affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [14:20]
E
This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features. You need to check out Odoo at O D O o dot com. That's O D O o dot com.
- [14:50]
G
The great filmmaker David lynch has left this plane of consciousness, but his Lynchian visions live rent free in our dreams. And also right now on mubi. Mubi is the global film company that champions great Cinema. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs to brilliant first timers to. We have always got something new for you to discover. And ready to be discovered on mubi, or maybe rediscovered, is David Lynch's Twin Peaks, created with Mark Frost back in 1990. This is the TV series that enthralled a whole generation of viewers, teaching them the pleasures of a damn fine cup of coffee, how to tie a cherry stem in your mouth, and also how supernatural horror, deadpan comedy, crime procedurals and soap operas make perfect sense, all mashed up together, together. To stream all of twin peaks, the two original seasons, plus twin peaks the return, you can try MUBI free for 30 days@mubi.com critics@large. That's M U B I.com critics@large for a month of great cinema for free. Diane, take note. That's a bargain.
- [16:03]
C
I want to move us toward how this apprehension of moviemaking has sort of continued to ramify. But I don't think we can do that without talking about a figure who I know is important to you, which is Andrew Sarris. I was thinking of a corollary to Andrew Sarris and my understanding of art in other forms. Who I was left with was Lee Strasberg, the famous teacher of acting, who came into contact with the acting instructor, director Stanislavski, and his methods, and imported them to America, and in so doing founded or helped to found what we think of as method acting. Sarris was a fan and reader of Cahier du Cinema, the people that we've talked about and translated their ideas. And he's the one who called it auteur theory in America. How did this method, how did this idea first make contact in America? What was the effect of this kind of translation by Sarris?
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B
I very much like your comparison of Sarris to Lee Strasberg, by the way, because the comparison I had been using until you said that was Julia Child.
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C
French cooking.
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B
Exactly.
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C
Yeah, fair enough. I like cooking, too. They were cooking. Every sense of that word.
- [17:23]
B
Sarris is a fascinating guy. He went to France and imbibed the films along with the criticism. But Sarris did something peculiar. Sarris, exactly as you said. Called it the auteur theory.
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F
Yes.
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B
For the French, it wasn't a theory. In other words, there was nothing to prove it inspired them as filmmakers. It was their practice. It was their guiding light. But it wasn't.
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C
It wasn't an orthodoxy that was imprinted upon every text they encountered, or something like that.
- [17:54]
B
Exactly. And Sarris did something that was simultaneously heroic and ultimately a little reckless because he had such enthusiasm for so many interesting American filmmakers. He created a sort of massive taxonomy, you know. Is he right to be interested in John M. Stahl? Absolutely. Is he right to be interested in Bud Boetticher? Absolutely. But the best way to do that is to do it essentially freely as a critic, rather than to look at filmographies and attempt to, you know, organize and canonize and assume that this theory is something that can be demonstrated empirically by way of analysis.
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C
Perhaps this is the American sort of Anglo Saxon mind meeting a more poetic French sensibility. Not to totally stereotype.
- [18:39]
B
No. Exactly. And of course, the problem was that Sarris, who was a genius of a critic, was still not thinking like a filmmaker. He was thinking like a critic. And he put an enormous target on the theory. And Pauline Kael shot very effectively at it. Pauline Kael, who was, of course, not at the time writing for the New Yorker. She was a longtime freelancer. She didn't land at the New Yorker until she was nearly 50.
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F
Yeah.
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B
Pauline Kael had her own critical orientation, which was formed by her years of watching movies, especially Hollywood movies in the 1930s, when the studios were at their very peak of control over directors. Her idea of movies involved the popular movies that she enjoyed when she was young. The popularity that they enjoyed was part of their artistic virtues.
- [19:31]
F
Right.
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C
You could call her an early. The term did not. But you could call her an early poptimist.
- [19:37]
B
Exactly. So she, you know, she never denied that directors were important in the making of films, but she saw some particular artistic virtue attaching to the very fact of popularity and the ambition of popularity. And what she certainly didn't like was the idea of canonizing films on the basis of essentially prejudice in favor of a particular director over another on the basis of their previous films. Right. She also appreciated the idea of a well made film in general. In other words, her praise went to professionalism overall. The studio production with its producer intervening at every step of the process and shaping the script and having test screenings and having other directors come in to reshoot scenes to make the film work better for commercial release. To her, that was not an industrial imposition on the directorial prerogative. It was how you made a movie. Good.
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F
Yeah.
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B
So because of this orientation, she was, to begin with, hostile to the very idea of looking, let's say, past or beyond the film to the personality of the director that's expressed in it. So when Sarris was praising these films with some fairly rigid theoretical structure, yeah. She rightly, in the name of the empirical fact of viewing experience, targeted it. And her debate tactics were really unfair. She simply distorted the argument for the sake of.
- [21:16]
C
We should say this is largely takes place in a famous essay called Circles and Squares. Am I right? Is this the piece that you're referencing?
- [21:24]
B
That's the piece published in the relatively obscure Film Quarterly, and it was extremely effective.
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C
Yeah, I'm sorry, I cut you off. The extremely unfair. What were the methods?
- [21:34]
B
Oh, for instance, she said, these auteur critics are all essentially overgrown adolescents who are looking to juice their masculinity by sitting in Times Square grindhouses getting off on tough guy movies. And. Well, did they like tough guy movies? Sure. But they also liked musicals. They also liked movies by Douglas Sirk that were explicitly in the genre of women's pictures.
- [21:58]
F
Yeah.
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B
And their interests went far beyond Hollywood to films by, you know, Kenji Mizuguchi, Max Ofils, Jacques Tati, you know, they. They loved films of all sorts. They were not saying that, you know, these tough guy films, these film noir that we're watching in Times Square are the only kind of good movies there are. It was a kind of movie that they were bringing up critically and culturally to the level of movies that everybody recognized as great.
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F
Right.
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B
They discerned that, in fact, many of these films that were received by their public as commercial trash was actually the work of artists whose inspiration was discernible throughout.
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C
You mentioned earlier on that the Kahie crowd felt and acknowledged this intangible, invisible presence, that of the director. It seems to me that today the. The invisible figure that we hear from Notice the Most is maybe an inversion of the sort of move from old Hollywood to the moment that you're describing, which is like the studio has kind of reimposed itself as the sort of invisible figure. I'm thinking, of course, about whatever you think of superhero movies, Marvel movies, it seems like the director is, again, in many commercial situations, again, a sort of worker for hire to deliver a vision that is not their own. First of all, do I have that right? And if I do, is that a problem that you think is, I don't know, worsening, loosening?
- [23:31]
B
The studios and the producers were never really gone. You know, there was a blissful moment, which wasn't really that blissful in the 1970s, late 60s, early 70s, when the studios were having. Forgive me for going for rewinding, but we're having great economic crises. Hollywood was really out of touch. And so they basically handed the keys to the kingdom to a group of young filmmakers. And so you had this great outpouring of very interesting films in the 70s, whether by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Michael Cimino, so on and so forth. Elaine May There were lots of really interesting films being made in the 70s. Then came Jaws and then came Star wars and, and Blockbuster Fever. And the studios realized, hey, our gold mine involves control. Again we figured out the formula and the studios have never really been out of control. And you can see this in, you know, the great sort of the next great crisis in Hollywood, which came in the 1990s, early, early 2000s, when big budget movies were simply not really making much money. Big budget realistic movies, or what people love to celebrate as the mid range drama for adults, for the simple reason that they were already seeing this sort of quote, film on television in the first big wave of prestige TV. So in the late 90s, early 2000s, the studios basically got out of that business. But there was still a business to be had and it was independent producers, but at a relatively high level of investment. People like Megan Ellison, Bill Pollad, Stephen Rales, who now works with Wes Anderson. Independent producers saw that there was a business to be made with the best Hollywood directors, that essentially for a younger generation of viewers, the director was the product. In other words, auteurism had long taken over. Everybody has loved Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino, or some people didn't love Michael Cimino, but.
- [25:36]
C
And was that a, by the way, was that a response from the filmmakers to these critical battles that were raging behind. We talked a lot about Sarris and Kael, but did filmmakers themselves take this on self consciously as a project to say, no, no, no, I can make a film that is more personal? And this being an inheritance of these earlier figures that we've discussed, the Scorsese's of the world?
- [25:58]
B
Well, they did at the point that it became an option. In other words, independent filmmaking is, you know, kind of always existed in one way or another. High level, like Charlie Chaplin, who owned his own studio, lower budget, like Oscar Michaud, who was an independent and owned his own studio. But it was only when filmmakers realized they had other options that they took them. In other words, it wasn't fun for Wes Anderson or Martin Scorsese to fight with the studios. Scorsese, when I interviewed him last year, he told me that he was so unhappy with his fights with the studio that he actually was going to leave filmmaking, he was going to stop making films. There was only access to independent financing, where the producers were not going to be overbearing and were going to let him essentially make the film as he wanted to make it. That brought him back Wolf of Wall street, one of the great outpourings of directorial creativity. So these filmmakers, whether older, like Scorsese or. Or younger, like Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola, all had another option. And that option was they would work with lower budgets. But it wasn't so much the movie that was the product, they were the product. In other words, the fact of their name recognition had value to a generation of film goers who had been brought up on Scorsese and Coppola and De Palma and so forth. I mean, for instance, the last decade of Spike Lee's great artistry is a direct result of his working with producers who have allowed him artistic freedom. Yeah, I interviewed him about this, actually, about a decade ago.
- [27:35]
C
And was he saying this because what you're describing sounds on the one hand like, you know, a great body of work can earn you, on some level, freedom, artistic freedom. And also it's like a kind of the other way to say it might be a contemporary patronage system or something like that. So was Spike's. Was he saying this as gratefully or was it sort of like a recognition of how tenuous that position is?
- [28:01]
B
So around 11 years ago, you know, Spike Lee had made the Sweet Blood of Jesus, his remake of Ganja and Hess with Kickstarter money. He had made what I consider one of his best films, Red Hook Summer, with his own money.
- [28:18]
F
Right.
- [28:20]
B
So what I wanted to know when I went out to Fort Greene to see Spike Lee, my reason for going out to interview him was I wanted to know why he was not working with independent producers the way that Wes Anderson was or Martin Scorsese was or Sofia Coppola was. And he told me what he thought. And this is in print, he told me, because they think I'm the angry black man. He said, I want to know the same thing. Where is my independent producer? Fortunately, they showed up, Amazon, showed up for Chirac, which is a great film. And since then, he's been working with many independent financiers, which is to say streaming services are independent financiers. They are producers who don't essentially need to maximize box office return. They need to maximize attention. And the name of Spike Lee is, as it should be, valuable.
- [29:20]
C
Filmmaking today looks a lot different than it did even 20 years ago. So how does the auteur figure in now? And where does moviemaking go from here? That's in a minute on Critics at Large from the New Yorker.
- [29:39]
H
Hey there, it's Rebecca Ford, co host of Vanity Fair's Little Gold Men podcast. This week on the show, the Bear star Ayo Adebri joins me to chat about her double Emmy nomination, making her long awaited directorial debut, and her thoughts on fans shipping Sid and Carmi.
- [29:57]
E
That man is crazy and that girl is a bad communicator.
- [30:02]
B
The restaurant would blow up in like smoke 3 seconds if anything ever happened.
- [30:06]
H
To hear that interview and more. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.
- [30:22]
C
So Richard, one of I mean, to even presume to have a favorite piece of yours would be like impossible for me. But I do have an idea of yours that I've been thinking about for a very long time. It's from a piece called A Great Film Reveals Itself in five Minutes, which I totally believe, and I believe it about most works of art. I thought about this piece as I wrote my book. Like every page. I was like, okay, how do I suffuse this page with like Cunningham ness such that if somebody opened it up to page 100 they could get what this whole thing is about. But what you said in that piece, I'm just gonna quote you to you, which I know is a mortification for any writer, so I'll try to keep it quick. You said reading a few pages of any really good book should astound and delight and send a reader to the beginning to devour the book. Whole synecdoche is the fundamental experience of art. The sense that a random fragment contains a lifetime of experience and suggests the depth of a soul. That's because this is the fundamental experience of life. No one knows anyone completely, no one comes in at the start. But the person you see for an instant and can no longer live without and whom you can imagine spending a lifetime getting to know is pretty much what makes life worth living. First of all, beautiful sentiment. And also I wanted to talk about this because, number one, I think it's helpful for anybody in terms of how to enjoy a movie, that it can be a matter of moments and images and sounds, that you can enjoy something based on the sort of irregular eruptions of beauty that don't have to be sort of big holisms. But not to be grandiose. But how did that insight come to you and how does it govern the way you look at films?
- [32:07]
B
Embarrassingly, I don't know where this off the top of my head, I don't know where this experience came from. I guess it came from just going to the movies and realizing very quickly when I was in the hands of an artist, when an artist was taking possession of me and realizing that that was happening really pretty quickly.
- [32:31]
F
Right.
- [32:31]
B
That didn't mean that when that didn't happen, there wouldn't be interesting and enjoyable things happening throughout the film. But that kind of spark that there was a huge gap in my experience between an enjoyable movie and the movie that I considered to be, you know, the expression of a director's higher inspirations.
- [32:54]
F
Yeah.
- [32:55]
B
That is what came to me and to this day, comes to me pretty quickly when I'm watching a movie. You know, this is one of the points of contention between Sarris and Kael. You know, Kael, you know, lashed into Sarris for praising a relatively minor film by raoul Walsh from 1935 because of one particular fantasy sequence or dream sequence, I can't remember what. And she said, you know, wouldn't you rather just watch a movie that in its entirety is good? To which the answer is, well, sure you would. But what happens. But what happens if you happen to know that a writer has written a piece of, you know, relatively commercial junk to pay the bills, but there's this spectacular sentence or this spectacular page in the middle of the book that could change your life.
- [33:33]
C
You gotta get it right.
- [33:36]
B
So that's essentially the argument. It's not that, you know, every film by Raoul Walsh or Howard Hawks or Jean Luc Godard is great. It isn't. But because these people are artists working at a very high order of creation, they may create something in an uncongenial context that will be overwhelming.
- [33:55]
C
That is a beautiful expression. Thank you. I wanna talk to you now about one such moment in a film that I know that both of us have seen. The new Spike Lee movie, Highest to lowest. The moment that I knew that I was gonna like this movie, it came so fast. And I was like, actually, there's no way that I won't like this. There is a beautiful camera panorama of New York as seen from downtown Brooklyn. And what is this sort of glittering view? Almost literally, the sun is playing off of little moments of glass. And as this is happening, the most unlikely song is playing. It's oh, what a beautiful Morning from Oklahoma.
- [34:39]
F
Oh, what a beautiful morning oh, what.
- [34:44]
C
A beautiful day and all of a sudden, the humor and the odd tension and the melodrama of that was so amazing to me that I just.
- [34:56]
F
I loved it.
- [34:57]
C
I'd love to hear you talk about not only that moment, but your review of that film, which I think has so much to do with what we talked about before.
- [35:06]
B
I felt the exact same way about the beginning of that film. I had the exact same experience. It started, and I said to myself, this is amazing, for exactly the reasons you just described. Style is a funny thing in movies. If it's any good, it's not inseparable from substance. It is substance. You know, the way that Spike Lee films Brooklyn in do the Right Thing is not an adornment. It's a vision of the world.
- [35:39]
F
Yes.
- [35:40]
C
It's too hot. Everybody's too close. Everything's too loud. Something is bound to break.
- [35:46]
B
Exactly. There are a lot of people around who are not in the foreground of the action. But there's something going on. The colors are too bright.
- [35:52]
F
Yes.
- [35:53]
B
The images are too tense. There's a sort of framing tension, editing tension. It feels like a time of crisis. Crisis. And at the same time, a celebration of something that he deeply loves and knows is besieged. A way of life, a community. Highest, Lowest is doing something very similar to an altogether different end. In other words, the elegance, the gloss of the world as he depicts it. In Highest to Lowest is the world as seen through the eyes of a rich and powerful man. It's doing it in images. It's doing it in, you know, the way the camera moves. It's doing it in Denzel Washington's magnificent performance. I think this is one of his great performances.
- [36:41]
C
I think it's, you know, magnificent. Hairline.
- [36:44]
B
Too magnificent. I envy him.
- [36:49]
C
We should say Highest to Lowest is a remake of the classic film by Akira Kurosawa, High and Low. And it is about a very rich man, as you say, played by Denzel Washington, who's a record executive. He's sort of about to execute a corporate maneuver, sort of leveraging his wealth to buy back the company that he built. And at this moment of sort of extreme aspiration for him, he learns, or thinks that he learns, that his son is being kidnapped. In fact, it is the son of his driver and friend, played by the great Jeffrey Wright. And what unfolds after this is sort of a police procedural action movie morality tale, which, in the case of Lee's film, is really about what a man, as you mentioned, like David King, this record executive, owes to younger and socioeconomically opposite black people.
- [37:50]
B
Yes. Although I would add that what it shows the protagonist owing young black artists in the black community turns out to be fairly ironic. Which is to say he owes it a legacy.
- [38:08]
F
Right.
- [38:08]
B
And that's not exactly the point of view that this character started his career with.
- [38:16]
C
And this, I think, is where an attention to the. Again, indistinguishable sort of mark or style of an artist is inescapable. You can't watch this movie without thinking about Spike Lee himself.
- [38:30]
B
Exactly. And stylistically, there's a tension in this movie between, let's say, modernism and classicism. I mean, Spike Lee is simultaneously both. One of the things that I love about Spike Lee's films, one of the things that has brought me to Spike Lee's films from the very beginning is that the text is the subtext.
- [38:49]
F
Right.
- [38:49]
B
In other words, he's not a director who works with hints and nudges. What he wants to say, he says out front. But it reaches very deep because he elaborates on it. He varies it. He does something with his main ideas throughout the film so that they come out seeming really transformed. In this movie, it's all out front, too. But where he gets with it is really surprising. And his direction is simultaneously modernist and classicist, simultaneously calling attention to itself and appearing transparently realistic. Yeah, the tension between a realistic depiction of the world and the world as it appears to the protagonist and to Spike Lee through his own transformative vision is almost tearing this film apart right now.
- [39:41]
C
As we talk about this. These methods of construction and ways of making and how they come together in this film and Lee himself. I do want to also reintroduce the figure of the studio. Of course, highest to lowest, is produced by A24 and Apple TV. And it has what I think is a regrettably short theatrical run and then will stream on Apple tv. I wanted to ask you, because we talked about this a little bit before, whether there are things that are possible in this movie that were not possible in the previous sort of crowdfunded, independently produced era that you mentioned of Red Hook Summer, for instance. Does the commerce aspect of this, does the method of. Or the means of production show itself in this film and sort of create a contrast to other moments in his filmography or life as an artist?
- [40:35]
B
Well, in a way, the means of production is the subject of the film. David King is a producer, after all, and Spike Lee has had his own production company since, you know, since before he had a career, since 1979, if I'm not mistaken. So, you know, the idea of being a producer, of being, let's say, tapped into the business and the economics of filmmaking, along with the art of filmmaking, has always been at the center of his vision. And I think that that's an accurate. Well, first of all, it works for him. Most importantly, Right. But I think it's in general an accurate vision of what it is to be a great director. In other words, in the studio system, a director essentially was slotted into a production. But most of the great filmmakers are also untitled great producers, not because they're necessarily literally finding the money or raising the money, but because they're creating their own method. What it is to be a director isn't simply to say, this is the shot. You know, Godard created his own methods for making Breathless, and they were singular methods. That's one of the reasons why we're going to be watching a movie soon about those methods in Linklater's film Nouvelle Vague. And Spike Lee has his own way of doing things. One of the things about being a filmmaker is that when you're working for a traditional Hollywood studio that is going to be releasing a movie, that the movie's fairly expensive and you'll be releasing it on many, many screens, and you need to please a wide audience. There are both constraints imposed on the methods and constraints imposed on the results. And that certainly never stopped Spike Lee from making great films, but it did get in the way at certain points in his career. You know, there's a combination for Spike Lee, as for most studio filmmakers, of, you know, extreme tension with producers and the sense that, at the very least from that pressure, you get big budgets to do grand, elaborate things in a movie like, you know, Red Hook Summer. Spike Lee, working with a very small budget, could not do things at the scale that he does them in. Highest, lowest.
- [42:46]
F
Yeah.
- [42:47]
C
First of all, Spike Lee is also, in his beautifully artful way, also very unsubtle about this arrangement. There's a moment where David King knocks on a door, I guess we won't say which, and the apartment number is a 24.
- [43:00]
B
Yes.
- [43:03]
C
Do you think that this collaboration between Lee and a 24 and Apple TV is indicative or suggestive of a way forward for the cinema artist, the auteur? Does it point a way forward?
- [43:17]
B
The way forward is wherever, as Spike Lee says, by any means necessary. The generation of independent producers has crystallized, in effect, into many Studios. Companies like A24, Neon and MUBI, which marshal the resources of studios but act like independent producers in promoting the work of filmmakers with names. They don't only make films by filmmakers with names, but that's one of their showcase activities. And the artistic importance of that practice depends on the artistic importance of the filmmakers whose names they consider worthy of exalting. You know, in the mid-1950s, Andre Bazin, one of the Co founders of Kaidi Cinema. And the great critic who was not down with the Politique des Auteur, wrote an article critical of it in which he concludes, essentially, auteur, yes, but of what? In other words, it isn't the mere fact of identifiability, of distinctiveness, of having a directorial personality that makes a director good. We have today. I don't want to name names. I don't wanna be nasty, but there are a lot of filmmakers whose names are recognized and who are considered. They certainly are distinctive. In other words, you would watch their films and say, oh, yes, this is a. You recognize, blank film in both senses of the word.
- [44:44]
C
Forgive me, I'm polite and shady at the same time is exactly what I'm asking for from you. Please continue.
- [44:50]
B
And yet, the films themselves, the aesthetic, is not, in fact, something that I might find inspiring or exciting. If it pays the bills, great. If it finances the films of other filmmakers who really are great or finances the careers of filmmakers who are just getting started and turn out to be great, you know, it's a noble venture. Why not? You know, that's what it is to produce films. You know, it's a business. And in order to keep the lights on, in order to be able to consider continue investing significant sums in. In movies, you know, they have to do business, right? But, you know, the auteur business, so to speak, is not simply, you know, hearts and flowers. It's not only a steady string of great movies, Right. It's also movies of, you know, you could say, not hauteur, but promoteur. Forgive me. Well, that's not my original joke either.
- [45:41]
F
No.
- [45:42]
C
Well, whatever business you're in, whatever business we are a part of, I am glad, truly glad, that it has produced a Richard Brody. I'm so grateful that you did this, Vincent.
- [45:57]
B
This has been a great pleasure. We could go on for a long time.
- [45:59]
F
We could.
- [46:00]
C
It's hard to find a place to.
- [46:01]
F
To stop.
- [46:02]
C
But until next time, thanks, Richard. This has been Critics at Large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle o'. Brien. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Condi Nast's head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music, and we had engineering help today from Michael Geno with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at large@newyorker.com Critics now, we'll be back, the regular deal, all three of us, on the Thursday after Labor Day. Till then, enjoy the last bit of your summers. We'll see you in September.
- [47:09]
D
Hi, I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of the New Yorker. Each week on the Writer's Voice podcast, New Yorker fiction writers read their newly published stories from the magazine. You can hear from authors like Colson Whitehead.
- [47:22]
G
Turner nudged Elwood, who had a look of horror on his face.
- [47:26]
C
They saw it. Griff wasn't going down.
- [47:30]
G
He was going to go for it.
- [47:32]
C
No matter what happened after.
- [47:35]
D
Or Joy Williams, her father, was silent. Slowly he passed his hand over his hair. This usually meant that he was traveling to a place immune to her presence, a place that indeed contradicted her presence. She might as well go to lunch, listen to news stories, or dive into our archive of great fiction. You can find the work of your favorite fiction writers and discover new ones. Listen and follow the Writer's Voice wherever you get your podcasts.
- [48:12]
B
From PRX.