Seed Field, 1991

A few favorites:

"A director whose feel for small-time, scrappy wage earners possibly came from his own cooperative, energetic function in the movie industry, Walsh made a mistake when he misread his own strengths (he was insistently touted as a flexible master of swift-moving adventure epics) and abandoned stagnant, suspended scenes of truckers resting up at an all-night roadside café before tackling the next leg of the truck route, of a bedraggled dame (Gladys George) consoling a deposed rackets chief mourning his lowered status over beer after beer, of the petty, racy banter passed around with waitresses, chorus girls, and hat-checkers... Walsh, who wrote some scripts as bald copies of hit films he directed, and probably entered each new project with "Christ, it's not bad. It reminds me of my last movie," never fights his material, playing directly into the staleness. He is like his volatile, instinctive, not-too-smart characters, who when they are at their most genuine, are unreclaimable, terrifying loners, perhaps past their peak and going nowhere."

"The position of Laurel and Hardy in their scene was revolutionary: it was dispersed. They're always viewed in relation to American suburbanism, possessionism, commodityism, or copism. That's very different from Chaplin or Keaton in that they're rather small items in a space, and the space is political, social--prestige to get the money and be accepted in society--and the viewpoint never loses that distance on them. Instead of being virtuosos commanding space, the way Chaplin is, dissolving space around them... the thing that intrigues me about Laurel and Hardy is that they're sort of lost in the frame, they don't work it to their advantage, either aesthetically or egoistically. That's what's so exciting about a Duras or Rivette movie. There's a great deal of reality and truth, and it's magic; you forget the idea of a linear construction into a story or into an event. The edge of the frame is where art is today. That's a big statement, but that's where the fun is. Not only the edge of the frame, the edge of the soundtrack. Not like Bernard Herrmann's Taxi Driver idea, in which you're inside the movie, there's nowhere to go, it's like a bowling alley."

"La Région Centrale looks at landscape from a viewpoint it hasn't been looked at before, so that it's completely primordial--like seeing the world for the first time. It's a whole movie caught up in a kind of movement that envelops the whole movie. In a movie, a scene is usually just a fraction of the event; a movement is just a fraction of it. In this movie, movement takes over the whole screen, the whole movie. It's seeing things inside the cyclical movement of feeling or existence: the back-and-forth movement, the slow zoom movement. It's being caught up in a whole force of vision.

Straub refuses to believe that you can have any number of camera angles in a movie. That is the fantasy, that's what Godard arrived at: well, why am I putting the camera out there, why are those people acting that way? It's a myth, it doesn't make sense, the logic is wrong. So he brought the film down to one shot, and now he's into video. He's given up the idea of a movie-screen image totally, which is ok... I think he's giving up the whole technique of movies. He's gone into this new process, video-making, because he thinks it would be phony to go back and do works like Masculin-Féminin, where camera position, color, whatever, are arbitrary. If you can have it that way, why can't you have it a million ways--why is the camera outside the window if it can't be outside the window? I think that's a believable question."

"The lay of the land, in the Seventies film, is that there are two types of structure being practiced: dispersal and shallow-boxed space. Rameau's Nephew, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Beware of a Holy Whore are films that believe implicitly in the idea of non-solidity, that everything is a mass of energy particles, and the aim, structurally, is a flux-like space to go with the atomized content and the idea of keeping the freshness and energy of a real world within the movie's frame. Inconclusiveness is a big quality in the Seventies: never give the whole picture, the last word. A distinctly different structure and intellectual set--used in films as various as In the Realm of the Senses, Katzel-macher, Nostalgia (the Hollis Frampton film in which a set of awful photos are presented and destroyed on a one-burner hot plate), the various short films of minimalist sculptors and painters--is to present a shallow stage with the ritualized, low-population image squared to the edges of the frame.

...It is also interesting here to mention Ozu's far-earlier-than-Seventies work with shallow-boxed frame innovations, using still-life interstices to do the work of an establishing shot, framing the most jagged husband-mistress conflict across railroad tracks as a two-dimensional emblematic design, playing out entire episodes in bars and modern "project" rooms so that every door frame, every crossover move by a snotty six-year-old, is schematized and abstracted into a perfectly poised, becalmed world view. Ozu, without drawing a heavy breath, predicted many of the conditions in upfront boxed movies: a limited cast, very domestic situations, abstract placements, the sense of people trying to break-out of or living within the rules, super-controlled direction."

"I can't see any difference between writing about a porno movie and an Academy Award movie--both are difficult objects."

"Czech films, Underground films, Hollywood films. Now people who take films seriously study skin flicks, TV commercials, scopitone. In the days of Wrath or Raft, there were just Hollywood films, "B" or "A," Arthur Rank, and a few art directors like Renoir. The sheer bulk of what is known as film, plus the equal cheers for so many different types of film, has loosened everyone's bowels. Everyone's in the cat-bird seat casting out rambling comments."

"...I think the point of criticism is to build up the mystery. And the point is to find movies which have a lot of puzzle in them, a lot of questions."

-- Manny Farber, 1917-2008