Odds & Ends

Monday, August 06, 2007

Stop Giggling, Zeffirelli

This says a lot about me: the deaths of Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman last week sent me scrambling for an episode of The Goodies. Specifically, I wanted to check if either had received a mention in Tim Brooke-Taylor's dressing down of the mid-seventies art-film industry in the episode "Movies," from 1975. Turned out neither had (I guess because they peaked earlier), but it's still a great clip:

This speech, and the whole of this episode, comes across as expression of the team's frustration at the under-recognition of popular art such as their own in favour of "boring" and "pretentious" art movies. Having fired the art-film directors, the Goodies (Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, and Tim Brooke-Taylor) turn to making their own films, and the episode builds towards a remarkable eight-minute-long sequence in which each simultaneously tries to make their own genre film, only to have their competing genres - silent cinema, westerns, and Roman-era epic - declare war on each other. (I'd love to post it on YouTube, but that would be pushing fair use a bit far: you can find it on the second Goodies DVD compilation).

It's a sequence full of remarkably inventive gags, which pull together a lot of the kinds of medium-stretching jokes used by earlier popular filmmakers such as Buster Keaton, Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin. Bill Oddie, in an apparently black and white shot, runs to the right of screen, only to run (without a cut) into a colour set, revealing that he and the original set have actually been painted black and white. Graeme sits down to watch a film only to be chased out of the cinema by Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy lookalikes who emerge from the screen (actually two screens, because the film Graeme is watching is of a motion picture theatre, and the characters chase him from two screens deep in the film-within-a-film-within-a-film.) The trio do a flawless, and dangerous-looking, recreation of Buster Keaton's famous falling house gag from Steamboat Bill, Jr, after which Keaton steps onto screen to take notes. A truck emerges from a projected image and nearly kills Graeme; moments later, Graeme pulls a similar projected screen off the wall and tips the projected images of Tim and Bill out of the screen and into a heap on the floor. And so on.

The team still seem proud of this sequence; when I saw Garden and Brooke-Taylor at a live show last year, it was the clip they chose to finish the night. It must have been extraordinarily challenging to put together, and is impressive both in concept and execution. (The editing is very sharp: the truck-out-of-the-screen gag, for example, reads much better than it should have because the truck's approach is preceded on the screen by a couple of seconds of countdown, to suggest the start of a reel of film). Yet The Goodies never received a great deal of critical recognition, and even in 1975 it must have been apparent that it was their contemporaries from Monty Python who would be remembered as the real comic innovators of their generation. So when the Goodies lash the pretentiousness of recognised art-film directors of the day, it's hard not to see a little frustration at the critical prejudices that left their own work so under-appreciated.

I find all this really interesting because it relates to my own interests, which have probably become obvious to anyone who has read this page over the years. That is, I'm particularly interested in the merits of popular cinema, and the art that flies under the radar of critical recognition. It isn't that I'm anti-art cinema: while I could point to some classic examples of pretentious, largely meritless films that got a soft ride from critics (Last Year at Marienbad, I'm looking at you), I'm not one of those people who scoff at the notion of film as art. But I do find filmmakers who do really interesting things without overtly waving the art flag particularly rewarding, and admire those who can please a wide audience while still doing interesting things.

These are the kinds of filmmakers that the Goodies acknowledge in "Movies:" people like silent comedians, makers of westerns, and cartoon filmmakers, who weren't usually taken terribly seriously as artists at the time they worked (Chaplin is an interesting exception in this regard). Great popular filmmakers like Keaton, Frank Tashlin, John Ford, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and so on suffered critically at the time they first made films by being on the wrong side of art vs commerce or high vs low dichotomies. Yet these kinds of artists have a massive reach and influence, and deserve greater recognition for doing quality work that also speaks to an audience.

Such filmmakers are recognised now, of course. There tends to be a generational delay in the critical appreciation of really popular artists: when those who grew up with them join the ranks of the critical community, they prompt a reassessment. Hence you get Andrew Sarris' re-evaluations of people like John Ford and Howard Hawks starting the late 1960s, or the 1970s reevaluation of the Warner Bros cartoonists. As I've touched on before (here), this means that a key challenge for critics is to not get distracted by elitist, pre-conceived notions of quality, and to try to spot the really good stuff wherever it's occurring, without feeling sheepish about whether its respectable or not. That's a major part of why I find popular cinema so interesting to write about.

Labels: commentary, criticism, goodies, snobbery