Gripla - 20.12.2016, Blaðsíða 299

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which up until the late 70s was European art cinema. But not american
movies. Definitely not american movies, which, to the extent I’d seen
any, I pretty much scorned as pulp fiction. I wasn’t alone in that bias. nor
was I alone in splitting the world of film into two categories. on one side
were genre films, typically american, the products of studio committees
rather than individual artists; plot-driven and formulaic in both their for-
mal properties and the stories they told. on the other side was (mostly)
European art cinema, a tradition more lyric than narrative; more invested
in states of mind than in plots; driven more by philosophical implications
than by endings; and more formally experimental, drawing attention to
a film’s individual artistic madeness (a no-no in Hollywood films, which
were designed to seem self-telling).
Some of my friends could happily go to an american boxing movie one
night and the next night to a french film about a relationship, but most
people tilted toward one type or the other. I tilted emphatically toward art
cinema – until the later 70s, when, back in Berkeley, I finally backed down
and started going to some american movies. and of course the video revo-
lution also enabled a systematic look backwards at the longer history of
american cinema that I’d missed. It was only then that it finally dawned on
me that genre cinema is not just failed art cinema, but its own thing with
its own aesthetic – not the esthetic of James Joyce or albert Camus, but an
aesthetic a lot like that of, well, my other field, medieval literature.
Medieval literature too is a world of the formulaic. a world of cycles,
in which there is seldom an original, a real or right text, but only variants.
a world in which texts can be shortened, lengthened, imitated, disguised,
sequeled, prequeled, changed from verse to prose or prose to verse, and so
on. a world in which texts were more commonly meant to be heard than
read. a world in which authors’ names are mostly unknown to us—not
just because they may be lost, but because they may not have mattered
that much to begin with. Even when we have authors, as in the case of
Gottfried or Chretien, it’s not exactly clear what that means when the texts
in question are yet another Tristan and yet another Perceval.
the notion of authorship sits no less uneasily in the world of modern
genre cinema, and for much the same reason. this too is a world of retell-
ings – of copies of copies of copies. What is film noir but a cycle? Ditto
the western, the backstage musical, the romantic comedy, and so on. and
SAME FRAME