Gripla - 20.12.2016, Side 300

GRIPLA300
how many thousands of times has Hollywood retold the oedipus story in
one guise or another? or the ash Lad tale-type, playable as comedy, west-
ern, courtroom drama, musical, gangster, etc? and what are the formulaic
protocols of classical Hollywood shooting and editing but a technological
version of the system of verbal clichés that enable tradition-based narrative
more broadly? It’s no surprise that when Hollywood started advertising its
movies as “a film by John ford” or “a Howard Hawks film,” it often had
less to do with auteurism than with the studios’ cynical wish to appeal to
art-film audiences, who, like European filmmakers, were bent on “trans-
forming film history into a cult of personality,” as andré Bazin put it. But
Hollywood films were primarily the products not of auteur-directors, but
of studios – of committees, in a word. and yet those committees could
make some pretty good films. It was Bazin who, in 1957, famously wrote
that “the american cinema is a classical art…so why not then admire in it
what is most admirable – i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmmaker,
but the genius of the system.”
In a not-so-different way, I think, the genius of the sagas is also the
genius of a system – a system of telling that stands alone in European let-
ters. I’m inclined to think that Snorri had to do with the making of Egils
saga, but in something like the way that Howard Hawks had to do with
making of the film The Big Sleep: operating firmly within a set of stock
protocols, but with personal touches, and emphases, here and there. I think
Howard and Snorri could have an interesting conversation about creating
what has been called “art in a closed field” – for the prose “field” of the
sagas is indeed a closed one.
So: upside-down as it may seem, it was studying medieval literature
that taught me how to understand american genre cinema—to “get” it,
to appreciate it on its own terms. So starting in the early 80s (I was back
in Berkeley by then), my film teaching shifted from art cinema to genre
cinema: mainly film noir and detective narrative more generally; horror
movies; and courtroom dramas – plus occasional lectures in others’ courses
on the musical and the western.
But it’s the northern subset of medieval literature that became my
specialty; so the question narrows to one of the common ground between
Hollywood genre movies and norse-Icelandic literature, especially but not
only the Íslendingasögur. of course the sagas have a number of the formal