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Bert Cardullo, “Soundings on Cinema: Speaking to Film and Film Artists”

Thought-provoking interviews with nine major film directors, accompanied by critical essays on their work.

Preface

This book began as a wildly ambitious adventure over three decades ago,

a few years after I had graduated from college: try to interview, or at least

meet, as many of the world’s most esteemed filmmakers as possible.

Through various contacts—familial, academic, journalistic—unflagging

persistence, and some great good luck, I was able to do so. But my

“adventure” took much longer than I had expected, for the usual reasons:

money, time, other commitments, and so on. In any event, meeting up

with filmmakers got easier after I became the movie critic of The Hudson

Review in 1987. And Soundings on Cinema is the result of hours of conversation

with the likes of Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson, to

name just two of my subjects in the pages to follow.

The conversations with Antonioni, Vittorio De Sica, and Federico

Fellini were all conducted, as much as possible, in English; when each

director had to use Italian, I translated later with the assistance of my

mother, a native speaker. The same goes for the interviews with Jean Renoir

and Bresson: mostly in English, with a smattering of French, which I was

able to translate on my own. Ingmar Bergman, Aki Kaurismäki (who graciously

provided me with my introduction to the reclusive Bergman), and,

of course, Mike Leigh all spoke only in English; and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

spoke exclusively in German, which I myself subsequently translated. In the

cases of the interviews with Kaurismäki, Bergman, and Leigh, each man

either was already familiar with my writings on his work or requested

copies in advance of our meeting. When those writings were negative, in

whole or in part, as in the instances of Autumn Sonata and Vera Drake, the

filmmaker happily happened to agree with my assessment (Bergman) or

wanted very much to contest it—in person (Leigh).

Soundings on Cinema is organized along national lines, and, although

I have limited my nations to those of Europe, I have otherwise tried to

be inclusive in my selections. Finland, Italy, Germany, France, England,

and Sweden are represented here. I would have liked to include other

continents and other countries along with their best directors, and I tried.

But Gutiérrez Alea of Cuba, for example, regrettably passed away several

weeks before our scheduled meeting; Ousmane Sembène of Senegal canceled

on me three times; and Agnès Varda simply refused all requests for

an interview. Still, I managed to conduct nine interviews with some of the

men who figured (and figure) most in the making of the movies; in any

case, restrictions on length would have prevented me from including all

the filmmakers I would have wanted. It must be said, moreover, that the

subject of African or Latin American cinema—like the subject of Asian

cinema—deserves a representative collection of interviews unto itself.

The European filmmakers I have included, the reader will note, are

important not because they are “mere” directors, but because they are

writer-directors or cinematic auteurs. Each of them has written, or collaborated

in the writing of, every script he has directed; some are even complete

auteurs in the sense that they perform almost every function that goes into

the making of a film, including editing and musical scoring. Why is such

authorship so important? For the obvious reason that it puts a work of film

art on the same level as any other work of art (not so negligible a reason

when you consider the relative youth of the cinema as an art form): as

primarily the product of one person’s vision, supervision, and execution.

Auteurism is also significant for the less obvious reason that, as it is properly

understood, it correctly privileges the well-wrought script, the carefully

chosen word, as the place where every narrative film of quality must begin.

That so many narrative films do not so begin—that they limit auteurism to

signature visual style or stylistic flourish—is the reason so many of them

finally fall short of cinematic wholeness, let alone excellence.

A word on the pairings: Each interview is accompanied either by an

overview of the director’s career, a section on a particular film of his, or

a series of interconnected reviews of films by the auteur in question. My

intent in doing this, of course, is to “bounce” my writings off a director’s

own words, to juxtapose what I think of his work against what he thinks

of his work. We do not always agree, but, why must we? Where I am bold

enough to differ, say, with Leigh, I hope that our disagreement is a productive

or “teaching” one. Where I am (at the tender age of twenty-five)

cheeky enough to challenge De Sica, in conversation if not in writing,

I trust that his exasperated response to my question is telling as well

as comic.

As for the three groupings themselves, they are, aside from being

geographically representative of Europe, artistically inclusive as well. Among

the Italian neorealist directors, for example, are those who go beyond re

alism into realms that can only be called “romantically fantastic” in the case

of Fellini and “sculpturally spatial” in the case of Antonioni. In the grouping

“Anglo-Nordic Temperaments,” Syberberg’s theater of film is juxtaposed

against Bergman’s film as music. Finally, among the French, there is

one director, Renoir, to whom one cannot easily ascribe a specific narrative

style or tone—and there is another director, Bresson, whose style and tone

remained the same throughout his career (as they have remained the same,

thus far, in the work of his Finnish admirer, Kaurismäki).

I have tried to make the interviews themselves as artistically inclusive

as possible. That is, my questions focus on practical matters related

to filmmaking (which, lest we forget, is variously known as a technology,

an industry, an entertainment, and an art) as much as they do on historical,

aesthetic, and critical-theoretical issues raised by the films themselves.

Among those practical matters, furthermore, the reader will note that as

much attention is given to acting, design, and cinematography as to directing,

writing, and editing (with some attention paid to finance and

audience-reception, as well). Naturally, this is because film is the most

“total” of the arts, containing or embracing all the others: literature,

painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, music, theater, and dance.

Hence any interview of a film artist should itself aspire to be as aesthetically

comprehensive as it can.

Soundings on Cinema is the culmination, then, of my lifelong love

affair with the cinema, even though I somehow managed to marry into

the theater (as the reader will see, for instance, in the chapter devoted to

Syberberg). That love affair, from the start, has been premised on my

belief, or rather knowledge, that not only is film the most democratic of

the arts in addition to being the most “total”—making all faces equal and

making “travel,” through time as well as space, available to people of

every social class at the same low price. Film is also the only narrative art

form almost instantaneously available, through subtitling, throughout the

world. Its immediate international character is what drew me to it, and

therefore it is ultimately what made this book possible.

Soundings on Cinema was also made possible in the end through the

generosity, confidence, and even forbearance of my editors at The Hudson

Review, Paula Deitz and the late Frederick Morgan. It was completed

during a Fulbright research fellowship in Istanbul, Turkey—a country,

poised between East and West, where I remain today. It was improved by

my editor, Murray Pomerance, together with the two anonymous readers

of the original manuscript. It is dedicated to Barbara Ann Wittenberg, the

woman who accompanied me during the early part of my great adventure—

and the one who got away.

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