The Contemporary Cinema: Penelope Houston. Penguin Books.
Penelope Houston represents, I suppose, decently catholic, unassumingly highbrow, mildly leftish opinion. She applauds Visconti, Ozu, Truffaut, Wajda, Antonioni, but admits also to liking Hollywood for its “relaxed assurance” and “magnificent vulgarity.” She devotes most space of all, three pages, to the cinema of Satyajit Ray, but also a paragraph to a single film of Hawks, The Big Sleep. She separates herself carefully from “the snobbery of specialized cinemas” and is on her guard against the “esoteric.” The creative cinema, however, the cinema which “runs risks,” is set firmly for her in Europe. It is no longer, she points out, “the cinema of straightforward social purpose.” “Underlying many of the really significant films of the last few years is an unspoken sense that the public context, the social scene in all its complexity, is something too big to grasp and too unwieldy to be susceptible to change.” Instead young directors are interested in “emotional landscape,” “personal relationships,” “how people behave.” And, to accommodate this new humanism, they are inventing a new screen lanuage. She cites, for instance, the cutting of Godard’s A Bout de Souffle, the improvisation techniques of Cassavetes’s Shadows.
Penelope Houston is not interested in the larger questions one might care to ask about cinema. Indeed she is rather scornful about them. She quotes Rene Clair approvingly: “That which makes the cinema is not to be discussed.” She takes care not to involve herself in critical controversy, fearful of being trammeled by doctrine and theory. Only once is her serene indifference shaken, when she tries to cope with the influence of Cahiers du Cinema. Her account of the critical positions and arguments of the Cahiers concludes with the old gibe that their enthusiasm for American cinema is partly based on their inability to speak or understand English. Judging by Miss Houston’s thoroughly misleading account of the Cahiers one may be forgiven for assuming that she doesn’t understand French. As I read her summary, which suggests, for instance, that the Cahiers believe Cottafavi can do no wrong, I recalled the celebrated article of Andre Bazin, in Cahiers 70, De la Politique des Auteurs. After warning against the dangers of the aesthetic cult of personality—the politique, he thought, might lead to this error, but remained nevertheless fecund enough in its total impact to justify its use as a critical method — he continued: “Far be it from me to wish to deny the positive spirit and methodological value of this policy. It has, in the first place, the merit of treating the cinema as an adult art and of reacting against the impressionist relativism which still dominates criticism of the film.” Penelope Houston’s position is impressionist relativism at its worst.