Hooper in the Pantheon

There is the dream: "Hooper, a cinema of pacifism."  The moral cinema that no one notices.  Imagine the spiritual book cover, two uneven squares below the title on the plain white gloss cover: the box on the left the image of Eaten Alive's gator chomping down on the little terrier dog in that moment's one insert shot of teeth-on-fur.  The one on the right The Funhouse's Marco the Magician about to take a reprovable swig from his flask before launching into his history of Vlad the Impaler.

One the image of a coarse and imposed education.  The other an image of cruelty, crude and blunt, that somehow manages to soften in light of how, with Hooper, the parameters of genera hold no sway over, or are rightly corrected by, a cinema of some morals.  Hooper imbibes and then transcends what is always clear to him the purposes of a commercial art, a cinema not in a vacuum and one that he has taken to both promulgate - for its popular purposes - and then also rectify.  The rectifying is pronounced in his chosen genre.  The image of the crocodile and the dog thus becomes indelible.  Not as a prickly horror image, but as a populist moral one, part of a film that serves to teach unfairness and kindness in equal measure.  Eaten Alive, of the commercial 70s grindhouse, does that.  A corrective cinema: one no less patched into the ultimate purposes of the cultural act of storytelling than his more successful contemporaries - those most incantatory and powerful luminaries of culture (I'm looking at you, Spielberg) - but has so internalized the virtue of fightlessness, accepted the circumstances of defeat, and embraced work that teaches and welcomes its own consequences (which includes its own defeat, its own evaporation from consequence due to the lofty aims of teaching, of a cinema "Socratic," of the taking in the poisoned Hemlock of industry pacifism.  Who else creates films so beautiful, so educating, yet so sacrificially unremembered?  One so unequipped for a business yet who throws himself into the business anyway, for, yes, the dream factory does teach as much as it makes opaque?).

... Woe to the conquered one - vae victis - but what beauty they still, with struggle, may create...

This may be a good time to quickly and quite sketchily create a personal Sarrisian, American Cinema-esque filmmaker list of excessive categorizing, not comprehensive but a quick give-away of where I place certain filmmakers - perhaps to shed light on where I see them in relation to Hooper.

It's quite clear, anyway, that Hooper would fall in the "Far Side of Paradise" category of Sarris's The American Cinema auteur deconstruction (Sarris's categorizations, my eyes, that is), putting him auspiciously alongside other seeming metteurs en scène like Vincente Minnelli and Joseph Losey (and Frank Capra and Blake Edwards... hmm...).  But Sarris's formulations brook far too much on the hegemonic relationships of compatibility with studio structures and cultural superstructure (his pantheon must have conquered the workings of the studio system, must have "branded" themselves).  Is our new pantheon really supposed to be only those who've managed to have their personal visions survive the modern studio prerequisite of bigger and bigger budgets?  Sarris compensated with "fringe" and esoteric categories, but this is not the type of separation I am interested in here.  Here, you will see, everyone is a metteur en scène and what matters is what they do with it.  It is not the authorial degree but the type itself.

This list is perfunctory (by design) and is open to splay and gain categories in event of future realizations (if I am to revisit this at all).

[The Quintessential "Caméra-stylo"/The "Visionaries"] [These are directors that are quite adamant in creating "big" things quite specifically devised to their own personal interests, such that they announce a "view of the world" quite loudly and by virtue of their "style"]
Francis Ford Coppola
Martin Scorsese
Steven Spielberg

[The Oneirics]
Robert Altman (This seems arguable, but I'll subsist.)
Werner Herzog
David Lynch
Jacques Rivette (I can't say I am much of a fan of Rivette, though, whose shaggy-dogisms tend to leak from the narratives and into the repetitive form.)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul

[The Baroque Artist]
Jane Campion
Brian De Palma
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
John Frankenheimer
Alfred Hitchcock (Another curious placement.)
Joseph Losey
Ken Russell
James Whale

[The Theoreticians]
Dario Argento
Robert Bresson
John Carpenter
David Fincher
Jean-Luc Godard
Roman Polanski
Bela Tarr

[The Stylists]
Mario Bava
John Ford
Howard Hawks
Ernst Lubitsch
Most Classical Hollywood
Quentin Tarantino

[The Emotionalists/Spiritualists]
Ingmar Bergman
John Cassavetes
The Dardennes
Harmony Korine (For comparative purposes...)
Mike Leigh
Maurice Pialat
Andrei Tarkovsky
The Neo-realists

[The Scholastics]
Joe Dante
Terence Davies
Carl Dreyer
Federico Fellini
Michael Haneke
Abbas Kiarastomi
Stanley Kubrick
Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet
Lars Von Trier (Huckster scholastic?  You decide.)

Malick and Ozu I waffled between Spiritualist and Scholastic.

[The Humanist]
Charles Burnett
Tobe Hooper
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Jean-Claude Rousseau
Agnes Varda

The Humanists are the odd cross-breeds between the Scholastics and the Stylists.  They teach, but are humane about it.*

* humane = "populist"... less pretentious...

(?)

THAS: Exhibition 1: #1 - The Poignantly Seating and Upholstery / #2 - Transmutation / #3 - Matters of Scale and the Self-Enclosing Scene

A new THAS initiative: the visual exhibition.  Liken to as if in a museum (to see an image or two), which is what the internet will be... For our purposes.  A spare image wall, emphasizing the sheer degree to which Hooper works on a level of the delicate, meaningful image. 

These will come in in batches of three, to foster the gallery effect of surveying comprehensively an artist's work.  Three an exhibition.  An exhibition a time.  In an ever accumulating testament to our most subtle, delicate aesthetician.

(#1)

Description: The Seating poignancy.  The form-fitting landscape of surroundings and the camera frame forming around humans in the conscripted arrangement of seating, emboldened by scales, sizes, and every now and then the majestic commonality of our upholstery (furniture and otherwise).

Perhaps I should save this point for its own later exhibit, but for Hooper, our surroundings, our furnishings and the decor around us, and architecture (moldings, always moldings) are constantly emanations of the Body, vivid environments that interact and become fitted with those in it.  No director pays as much attention to decor as Tobe Hooper.  This attention to and use of decor is further more Minnelli mise en scene than Argento.

The poignantly seated comes perennially in slants.  Slants of forms that convey pressing diagonals of engagement: Above, elegant velvet brackets a nauseous party with a false sense of upheld civilized living but in a house of uncaring business, and no furnishing is needed to conscript the embattled mother and father to a formation of bowing before their counsel.

 #2

The visual exhibition.  Liken to as if in a museum (to see an image or two), which is what the internet will be... For our purposes.  A spare image wall, emphasizing the sheer degree to which Hooper works on a level of the delicate, meaningful image. 

Description: Another time for the similar but distinct alternatives: the cinematic metaphor (e.g. Hooper's use of architecture and decor, rich and proliferate in Hooper's films, would be visual metaphor - though perhaps more accurately, visual allegory) and the cinematic metonymy (e.g. Ozu's twin bicycles in Late Spring, representing a romantic pairing).  Here, we look at the explicit transformation of human beings into the graphically similar inanimate objects around them: a mirroring, a conflating or equating, and quite literal transmutation.

#3

The visual exhibition.  Liken to as if in a museum (to see an image or two), which is what the internet will be... For our purposes.  A spare image wall, emphasizing the sheer degree to which Hooper works on a level of the delicate, meaningful image. 


                                                                                                                      Such a remarkable scene. 

Description: Cinematic spatial incredibility.  Grammatical rigor enough to stun.  A scene that encloses in on itself.  An unattending man in the background is the enclosing factor in his always-presence and shifting distance.  An alternation of shifting distances: between characters literally closing distances between them, to the jumping of the camera, to the shifting of focal length.  All this corralled by a structure of increased vicing of the characters into a dialectic of closeness and distance.

The first shift is caused by the mere movement of the actors within a single patient wide frame (one that establishes crystalline spatial arrangement): Craig T. Nelson leaves and JoBeth Williams takes his place.  The next shift is the closing in of the camera itself.  The next distance shift is the remarkable reconfiguring of the shot that faces Beatrice Straight: from a wide-angle shot to a short focal length shot, but with the idea that it is a shot evolution (both shots peek over Williams's head of hair) that pushes the idea of an incredible sense of grammar at work here. 

There are five shifts of distance here, and we have covered three.  The structured alternation of the type of shift - between the physical (Williams moving closer, Straight simply reaching out her arms and enclosing space within the unchanged shot) and the filmic (the camera jumps or dolly-ins) - is remarkable. 

The fourth and fifth shifts occur in sublime conjunction.  The fourth is prefigured by Straight reaching for Williams: she pulls her in for a hug, creating the final physical enclosing of bodies (without any cinematic assistance).

The fifth is the timed dolly-in of the camera as they embrace.  Two enclosing shifts occurring simultaneously for a structural apex.  What is most remarkable is the adamant inclusion-beyond-need of the unattendant party (the red shirt) in the background: the acknowledgement of the starting point of the sequence, the startling emphasis of the high display of cinematic grammatical, structural prose we have just seen.

Hooper Challenge, 2nd Edition

(1)


"... how minutely expressive are Hooper's visuals...

... how rhythmic, structural, and lean is Hooper's scene-building...

... how ambitious are these attempts to manifest, through the cinematography, the emotional filigree and dramatic vigor he senses within his stories.

Shots follow shots for reasons...

... They interlock in sequence in a way almost algorithmic, the efficiency of his rendering of space, perspective, and the syncopated beats of actions and interaction seeming uncommonly computational in its artful preciseness.

Furthermore, his camera is an entity unto itself...

 

(From 'The Silence,' Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

... an aesthetic eye, bound by the continuity of dramatic staging and by a never more-than-human, always perspective-informed observational restraint.

As some filmmakers create great art by emphasizing an inorganic, clinical eye, Hooper and his brand of aestheticism embodies a very organic and emotive camera...

('The Silence')

 

An actor-and-camera ballet exists in his blocking of his players...

 

Shots are rich with textures and painterly artistic principles...

(From 'Touch of Evil,' Orson Welles, 1958)

Pause his films at random and you will see a shot framed to a maximum of elegance."

Hooper's films are pure "works of art" - astounding marathons of inspiration and solemnity towards the serious aims of cinema...

... of elegance and compassion and creation...

... idea and thesis and presentation...

Choked of the loftiest ideals of story as rich, woven tapestries of character, drama, metaphor, and commentary...

... rich abstractions effectively superseding filmmaking of literalism.

(From 'The Band Wagon,' Vincente Minnelli, 1953)

Every motion a direct, modest act in realizing his film suffused of pure and warm artistic-humanist ends.