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: Vincente Minnelli

"Repeat viewings of Singin’ in the Rain merely confirm its initial pleasures. Repeat viewings of The Band Wagon bring forth a work of an increasingly apparent formal, thematic and emotional richness which the Kelly/Donen film never approaches. While there are several ways of accounting for this difference in the two films, arguably the central one is the sensibility of The Band Wagon‘s director, Vincente Minnelli... Minnelli is often condescendingly regarded as the ultimate example of the decorative metteur en scène. Certainly in his handling of color, camera movement, costuming, decor, and staging of action, he has few rivals in the Hollywood of this period. A recommended experiment: Try watching the “Shine on Your Shoes” number in and force yourself not to watch Fred Astaire and LeRoy Daniels. Instead, only take note of the direction of the extras; watch it again, and only note the function of the decor and the camera movements; then watch it one final time putting all of these elements together. It is a very densely layered sequence, not only a brilliant Astaire number but a brilliant example of mise en scène."

- Joe McElhaney / Senses of Cinema review of The Band Wagon
 

If John Carpenter is the Howard Hawks of New American horror, then Hooper is the Vincente Minnelli (... with a certain eye of Fellini, and the self-nature, desires, and beset tooth-and-nail independent career of Charles Burnett, who, by the way, is certainly another one of the unsung graces of the cinema now...).

But yes, Minnelli. Sensibility. Color. Staging of action. "The function of the decor and the camera movements." "Densely layered sequence... a brilliant example of mise en scène." Film scholar Joe McElhaney hits Minnelli and The Band Wagon right on the head (I also encourage reading his general profile article on Minnelli at Senses of Cinema), and the "Shine on Your Shoes" dance number he singles out is another scene I'll immediately put up as one of the grand achievements in cinema - a statement I previously made about the living room scene in Poltergeist.  And indeed, both are a wonderment of directorial orchestration (of bodies in movement in time and space) and the aesthetic camera, tied to grand yet somehow - probably in their being embedded in the scene-craft's formal structures and perspectives - always sublimely understated emotion (and positive emotion).

Descriptions of Minnelli sound like Hooper to me.  The way their cameras are motivated by a full-fledged aestheticism tied to fluid beauty and those Bazinian ideals of revealing "structural depth" in the "reality of dramatic space."  The ways their cameras triangulate space, reconfigure staging, musicalize blocking, generate rhythmically their elegant camera gestures. See the edge of the frame, highly susceptible to the flight of characters into it... The high level of movement continuity between shots... Their cameras that bend and contort around decor and actors in the most inspired and sophisticated vectors, morph the architecture of a space into psychological geometries, seem to float every now and then in a cloud of characters' feelings, rise and fall in the most emphatic use of dolly and crane motion, glide past shoulders in loving exhortation of depth cues... The camera as living entity, alive and capricious, not afraid of the sprightly, reactive camera... the specifically-timed planning and precision of the movements, not suggesting simple style or emotion, but strident visual analysis and the aesthetic rhetoric of the plastic art... Minnelli and Hooper are flamboyant when they are being subtle, subtle when they are being flamboyant. Their mannerist use of depth, often three-plane images that place an emotional figurehead in soft foreground, emphasize coexistence and emotional life.  Characters changing placement within a single shot resulting in the constant reshaping of the composition and perspective. An aesthete's sense of the truly elegant tracking shot, or the elegance of the slow and low, or practically imperceptible, pull-back. Simply put they are always in search of beauty, or, even more precisely, sublimity.

In this "Band Wagon" musical number, we've got a wordless sequence, a revolving display of interacting characters and contraptions of amusement (contradicting the sequence's beautiful sense of artificiality, its interaction of crowds, machines, and the herding camera is entirely evoking of the spatial reality of the environment), and a glum rich guy, Freddie A., who experiences something of a silent, communal reverie with his surroundings, before it culminates in a joyous dance with working fellow Leroy Daniels.

For your enjoyment, here is that scene and two others, all of which are simply three of my favorite scenes from Minnelli's musicals I've seen (I actually have much of his filmography to go still, but these scenes have undeniably stuck with me, and I'll place the "greatest of cinema achievements" claim on the extra two as well) - truly joyous scenes from one of the truly joyous filmmakers.  But do watch them carefully if you choose, for they are in fact highly representative of many of the attributes I looked into above ("Trolley Song" may be a bit of an indulgence):

The "Shine on Your Shoes" number from The Band Wagon

 

"The Trolley Song" from Meet Me in St. Louis

The "By Strauss" scene from An American in Paris

(This scene is actually an incredible example of many of the aesthetic techniques mentioned above.  Depth, blocking, graceful and minute dollying, timed movement, the interaction of bodies in a restricted space, the precise arrangement of the bodies in the frame resulting from their constantly reconfiguring [here, literal] loopty-loo and dance.)

François Truffaut on Nicholas Ray, From 'A Wonderful Certainty,' François Truffaut

(First published as 'L'Admirable Certitude,' Cahiers du Cinéma 46, April 1955, under pseudonym Robert Lachenay)

"The hallmark of Ray's great talent resides in his absolute sincerity, his acute sensitivity. He is not of great stature as a technician. All his films are very disjointed, but it is obvious Ray is aiming less for the tradition and all-round success of a film than at giving each shot a certain emotional quality. Johnny Guitar is 'composed,' rather hurriedly, of very long takes divided into four. The editing is deplorable. But the interest lies in elsewhere: for instance in the very beautiful positioning of figures within the frame. (The posse at Vienna's is formed and moves in V-shape, like migratory birds.)

Nicholas Ray is to some extent the Rossellini of Hollywood, in the kingdom of mechanization he is the craftsman, loving fashioning small objects out of holly wood. Hence a hue and cry against the amateur! There is not one of Ray's films without nightfall. He is the poet of nightfall, and in Hollywood everything is permissible, except poetry. Hawks, for instance, keeps it at arm's length, and Hitchcock cautiously ventures four or five shots each time, in small doses. While a Hawks settles down in Hollywood... and takes things easy, flirting with tradition all the better to flout it, and always winning, Ray is incapable of 'doing a deal' with the devil and turning the arrangement to his advantage - he is picked on and loses the battle even before he starts fighting.

Hawks and Ray perform an opposition much like Castellani and Rossellini. With Hawks we witness a triumph of the mind, with Nick Ray it is a triumph of the heart."

Hawks/Castellani/Carpenter, Ray/Rossellini/Hooper.