Name: Untitled Nonfiction
Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9780063112582

Anon9780063112582

Untitled Nonfiction

Tim Pendry

Quentin Tarantino is a strange one with a unique mind, honed (as this book demonstrates) on an intense childhood and teenage engagement with popular American cinema and a close awareness of what cinema actually is in the hands of its audiences at the point of first reception. This last point is an important one. The young Quentin is observing audiences as much as films at a time when urban theatres and rural drive-ins could still compete with television and before home watching, first on video, then on DVD and then as streaming. In working class Los Angeles, young male audiences would respond viscerally to films and make their opinions known in heckling or laughter or silences and attention. If a film was a studio cop-out, they would get that. It had to please them, not the critics. Tarantino is not offering us an exercise in nostalgia here but rather is giving personal testimony concerning a specific point in history for cinema at the heart of its market in the immediate vicinity of the dream factory under conditions unlikely to occur again, at least in the West. From this testimony which is expressed in highly discursive essays built around particular 1970s films, the reader gets insights into the sources of Tarantinto's own but also into Hollywood creativity from a unique set of perspectives - those of audience member, film nerd, actor, writer and director. All five of these aspects of Tarantino merge seamlessly as he dips into American cinema as an experience. It enables him to help us understand that the simplistic Directorial 'auteur' approach is not enough - actors and writers (and audiences) all have distinct roles to play in the creation of a film. He is also capable of rising well above film critic snobbery to make two fundamental points. First, as an art form, film is not reality. It should be taken on its own terms. Like all other arts, as something contextual, something that relates to what went before within its own frame of reference. This is important when looking at one of the central aspects of 1970s Hollywood - its violence - which was of its time and appealed to a male psyche whose catharsis is clearly artistically very important to Tarantino but which implies nothing about the future exercise of violence in reality. The second fundamental point is that even hackneyed commercial cinema has its place in the sea in which genius can swim (much as every masterpiece of other arts in the past swam in a similar sea of relatively enjoyable mediocrity). The superior art work can evolve even out of exploitation cinema. The nerd in him is invaluable. The riches in the book are those derived from the realisation of exactly why nothing can come of nothing. For example we get a renewed respect for Sylvester Stallone as he reworks the cinema of the Dead End Kids in his early films. But it is the relationship with the audience that interests as much as anything, much as an understanding of the relationship of much early modern art to court life allows us to comprehend shifts and changes in creativity in a more informed light. If there is an insight here, it is that a detached clinical and academic approach to cinema is all very well but it misses the impact of a film at its time to its audience which would have no knowledge of all the subsequent rip-offs and plundering of its innovations. Perhaps Tarantino's highly eclectic and plundering post-modern style is expressly designed to make it difficult to plunder it in turn - making Tarantino's cinematic style only ever copyable in an obviously weakened form as (say) Brian de Palma might sometimes copy Hitchcock. This is not to dismiss De Palma (Tarantino makes a good case for him) only to say that Tarantino and Hitchcock manage to maintain their 'bite' in the long run and long after (say) 'Jaws' (still a great film) starts to suffer from an excess of big fish attack films and music that sounds now familial. The curious nature of Tarantino's five aspects (the hybridisation of which makes the man where others specialise in just one skill) means that, as actor, although I have never been able to rate him in that role, he can get under the skin of the way 'stars' build their relationship with audiences. 'Stars' and actors in general are both unreal and real. The unreal is manufactured by the real with deliberation in the best cases and in complicity with directors and scriptwriters. The top end of the 'profession' is 'driven'. There are insights here into Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood and others. He moves easily and with understanding to the New York School of film-making and he contextualises the importance of Taxi Driver (1976) and (in Hollywood) Rolling Thunder (1977) as the highest creative output within that sea of 'revengeamatics' triggered in part by 'Death Wish' (1974). He revives the reputation of many lost actors (some of whom I will be looking out for), is not afraid to be tough on wooden ones and reminds us that Burt Reynolds once actually mattered a great deal and for good reason (a point long missed outside the US). There is so much meat and detail in this book that one leaves it eventually with something more than knowledge (because the knowledge can only be partial, of course, about a complex industry and time) - with a certain wisdom about the cinematic art and its relationship to society. His perspective adds value precisely because it is demotic and comes up from below, from experience. His comments on critics and film theoreticians are rare but to the point and his attitude to the French Nouvelle Vague and their sanctification of Hitchcock implicitly dismissive. There is a refreshing common sense and easy-going almost 'working class' tolerance throughout. The book should be read with an open mind by any middle class wally becoming posturingly anxious about violence in video games let alone cinema. Tarantino, for example, was half brought up in Los Angeles black culture. His account of 'Floyd', a black cinema co-conspirator in his adolescence, in his final essay is a lesson in listening to what black people actually say and mean and not what they are made to say and mean by liberal activists. The adult entertainment industry, too, is presented as a legitimate part of cinema alongside all other forms of popular exploitation cinema designed to entertain and meet a need. His assessment of the mainstream 'Hardcore' (1979) is one of his few 'moral judgements' on the film's 'mauvais foi'. This is not a sustained narrative but more like a network of connected highly personal essays digging deep into moments of Hollywood history and contextualising them with what appears to be a high level of personal integrity. It is highly recommended for cineastes. One cannot help thinking about what next for Tarantino since, to be blunt, after (in my view) reaching a peak in 'The Hateful Eight', there is a danger of him having exhausted his inspiration and personality as some might say Hitchcock did. You sense a new or revived interest in writing - the novelisation of 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' and this book - and in the role of the critic (said to be the subject of his next film). He has said himself apparently that he is coming to the end of his film directing career by choice. Maybe it is good to go out at the top and plan the shift to a new mode of creativity if that is what he plans. On the basis of this book, he has a lot to contribute to understanding and he is clearly sensing that a cinema of streaming without benefit of live audiences and physical film is not for him. And that is the final point, a sociological one that fits in with our new hyper-real existence. We cannot capture again what it was like to listen to Monteverdi's 'Orfeo' at its first performance and much of the grounded theatre-based cinema of the past is as lost to us now. The new popular art may be like the superb animated series 'Arcane' or 'Iron Man'. Tarantino's only sign of old foginess is dismissal of the super hero movie. Film is now watched at home in small family or friend groups, more rarely in cinemas with seats more distanced and in respectful silence and awe. The tightly drawn boxed set has replaced even the film as popular preference. Called TV by the marketing men, in fact, many of these series are really extended cinema, Even Scorsese's 'The Irishman' was extended to over three hours to feed the demand for the epic and detailed. There is still the instinct to laugh or to shudder. There is still the huge amount of necessary dross required to create the sea in which art can swim. But the experience is increasingly personal, intense and drawn out - very different from the theatre double feature of Tarantino's youth.

Untitled Nonfiction

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