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RIP J. Saul Kane - Well, it had to be this one I posted, didn't it? That macabre sing-song sample - "*did you ever think / when the hearse goes by / that some day you a...1 day ago
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New Wavest (#3 of ??) - *Clock DVA *- a name one associates with industrial music. Well, they were actually on *Industrial Records*, weren't they? Put out a cassette via them...4 days ago
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RIP Shel Talmy - One of the odd things about the social media era is becoming "friends" with musical legends and cult figures that you've never met. Musicians you've inte...5 days ago
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Futuromania in Rough Trade's Books of the Year! - "A collection of compelling essays analysing the technological evolutions which have defined pop and electronic music and how this history intersects. Fr...1 week ago
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Dream on - Last week, I found it very hard to get down to the work I was supposed to be doing. Writing about music felt trivial, absurd. That feeling has passed - fo...1 week ago
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anti-theatricality + politics (the finale?) - *A wise person once said: “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” Donald Trump is a clown. Let’s preve...2 weeks ago
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RIP Lillian F. Schwartz (1927 - 2024) - *"Resident artist and consultant at Bell Laboratories (New Jersey).... during the 70s and 80s Schwartz developed a catalogue of visionar...5 weeks ago
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haunty ha-ha, haunty peculiar - Sometime ago, *Vic Reeves* posted this on Twitter - if I remember right, it's artwork for a tour poster that was nev...1 month ago
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50 Favorite Songs - (for an Italian publication, 2009) The Eyes -- "When the Night Falls" The Beatles -- "Strawberry Fields Forever" John's Children -- "A Midsummer ...2 months ago
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angel delights - https://rada-ve.bandcamp.com/track/saturn-rings-songs *Go on* - listen to that gorgeous bubble bath of synthtronica! Another vintage release, with a vi...2 years ago
A tough one here. By 1986, we are clearly entering the time - which persists to this day - when Burchill started being wrong much more often than she was right. But on the other hand, Case's blokeish philistinism makes me wonder if she was on to something after all.
ReplyDeleteThe feminist critique of Cimino, Scorsese and Coppola, which would be considered absolutely commonplace today, can't really be brushed aside by listing some of the actresses that have appeared in their films. And when Case breezily dismisses any inquiry into the gender politics of Some Like It Hot with the willfully obtuse "they wore drag for the plot!", his plain man act becomes simply exasperating.
Burchill has no interest in the truth, and is clearly useless as a source of reference. The quotes of her phrase-making about Bacall and Monroe suggest that her writing on film is laboured and awkward. But Case's review almost makes me want to track the book down and read it.
He gets one bulls-eye though - "she dotes on alliteration and will distort both sense and her own drift in pursuit of the stuttering line". This is something I already noticed (as an alliteration junkie myself) in rereading JB's stuff - that its truth effects often come from her style, from rhythmic and alliterative effects. A sentence has a nice ring to it, the first-letters of a series of words chime with each other, it's got a shape and a kick to it - ergo it's accurate. I think all writers do this to some extent but it's particularly striking in Julie, whose early work made a huge impression of me.
ReplyDeleteI have the book but not read it, but she would take dead right about how those early '70s American auteur film makers marginalize women. In the Godfather films, that is actually part of the point of the film, of course - the closing door motif, cutting off women from the blood-brother clansmen and their dealings.
One of the worst is Robert Altman - M.A.S.H. is almost unwatchable for it these days (I found myself rooting Houlihan and disgusted by the humiliation inflicted on her and how she then becomes this docile, tamed ninny). California Split, a great film, has a similar treatment of the two whores-with-golden-hearts, who are presented as child-women (there's a similar scene as in M.A.S.H. where they are a boxing match and acting the ninny). In mitigation, Mrs. Miller is a great role, and then there's the "interesting", most peculiar 3 Women. But Short Cuts reverts to chauvinist form.
What I find most curious about this review is the lack of an explanatory sentence that directly tells you what the book is about. It's only by inference that the reader realises it's Julie Burchill's survey of how women have been presented in cinema. And we're not told the periods of cinema covered, nor if Burchill covers non- American cinema or films not in English. A lack of delineation in an album review, I can grasp, but for a book review it's rather odd, so odd that nowadays we'd assume the subeditor had made a mistake.
ReplyDeleteTo play devil's advocate vis a vis 70s New Hollywood sexism, should it be treated on a film-by-film basis? Friedkin followed the ultramacho French Connection with the Exorcist and its male-authority-constraining-femininity-in-all-its-forms subtext. Star Wars is a significant regression from American Graffiti regarding female characters. Probably the most problematic mainstream filmmaker from that period was actually an old hand, Peckinpah. So I'm not sure 70s New Hollywood merits especial condemnation. Perhaps the biggest criticism one can make is simply the lack of female filmmakers from that period, and let's face it, that's been true of every period.
If I recall rightly, didn't Burchill once say her favourite movie was Kids? Kids is one of the most misogynistic films ever made (and that's "misogynistic" as in "genuinely despises women and is aroused by their suffering"). Anyway, can't we just acknowledge that Burchill was always a talentless hack with a prose style as irritating as thrush? Her shtick of reciting any old cobblers in the hope that a vaguely controversial statement will garner morbidly curious views is exactly the same shtick as Jeremy Clarkson's. Would you feel comfy saying that Jeremy Clarkson made a huge impression on you?
Just found this quote in a 2008 Guardian interview with Burchill:
ReplyDeleteAlso a chore, she adds, was working for the Sunday Times, where she was the film critic between 1984 and 1986 - but admits that she often "skived" the screenings and just made up her reviews.
This is a perennial problem with celebrities being roped in to write film review columns; Johnny Vaughan has been accused of not watching the films he reviewed, and Richard Bacon cheerily confessed to neither watching the films nor writing the reviews in his name. It's also yet another reason not to take Burchill at all seriously.
Brian Case was not a name that I was familiar. Some brief Googling yielded that he was/is a music journo with a penchant for jazz.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Writer/brian-case https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/05/brian-case-on-the-snap-jazz-nme-melody-maker-charlie-parker-be-bop/
The blurb for the book states: "A true original to stand alongside such peers as Nick Kent, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons"
Altho I'm not sure how he felt about that blurb comparison given the above review.
Burchill's savaging of the New Hollywood directors may come from a place of genuine feminist grievance. Or it may be another case of attacking the sacred cows of her peers.
Case's review does not encourage me to seek out the rest of his work. But I don't feel a strong desire to read Girls On Film either.
The irony is that Case comes across here as the kind of man who would claim solidarity with the author of "Welcome To The Woke Trials".
Case did the jazz section at Melody Maker and was still there when I joined the paper - but then they got rid of the jazz section, so he was doing film, and then he jumped to a better position at Time Out being the film critic there, for which work he was well-regarded, as he had been for the jazz writing.
ReplyDeleteHe probably wouldn't have cared for the comparison with Kent/Burchill/Parsons, I suspect you're right there - probably he'd have liked to be compared with Gary Giddins or David Thomson.
The Burchill take on Hollywood history was quite an original one at that point - I don't think there were many people advancing this idea then: that the studio system and the kind of glamorous but feisty roles it offered female stars gave more scope for actresses - and more impressive role models / fantasy projection figures for female moviegoers - than the 70s American bad-boy auteur period. Academic feminist critics would probably, at that time, been reflexively critical of glamour / stardom / the dream factory. But I don't know for sure - maybe there were people saying that golden age Hollywood's vamps and femme fatales, as well as the fast-talking feisty broads of screwball comedy - were much more impressive than the sidelined roles that the 70s bad-boy directors tend to allot.
Meryl Streep has a miniscule role in The Deer Hunter, compared with De Niro / Walken / Cazale / Savage - but then it reflects the subject matter and the world it describes, an industrial town in Pennsylvania, hunting, joining the army dutifully rather than trying to get a deferment or run off to Canada.
My favourite fact about The Deer Hunter is that, although the film is set in western Pennsylvania, the hunting scenes were filmed in a National Forest in Washington state. The spectacular landscape actually looks nothing like the much more modestly pretty woodlands of western Pennsylvania, which were presumably rejected as a location for lacking the necessary quality of the sublime.
DeleteIt really epitomises a film that is phony in so many respects, not least in its depiction of the Viet Cong.
That's funny about the wilderness fakery. I think the industrial backdrop scenes are filmed in Ohio in the same sort of Cuayahoga (sp?) River flatlands area that Pere Ubu were so influenced by. The scene where it's Streep's character house but there's all these pipes and refinery-type stuff in the background.
DeleteThe film has quite a lot going for it but you are right about the Viet Cong stuff - just shockingly racist.
One thing that struck me as odd - the fact that these men are Russian-American, and then the pivotal stuff in the whole film is the Russian Roulette. It can't be a coincidence, but what's it meant to signify?
Another thing that struck me rewatching it a few years ago was that the area it's meant to be set in would most likely be solid Trump - these men, if still alive, would probably be MAGA. (Which again makes the Russian-American thing retroactively odd).
I looked it up and seems Streep agreed to play the role of the "vague, stock girlfriend" partly because she wanted to be around Cazale, her boyfriend, who was ill with cancer. One critic said of her performance, Streep ""made a case for female empowerment by playing a woman to whom empowerment was a foreign concept—a normal lady from an average American small town, for whom subservience was the only thing she knew"
Another interesting fact (re the Viet Cong defamation) is that at an international film festival, the Soviet delegation protested and there were walk-outs by representatives of Cuba, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Have you read William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade? He has a chapter on what he calls "comic-book movies", that is, movies as transient entertainment painted in primary colours. He argues that The Deer Hunter is, at its heart, a comic-book movie, whereas Bambi overtly is not. Here's a link to a tweet with photos of the relevant pages: https://twitter.com/LiamMcIlvanney/status/1400602727546114049?lang=en-GB
DeleteI am of the ilk that considers The Deer Hunter racist, soporific and ill-constructed, and that the goodwill afforded to it is essentially the fondness felt for the cast and not the movie.
Simon - Haha yes that bothered me, too, about the Russian-Americans playing Russian Roulette. Felt too pat, a sign of lazy screenwriting.
DeleteAs you say, the areas of western Pennsylvania where the Deer Hunter is set, and Ohio where it was filmed, became deep-red Trump country. I toured around there a bit in 2017, and there were still loads of Trump signs and flags visible. I don’t think people there had any great hopes that Trump would make their lives better, but they were absolutely certain that Clinton wouldn’t. And they recognized an emotional affinity with Trump, which made them feel as though he was on their side, even if there were no real material benefits to show for it.
If the steelworks in the Deer Hunter had been real, it would probably have shut down in the early 80s, and all the friends and colleagues of De Niro and Walken would have left the area or become long-term unemployed. Then the community would have been further devastated by opioids.
I was thinking that a sequel following the characters and community of the Deer Hunter into the 21st century could be interesting. But then I realized it had been done, as Hillbilly Elegy. So perhaps not.
Stylo - Haha yes “soporific” is exactly the word I would use for the Deer Hunter. I have never actually watched it from beginning to end, despite repeated attempts, because I always fall asleep. I typically nod off during the wedding, or the hunting, and wake up when they are playing Russian Roulette and there is a lot of shouting.
There are a few films that have that reliable sleep-inducing effect on me. Diva is one: a classic example of what Simon calls “a Time Out film”. The Matrix, which is the kind of thing I usually love, is another. I don’t really know why, but it’s a film I have been only ever able to catch glimpses of in narcoleptic flashes.
Also, to Stylo's point about Burchill's professional laziness as a film reviewer, her take on Hollywood seems like a very straightforward transposition of her views on Pop: preferring women performers even when they are part of a slick corporate machine, from the Supremes to Girls Aloud, over bloke-rock in all its forms, from the Stones to U2.
ReplyDeletecase was (maybe still is, is he still alive?) a fantastic writer & this is a killer takedown of burchill...beyond that who knows, i hate movies
ReplyDelete