Sartre and Borges on Orson Welles
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
"Sartre reviewed the film in 1945, meaning he took four years even to bother seeing it."
One would think German occupation of Paris and wartime censorship might have contributed to that delay.
'Talking of Orson Welles, I wonder if many people still remember how, soon after the Second World War, his artistic reputation in Europe was nearly wrecked for a while by a blistering attack which Sartre launched against _Citizen Kane_. The profound silliness of this diatribe is startling half a century later:
... [same quote as in op]
The impact of this condemnation was devastating. _The Magnificent Ambersons_ was shown soon afterwards in Paris but failed miserably. The cultivated public always follows the directives of a few propaganda commissars: there is much more conformity among intellectuals than among plumbers or car mechanics. A few years earlier, Jorge Luis Borges (who wrote superb film reviews) had also expressed a critical opinion of _Citizen Kane_, but whereas Sartre’s censure now appears odious and ridiculous in its self-importance and dogmatism (it was actually dictated by a “politically correct” anti-American prejudice), Borges made a point that should retain its validity—even for the admirers of _Citizen Kane_:
"We all know that a feast, a palace, a huge enterprise, a lunch of writers or of journalists, a cordial atmosphere of frank and spontaneous comradeship are all particularly hideous. Citizen Kane is the first film that made conscious use of this reality ... It is not an intelligent film, but it is the work of a genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of this ugly word."
Sartre had an unquestionable genius (and we just learned what this means)—which may not be enough to reach posterity; in this respect, Borges was perhaps better equipped: he had a sense of humour—which is also the other side of a genuine humility.'
I remember reading a review by David Foster Wallace of a biography of some tennis player I never even heard of. I still would not touch that biography with a ten foot pole, but that review, and Wallace's reflections on professional sports and athletes' biographies, was fascinating to read.
But then, Borges' reasoning would apply to most anything not made recently. There's a very small cadre of writers/creators aware of anything not produced in their lifetime.
(Furthermore, Borges could not guess at the time that Citizen Kane would be anointed as one of the show pieces of "the seventh art" for a few decades - a fate that could probably have been bestowed upon a few other contemporary movies, but was not.)
Few under-30 year olds have even given The Beatles or Pink Floyd a proper listen either or know of Ferris Bueller's Day Off - I'm serious, mass cultural memory is not very long.
But I think you'll find that all of the above will be mentioned in discussions of 20th century movies and music long into the future. Citizen Kane definitely stands the test of time.
A popular classic like Cassablanca have endured due to strength of story and acting, something which ages much better than "groundbreaking at the time".
By the time most viewers today see Casablanca they'll have already seen most of the scenes ripped-offed, parodied, homaged, or referenced. For the first time viewer it won't feel like the original and instead will feel like an old black and white copy with a strange style of overacting.
The same happened to me watching The Wizard of Oz. Suddenly I remembered all those scenes from the Simpsons which I did not get before and was like, "now I get it".
There is an episode of Star Trek DS9 where a character almost literally quotes the speech at the end of The Third Man (given, incidentally, by Orson Welles). Had I not seen The Third Man, I would have thought it was just a stupid monologue, but knowing where it came from changed the tone and gravity of that scene completely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Qu... - where a book now being rewritten identically word for word is, of course, a completely different book ...
"Kane might have been interesting for the Americans, [but] it is completely passé for us, because the whole film is based on a misconception of what cinema is all about."
What does that even mean, assuming "us" means the French and not film connoisseurs anywhere in the world? Note that Truffaut, who was himself heavily influenced by Hitchock, later heavily criticizes general tendencies of French film of this era in a famous essay on (PDF: https://soma.sbcc.edu/users/davega/FILMST_113/Filmst113_ExFi...)
This xkcd strip seemed to be relevant in this case: https://xkcd.com/1112/
But to paraphrase Shakespeare: "There are more things in cinema, O Sartre, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Though many of Orson's scenes he isn't actually in as he refused to leave the hotel until they tempted him out with a magician, so he is often represented by shadow.