Films and Feelings / Cecil B. DeMille / Jean Cocteau / Ingmar Bergman / Joseph Losey / John Huston / Michael Carreras | Raymond Durgnat, 1967

Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings, 1967

The book is divided into four sections. The first is concerned with the union of film style and film content. The second treats the connection between the film as an entertainment and as a picture of reality, suggesting that even films that are unabashedly “escapist” are really rooted in, and comment on, the inescapable facts of social life. The third section attempts to close the gap between the popular responses and those of “high culture.” The final section produces further evidence of the existence of cinematic poetry in the commercial movie.

 Raymond Durgnat, 1967

 

On : Cecil B. DeMille : If DeMille had had a coat of arms, a cross and a bathtub would have been equally prominent thereon, and this moral dichotomy is characteristically Victorian.

On : Jean Cocteau : Cocteau’s artistic personality is a complex blend of fin-de-siecle dandyism, a classical discipline of form, a disillusioned narcissism and a romantic preoccupation with the spiritual worlds on the borders of the ‘real’ one. One might speak of self-centredness in depth; he reworks a repertoire of obsessive themes into a dazzling variety of forms, so as to bring out the emotional ambivalence which inspires it.

On : Ingmar Bergman : Occasionally, one is tempted to divide Bergman’s work into ‘first-rate’ and ‘second-rate’. But wiser counsel prevails – each Bergman film explores and lyricizes experiences lying latent in the others, and Bergman’s ‘second-rate’ usually results in a challenge more powerful, more intimate, more truly humane than almost everyone else’s ‘first-rate’.

On : The List Of Adrian Messenger, John Huston, 1963. There is a nicely macabre scene where the murderer’s removal of his make-up from his face resembles a slow, grueling self-dismemberment. In fact, the best tribute one can pay make-up man Bud Westmore is to admit that, after the film’s coda, one felt like inspecting all one’s friends’ faces and saying, “Wonderful, very convincing… but who are you really?”.

On : Maniac, Michael Carreras, 1963, a Hammer horror film : This is from a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, which means, in effect, that a handful of effectively macabre ideas are worked out in a style as creative as the operation of a meat grinder.

On : The Damned, Joseph Losey, 1963 : For all its faults, Losey’s film is in the highest class. Its social criticism cuts like a whip and yet is full of haunting poetic images. Its science-fiction universe, with its helicopters and rubber suits, recalls the eerie coldness of Antonioni.

Raymond Durgnat, 1932–2002