koganbot

I kind of associate this style with the New Yorker, but I do love it.

Was in The New Republic, actually, in the 1930s, back when Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson were on staff. (Ferguson died in WW2.)

Yeah, I saw that on Wikipedia - I deleted the bit that said that I was sure this was more because I've read very little from that period at all than an actual stylistic influence.

Actually I associate Ferguson's style with poptimists! New Yorker writers might well be a source for Ferguson (Ring Lardner had a radio column in The New Yorker in the early '30s). I don't really know that era of the mag, other than Lardner and Thurber and Benchley and O'Hara, though I have the feeling that too many of its writers would hide behind an attitude of amused detachment, their not quite having outgrown the adolescent discovery that the world is often shit, and dressing that immature attitude in debonair attire. But that's a pretty sour assessment on my part of an era of the mag I've barely read, and Ring Lardner and John O'Hara, for instance, were great writers; O'Hara got better as he got older, too, into the 1950s and 1960s.

The New Republic, on the other hand, was a committed liberal-left intellectual magazine, so what Ferguson is doing in that context is pretty extraordinary, looking at Hollywood for its art as well as its bullshit (the two quotes above may seem aimed at the bullshit, but in general you're getting a generous though critical embrace of the subject matter that reminds me a lot of Lester Bangs and Tom Ewing on music).

Might as well post here what I said in the skyelounge, as I see it's under lock and key. Dave had been writing about Bazin. When I mentioned the Ferguson book (The Film Criticism Of Otis Ferguson; there's also a more general Otis Ferguson Reader that isn't as good), David said that he'd not be able to walk the book out of the Temple University Library, so he wanted tips as to what to read/xerox:

The thing about Ferguson is that he's a week-by-week reviewer and almost everything he writes has something really good in it but will also have something opaque or something lamely sentimental, sometimes long stretches of these. Also, to the extent that he writes theory, which isn't often, he's not particularly profound; from the few theoretical generalizations he makes you might think he's a realist, but basically what he means is, if you stick enough people in front of the camera some of 'em are bound to do something real; they can't help it. But really what he's good at is talking about the flash and motion of an Astaire or a Cagney, or the fact that a young Mickey Rooney really captures what a punk wise-ass is like; but what I get from this isn't something along the lines of "Oh, look, the camera captures the truth," but more like there's this teeming creative life that people live, thousands of bratty kids creating bratty kidness in their daily life, and now here's this business-entertainment-art thing called the movies and all these people are spilling into it as technicians and character actors and camera men and leads, so it isn't that you have this creative art that captures something else called reality, but rather you have all this ongoing creative activity already there in life that spills over into the movies. But also he's interested in how the things are made, so he'll look hard and notice what it is that the camera is choosing to look at. And what he makes him a proto-auteurist (in the good sense) is that he picks up on the fact that how you frame things and sequence things is how you tell the story, and will have a good deal to do with what a spectator takes as the psychological sense of what's going on. And the guy who's supposed to have the overall sense of how things are to be framed and sequenced and what the purpose of this shot and shadows that shadow is supposed to be is the director.

Anyway, my thumbnail description of the difference between Ferguson and Bazin is that for Ferguson movies are an activity in the world, so to the extent he's auteurist he's talking about the filmmakers' (definitely plural) activity in the world, whereas Bazin's leading you to think about the filmmakers' view of or attitude towards the world. (Obviously, being active in the world and having an attitude towards it are not mutually exclusive; this is just a crude distinction.)

So, anyway, look in the index for Astaire and for Cagney. In general, I'd jump straight to the reviews rather than to the essays at the beginning or the reportage at the end (though they're worth reading). I'd say just open in the middle and start reading, but I'd recommend the review of Fury pp 135-137, for his eye for details in the riot scene ("this picture has the true creative genius of including little things that are not germane to the concept but, once you see them, the spit and image of life itself"); also his review of Prisoner Of Shark Island pp 120-122, for the attempted escape. Just good passages of prose. Basically, you're not reading Ferguson for any great principle he will reveal to you but rather for the quick descriptions and his bits of bobbing and weaving in relation to the liberal readers' expectations, flashes of wit and sudden belly laughs, the man adding his own motion to the motion he's witnessing. And also you should read him for his good humor in the face of readers he knew were as likely to be as self-satisfied and obtuse and dismissive as the readers likely to casually look at your Stylus piece on teenpop.

His style reminds me a little of early Pauline Kael, actually! The Mr. Smith pan is incredible, can hardly believe it was published when the film was released! Just goes to show how sentimentalized the era is, maybe partly thanks to stuff like Mr. Smith suggesting to future generations that no one called bullshit back then, too.

Like, someday (some) people are probably going to think that Brokeback Mountain and Crash actually capture the "tenor of the times," too.

There's a line that goes Ferguson-Farber-Sarris/Kael (as if Sarris and Kael are equivalent - hah!). Of course, Kael busted out of The New Yorker detachment thing, being such a railing, committed writer; and she had a tremendous eye, of course. But I don't think she ever outgrew the glee in calling bullshit, and seemed to me to be calling bullshit for the sake of calling bullshit way too much, with a lot of specious reasoning to back up her tone-of-voice, and came across too much as a scold. (Which doesn't mean she wasn't a great critic; but does mean she was somewhat of a dumbass as a social critic, which is a thought I don't have time to elaborate on at the moment.)

Yeah, Kael gets a bit stodgier and schoolmarmish as she goes along, which is interesting because she seems (sometimes vocally) concerned about the New Yorker basically squashing her style with anti-first-person "one perceives" style edits. By the time she gets to "debunking" the new American auteurists supporting guys like Sam Fuller I kind of lose interest in a lot of her arguments (and the once-refreshing cutting-through-bullshit tone that she has in stuff like her "Hud" essay turns more into this kind of annoying smirk, like "oh, you probably thought _____, but you were mistaken"). But I haven't really read enough of her criticism, only the stuff I have in her big compilation book (I disagree with almost everything she has to say about films after 1980 or so and kinda skimmed through the last bunch of pages bristling a bit).

Also, re: the New Yorker (which I have a free subscription to for 6 months), my friend Jeremy tells me that his go-to longform politics magazine, Harper's, has been pretty dull for a year or two and that the New Yorker is currently taking its place (I've been enjoying the political writing there about as much as the entertainment and random -- e.g. a pretty awesome look at counterfeit olive oil industries -- stuff). So these distinctions are always in flux in print media, too.

Might as well post here what I said in the skyelounge, as I see it's under lock and key. Dave had been writing about Bazin. When I mentioned the Ferguson book (The Film Criticism Of Otis Ferguson; there's also a more general Otis Ferguson Reader that isn't as good), David said that he'd not be able to walk the book out of the Temple University Library, so he wanted tips as to what to read/xerox:

The thing about Ferguson is that he's a week-by-week reviewer and almost everything he writes has something really good in it but will also have something opaque or something lamely sentimental, sometimes long stretches of these. Also, to the extent that he writes theory, which isn't often, he's not particularly profound; from the few theoretical generalizations he makes you might think he's a realist, but basically what he means is, if you stick enough people in front of the camera some of 'em are bound to do something real; they can't help it. But really what he's good at is talking about the flash and motion of an Astaire or a Cagney, or the fact that a young Mickey Rooney really captures what a punk wise-ass is like; but what I get from this isn't something along the lines of "Oh, look, the camera captures the truth," but more like there's this teeming creative life that people live, thousands of bratty kids creating bratty kidness in their daily life, and now here's this business-entertainment-art thing called the movies and all these people are spilling into it as technicians and character actors and camera men and leads, so it isn't that you have this creative art that captures something else called reality, but rather you have all this ongoing creative activity already there in life that spills over into the movies. But also he's interested in how the things are made, so he'll look hard and notice what it is that the camera is choosing to look at. And what makes him a proto-auteurist (in the good sense) is that he picks up on the fact that how you frame things and sequence them is how you tell the story, and will have a good deal to do with what a spectator takes as the psychological sense of what's going on. And the guy who's supposed to have the overall sense of how things are to be framed and sequenced and what the purpose of this shot or that shadow is supposed to be is the director.

Anyway, my thumbnail description of the difference between Ferguson and Bazin is that for Ferguson movies are an activity in the world, so to the extent he's auteurist he's talking about the filmmakers' (definitely plural) activity in the world, whereas Bazin's leading you to think about the filmmakers' view of or attitude towards the world. (Obviously, being active in the world and having an attitude towards it are not mutually exclusive; this is just a crude distinction.)

So, anyway, look in the index for Astaire and for Cagney. In general, I'd jump straight to the reviews rather than to the essays at the beginning or the reportage at the end (though they're worth reading). I'd say just open in the middle and start reading, but I'd recommend the review of Fury pp 135-137, for his eye for details in the riot scene ("this picture has the true creative genius of including little things that are not germane to the concept but, once you see them, the spit and image of life itself"); also his review of Prisoner Of Shark Island pp 120-122, for the attempted escape. Just good passages of prose. Basically, you're not reading Ferguson for any great principle he will reveal to you but rather for the quick descriptions and his bits of bobbing and weaving in relation to the liberal readers' expectations, flashes of wit and sudden belly laughs, the man adding his own motion to the motion he's witnessing. And also you should read him for his good humor in the face of readers he knew were as likely to be as self-satisfied and obtuse and dismissive as the readers likely to casually look at your Stylus piece on teenpop.

Ferguson is a decent writer but that Mr. Smith comment is dreadful. It says nothing about what the film actually says and utterly misses the film's remarkable subversiveness (Capra, alone among political filmmakers, doesn't regard people as idiots - unlike, say, Kazan, Altman, Kubrick, etc.). He doesn't explain exactly WHY the film is "more about themes than people," just lazily quotes someone else and makes a snide reference to Capra's "continued box-office triumph" and his baffling respect for the "American relic" - something that Ferguson evidently fancied himself far above.

It's the same condescendingm, thoughtless cant everyone's been writing about Capra since the 40s (with a couple of exceptions, I can't think of anyone who's written well about him).