Great piece today by the film historian David Thomson on how Depression-era filmmakers had the artistic grounding and creative skills to make art out of economic hardship. No more. Thomson:
How will it be this time? The US motion picture business has been worried for years. It knew the audience was shrinking, and sensed its own inability to reproduce the populism of the 30s and 40s. And nobody yet knows the extent of this crisis. So there's no point in anyone - let alone Hollywood - asking if it has the writers and directors who might speak to the nation while offering merciful consolation and some distant hope.You only have to look at the films the US mainstream has made in this century so far to know that we lack the talent or experience that will count. In 1930, the talent in American pictures was from literature, the theatre and journalism, with educated backgrounds and a shared sense of the moral identity in being American. Today's talent consists of absurdly rich young people who have made the hits of the past dozen years. They know very little about life, except what they have to lose.
Those people and much of the audience have lost the habit, or even the memory, of hard times. And the connection between that dismay and great hopes has had 60 years of prosperity, supremacy and self-satisfaction. The last is the most alarming trait, for it indicates the loss of a critical spirit and a sense of politics that believes in the steady decay of power. The critical spirit that made My Man Godfrey and wrote The Grapes of Wrath is not coming back at a snap of the fingers. Americans (and the people of many other nations) need to reacquire a capacity for experience, for registering what happens to you and seeing it writ large in the people as a whole.
In other words: can great art come from suburbia?
Walker Percy once asked why it is that a nation that suffers from material deprivation and oppression produced a Solzhenitsyn, but a nation like ours, which is relatively prosperous and in which artists are free to create whatever they want, cannot? He also asked -- and I paraphrase -- why it is that the poorest and most backwards region of the country -- the South in general, and Mississippi in particular -- produces the most great novelists? One might also wonder why Europe, which has never been more prosperous and egalitarian as it has been since about 1950, is artistically moribund?
There is some connection between suffering and creativity. Thomson indicates that comfort enervates the creative spirit, not only in individuals, but in cultures.
Another question: why is it that the Italian Renaissance, probably the greatest outpouring of creative genius in one place and time in the history of the world, occurred in a time of relative prosperity? Could it be that the conditions that lead to a decadent artistic vision is not so much wealth itself, but egalitarianism (Renaissance Italy was not, of course, a democracy)? Discuss.
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Several points:
1. For once, I think Cosimano, the perpetual gadfly, has made a point worth making. Is art actually important? On what grounds? I would have thought that, for a Christian, emphasis on art is close to idolatry, like the Puritans thought (??). Look, I personally like reading novels and poetry, visiting art galleries, and looking round cathedrals, but I'm just struggling here to find a justification for the value of art other than it being what I like. Suggestions?
2. Suppose art deteriorates with material well-being - what do you propose - start a project for the encouragement of suffering in order to generate art? Sounds a trifle sadistic to me.
3. Does anyone actually like Italian Renaissance art? I admire the skill, but dislike the product - all those angels and half-naked men fighting. OK, the point made would stand if Rembrandt's Holland or Shakespeare's England had been chosen instead (times that produced art that I actually like), but I sometimes think conservatives pick an artist or era to prove a point, rather than because they actually have any interest in it - all that stuff about how children should learn to read Virgil (does anyone actually like Virgil??)
4. The Black Death caused great suffering while it was happening, but greatly improved the standard of living for the remaining peasants, by reducing the population and introducing labour mobility.
Faith gives a person some "givens" to start with, a form to work with in. It offers limits, points of resistance, that can give traction to an artist.
Too much freedom lends itself to formlessness, vagueness, lack of direction and meaning, triviality.
Annie Dillard once quoted Simone Weil as writing, "We love the country of here below. It offers us resistance (to love?)." Can't remember the exact wording.
I find the quote interesting, in this context, though am not sure what the original was.
rombald
October 21, 2008 7:56 AM
Look, I personally like reading novels and poetry, visiting art galleries, and looking round cathedrals, but I'm just struggling here to find a justification for the value of art other than it being what I like. Suggestions?
That is a good enough reason right there.
Matt,
I second everything Lancelot Lamar said in terms of his devaluation of Steinbeck in relation to his contemporaries -- especially in relation to Faulkner, who is by far the greatest writer in this country's history, but also in relation to any of the major figures of the Southern Renaissance from the 1920's up through the 1970's or so, who produced by far the greatest body of fiction in this country's history.
In any event, Steinbeck drifted toward the right politically over the course of his career, in large part because the left came more and more to abandon the populism of works like *The Grapes of Wrath.*
By the time he died, Steinbeck was a sort of proto- neo-conservative, in that he remained an old-school Roosevelt Democrat at a time when the New Left was on the rise.
Steinbeck -- like John Dos Passos -- became a vocal anti-communist after World War II, a stance which put him on the outs with the leftist elite and led to the eclipse of his critical standing by the 1960's, an eclipse from which his work -- like Dos Passos's work -- has (unfortunately) never returned.
Rufus/Lancelot
As a reader, I too would prefer to curl up with Faulkner before Steinbeck but both men's works were realised in film by Hollywood Liberal, Communist and Socialist - Mr Kazan.
My point remains the same, the economic disaster of the Great Depression is not the root cause for the great artistry of Hollywood in that time but the ability of the artists of that era to question the social, political, and economic realities of early 20th Century America. Will conservatives of the 21st century pose them, or will the Left again set the agenda?
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