LEWTONESQUE: Biased Observer Watches Fantastic Film: Round Up 1946, Part One: Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Round Up 1946, Part One: Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 1,209 films made in 1946, 36 contain elements of horror, science fiction or fantasy. They are:

A Matter of Life and Death
Ang iyong ina
Angel on My Shoulder
Bedlam
Devil Bat's Daughter
Devil Monster
El ahijado de la muerte
El jinete fantasma
El moderno Barba Azul
El sexo fuerte
El superhombre
Fight That Ghost
Floarea reginei
Hay muertos que no hacen ruido
House of Horrors
It's a Wonderful Life
Kamennyy tsvetok
La belle et la bête
La tentation de Barbizon
Les portes de la nuit
Reka caruje
She-Wolf of London
Strangler of the Swamp
Sylvie et le fantôme
The Bandit of Sherwood Forest
The Beast with Five Fingers
The Brute Man
The Catman of Paris
The Cockeyed Miracle
The Crimson Ghost
The Curse of the Wraydons
The Face of Marble
The Flying Serpent
The Spider Woman Strikes Back
The Time of Their Lives
Valley of the Zombies

Not to downplay the value of Capra's inverted version of Dickens' Christmas Carol, It's A Wonderful Life, the milestone fantasy film of 1946 is Jean Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast. Stately, beautiful, and, though based on a fairytale, not pandering to children, it is the kind of film that could only have been made by a bisexual ex-surrealist who thought of himself as a poet, and, whether or not it entirely succeeds, attempts to be a work of art in an arena that, at that time, was playing host to an awful lot of mad scientists.

It represents a return to the kind of serious, pure fantasy film making that was the province of the Germans prior to Hitler having decided such stuff was 'degenerate' and inflicted his own rigid political aesthetic 'ethic' (typified by the music of Wagner, the architecture of Speer, the films of Riefensthal, and the bizarre portrait pictured at left) on his country's movie industry. Beauty And The Beast is also the expression of a single individual's uncompromised vision, rather than the too-many-cooks product of a compartmentalised studio system, making it more akin to a painting or a novel than the latest Universal monster movie. A true auteur film, is it going too far to suggest that it probably couldn't have existed in the world we would have had if the nazis had won the war?

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Biased Critical Terminology

Fantastique: a French term for a literary and cinematic genre that overlaps with science fiction, horror and fantasy. We'll be spelling it with a 'c' instead of 'que' so as not to look any goofier than we already do, but the Fantastic is generally what we will be looking for here, and the hoity-toitier it is the better we like it. Expect to see Jean Ray mentioned wherever we can figure out how to shoehorn him in.

Auteur: 1950s-era auteur theory, associated with the French New Wave and the critics who wrote for Cahiers Du Cinema, holds that the films of a good director (or, at any rate, an interesting one) reflect their personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). In spite of the films in question being made as part of an industrial process, the auteur's creative voice is distinctive enough to shine through all kinds of studio interference. Another good place for this to occur is in the making of low budget films and films made outside the studio system. We're particularly fond of films that subvert genre to the nefarious purpose of a writer or director with a bone to pick.

Semiotics: Biased Observer keeps looking this word up, but finds that the definition slides out of his memory like his brain was made of Teflon, and it will therefore not be used except in this sidebar. That was it just now.

Mise en Scene: has been called film criticism's 'grand undefined term'. That means that everyone who uses it presumably has some idea of what they mean by it, but anyone who reads it has to guess, which makes it a pretty sloppy word for anyone to employ who actually wants to be understood. But it makes you sound like an intellectual, so I'll try to fit it in every three sentences or so.

Good Kill: term used by splatter and slasher film fans to describe a particularly wet or inventive murder or, on occasion, other mode of buying it. While we don't have a problem with gore effects in general, we don't particularly care for films that are distinguished entirely by their catalogue of good kills, and that's not what we're after here, though a good exploding sheep a la Bad Taste is a joy forever, make no mistake.

Lewtonensque: This term is going to crop up over and over here. Val Lewton was a producer, not a director, though the term auteur suits his output perfectly, as his personality is ground into every film his name was attached to, particularly the B horror films he left a lucrative career by David O. Selznick's side to make for a pittance at RKO. His early films in particular are firmly grounded in the urban present (of the 1940's) and are models of restraint as they depict the fantastic intruding into modern life, and not a pitchfork wielding villager anywhere to be seen.

Cronenbergesque: A positive descriptor. Clinical, chilly, and intellectual are all terms characteristically used to describe David Cronenberg, but 'humane', 'humanist' and 'a fantastic interview' apply equally well. Canada's answer to J.G. Ballard, on whose behalf the term 'body horror' was coined, though I dunno by whom.

LEWTONESQUE: Biased Observer Watches Fantastic Film

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Round Up 1946, Part One: Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast

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