Sir, what do you read in between your columns?”
“Do you ever read reviews?”
“What does a critic read?”
These questions I get always from students and, sometimes, from teachers. I answer these questions in forums, and talk about them in my lectures. Almost always, this is the classic answer I resort to: To learn how to write, one must know how to read. Or listen (to what you are reading). Very general responses, if I may add.
I do not know how long ago was it that I explained the name I gave this column. “Reeling” as a title must be obvious to those who read books on criticism. Pauline Kael was the New Yorker reviewer who introduced a new way of reading films. She was accused of not being analytical but, as Owen Gleiberman of Variety says, Kael’s analysis was “seared into every word, woven into the expressive power of her free-style flow.” Continuing, Gleiberman describes Kael’s thoughts as “incisive, incantatory, indelible.”
I must say that to approximate a style that reaches the edge of those modifiers is difficult enough, but to be inspired by this woman is utterly attainable. So, I stay with the attainable.
From London, I received a delayed gift from Dr. Jaya Jacobo, an academic in transition from being a material presence to friends to being a mythical memory (a status that would certainly make her giddy despite her propensity to charm people with her elegant obscurantism). It is a back issue of Sight and Sound, not that old as it is a 2022 edition. On the cover is Paul Verhoeven, the director behind such iconic films as Basic Instinct and Robocop; inside is an interview by another filmmaker, Kleber Mendonça Filho. Further inside is Verhoeven’s latest film, called Benedetta, which is about a young woman who enters a convent and has an affair with another novice. In the synopsis of the review written by John Bleasdale, it states how Benedetta “rises in hierarchy, aided by a series of ecstatic religious visions. Soon the Mother Superior and ecclesiastical authorities grow disturbed by her rise to power, and begin to plot against her.”
Bleasdale’s review fulfills what good reviews are all about, and that is to make films look real than how it appears on the screen (Gleiberman speaking of Pauline Kael still). Here are some lines from Bleasdale’s review: “Increasingly, the film resembles a sort of ecclesiastical Basic Instinct, with Benedetta as Catherine Tramell, possessing similar blonde locks once sans wimple and a penchant for exposing herself.” The review goes on: “It is difficult to tell how seriously to take the film, and how seriously the film is taking itself.” These are lines we can, at any given time, apply to our reviews of our so-called winning films.
We know what are winning films but are there winning actors?
There are, but not in terms of awards but in their understanding of the craft and art of filmmaking. Liv Ullman—I am reading about her right now in the same 2022 issue of Sight and Sound where she talks about the genius of Ingmar Bergman, in an essay with the introduction and interview by Hannah McGill. And to talk of Ingmar Bergman is to bring into the circle another Bergman: Ingrid.
Listen to Liv Ullman speak of the two Bergmans: “I did Autumn Sonata [1978] with Ingrid Bergman, and seeing her working with Ingmar…. I don’t know how well they understood each other. Maybe not so well; but she was incredible.” Describing this incredibility, Ullman narrates further: “She and Ingmar, it was two worlds—director and actor, and sometimes that’s difficult. I was the angry daughter in that film…. As Ingmar had it in the script, I had all the words; all she had to say was something like, ‘Please hold me; please forgive me.’ But when Ingmar turned the camera to her, she said, ‘I’m not gonna say that! I want to slap her in the face!’”
What happened next was terrific and terrible. According to Ullman, the two walked out of the set into a corridor. All they could hear were angry voices. They thought of the film not being completed. But Bergman and Bergman came back, with the director winning the battle. Ullman, however, saw something: when Ingrid Bergman said those words she did not want to utter, you saw in her face what she really wanted to say.
Ullman in the same interview has opinions about remakes that students of cinema should heed. When another Norwegian director, Erik Poppe, did a “remake” (the quotation marks you will understand later) of The Emigrants, which was directed by Jan Troell in 1971, Ullman saw that the actor who played her role played the character of the refugee woman differently that Ullman believed it was not her role anymore.
But what are the lessons we could learn from Buster Keaton? Known as the Great Stone Face by John Gillet and James Blue in an interview done in the mid-1960s, Buster Keaton was also described in the essay as possessing “expressive immobility.” Overshadowed by the celebrity of Charlie Chaplin, cineastes are discovering once more this actor.
One of the many questions asked in the interview reveals how exactly we need to view Buster Keaton. This question was on how the great comedian treated women in his films, were “subjected to all kinds of humiliations and yet they battle on. They get pulled and pushed around but they always stand by you.” The question punches with “Did they mind at all?” To this, Buster Keaton replies: “No, no. They didn’t mind at all…. It’s because so many leading ladies in those days looked as though they had just walked out of a beauty parlour. We said, ‘To thunder with that, we’ll dirty ours a bit and let them have some rough treatment.’”