Highway 61 wrote:jbeall wrote:Highway 61 wrote:White attacks social-issue films because they are fashionable, so he knows he'll get a rise out of people. It works, and he's very good at it.
Vladimir Nabokov loathed socially conscious literature, but he didn't go around making an ass out himself by expounding on the profundities of Mickey Spillane. White, on the other hand, is more than willing to humiliate himself by combing through his thesaurus and finding the stupidest words possible to praise the stupidest films possible. It's a winning formula that has attracted plenty of attention—and apparently admirers.
Minor quibble: Nabokov loathed psychoanalysis (or at least psychoanalytic criticism) and went out of his way to disparage it, occasionally to the detriment of his novels. However, Nabokov's dispute w/psychoanalysis seemed much more deep-seated than Armond White's rather more blatant trolling. White's far too intelligent to believe half the shit he writes, most of which is filled which logical fallacies that my freshman comp students could pick apart in their sleep.
I don't think there's any quibble. I'm a big admirer of Nabokov, so I would agree that his positions on art and literature stemmed from deeply held convictions. Unless you're saying that it was psychoanalytic criticism Nabokov disliked and not social issue novels? I don't have my copy of
Strong Opinions handy, but I'm almost certain that Nabokov mentions several times that he thinks social issues are ephemeral and that he's only interested in aesthetic achievement.
Well I think most great filmmakers including Godard, Bunuel, Renoir, Fassbinder, Rossellini, Ozu, Bresson, Antonioni and so on exhibit both a sensitivity to social issues as well as aesthetic achievement, and I believe great art should ideally exhibit both, but at the end of the day I think most here would choose work solely concerned with aesthetic achievement over work solely concerned with social issues if they had no other choice. The latter, such as the plays of Arthur Miller, tends to merely preach to the choir whereas the former, and an example may include Last Year at Marienbad, is often rather indulgent, even if it still often provides sensory stimulation.
With that said, I do often ask myself why among cinephiles there's a strong preference for termite art over white elephant art, to employ Manny Farber's terminology. Nobody every dismisses War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, or The Divine Comedy for being self-serious and bloated, but "ambitious" films tend to be rather more divisive and aren't quite as immune from such epithets. 2001 and 8 1/2 are good examples, or see how Farber speaks of Bergman and Antonioni.
