052 Herman G. Weinberg

Old words on old movies, but new

Earlier this summer I pulled out from basement storage my copy of Herman G. Weinberg’s Saint Cinema, a collection of essays and articles by a man who worked as a critic, an innovative subtitler of European movies, a filmmaker (his 1931 Autumn Fire, a short experimental work, was a love letter to a woman he’d eventually marry), and a raconteur. His name should be included alongside the likes of Harry Alan Potamkin, Iris Barry, or Jay Leyda. He was friendly with Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Flaherty, and Fritz Lang (who wrote the preface).¹

I picked up this volume from Mercer Street Books in New York, probably in the mid-2000s, and though I looked at entries from time to time, I only recently read through it in a more devoted and linear fashion. The entries include essays and some loose interviews, as well as many installments of the column in Film Culture, “Coffee, Brandy & Cigars.” Weinberg’s enthusiasms, anecdotes, and insights are charming, but more than that, they’re testaments to a distinct temperament and attitude toward film, toward the arts, toward life and culture. The know-it-all cinephile might flip through a few pages of the book and dismiss Weinberg as a cobwebbed aesthetic conservative from times past, and little more. But to do so would be a mistake, if we are interested in film and if we are curious about the past as more than a carcass to be scavenged for looks & vibes.

Weinberg supports a cinematic art that strives for ambition, grace, wit, experimentation, and a certain moral decency—not necessarily a bourgeois one, mind you. His home base might be placed in the art cinema, as well as the most elegant entertainment, of 1920s and early 1930s European and American filmmaking. Many of the films and filmmakers he champions in his writing—von Stroheim’s work overall, including the the original and intended cut of Greed; Murnau’s Faust; Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc; Chaplin’s films; Lang; Pabst; Eisenstein; Clair; Lubitsch; von Sternberg; Welles—are still canonical today, although they wax and wane in fashion. Weinberg felt that it was a tragedy that the great film artists so often struggled to make the projects they wanted to make, and so often had their preferred cuts rejected and destroyed and tinkered with. (What if? What if the world could have seen Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico as planned? What if Flaherty managed to complete more films?) He writes compellingly about films virtually no cinephiles today discuss, like Nicolas Farkas’ Thunder in the East (1934), Compton Bennett’s Gift Horse (aka Glory at Sea, 1952), or Reinhold Schünzel’s 1935 Amphitryon (although it’s the French version, Les dieux s'amusent, he emphatically prefers to the German). And Weinberg occasionally describes, from memory or research, films that are today lost. And through the eyes of this critic we can start to imagine, in a lively way, what might have been.

A figure like Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast represents for Weinberg one of these missed chances. The movies d’Arrast directed were

“eight of the loveliest films ever made by anyone. Not world-shaking masterpieces of social and political comment, to be sure, not filled with big scenes and thundering dramatics, not even probings into the mysteries of the heart, and surely sans the bravura of cinematic fireworks and the whole panoply of dazzling virtuosity with which those names that have been enshrined in this pantheon have enthralled us. Just eight quiet, witty comedies, sometimes edged with satire but always with elegance, made by a civilized gentleman (what we used to call “a man of the world”) who thought it was something, too, to dedicate oneself to laughter (indeed, one of his films is called just that, Laughter) as Chaplin and Lubitsch did, as René Clair did … and as d’Arrast did so felicitously in five silent films and three sound ones.”

Weinberg saw in d’Arrast a “master … of pace and cutting, with never a frame too much, in which the slightest gesture counted and the human face—most important of all—reflected that joy of living that seems today to have gone out of the world.” Writing all this in 1969, Weinberg notes that the majority of the director’s work seems lost, and something like Dry Martini (1928), which is one of the lost ones, survives in part through the loving description of the critic, three decades after the fact. This backward glance preserves, partially, a thing that proved too delicate for the rough-and-tumble ways of the film industry and the market.

Weinberg isn’t merely a worshiper at the altar of an earlier era’s canon; he provides his readers with glimpses of alternate film histories, where different choices and different availability of titles or projects might radically reshape what we know of the movies. And he hailed experimentation in newer cinema, including the work of Orson Welles, like Confidential Report/Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil. His column in the Mekas brothers’ journal Film Culture speaks to an ongoing engagement with cinematic exploration going into the back half of the twentieth century, and (without researching it) I surmise he is the “HGW” cited as a “spiritual advisor” in the credits of Hallelujah the Hills. In his columns and elsewhere, Weinberg cites approvingly Flaming Creatures, the work of Norman McLaren, and at least some of Godard (e.g., Contempt) and Truffaut (e.g., The 400 Blows). In one of his early 1960s columns he writes: “There is nothing more powerful than an honest camera eye, one devoid of chi-chi or fustian. Adolfas Mekas has it, The Brig, heaven knows, has it. Emswhiller and Godard have it. So does Truffaut, so did Mizoguchi. Pasolini has it. Ron Rice, Jack Smith, Bresson, Rossellini, Dreyer … Chris Marker sometimes has it …” That’s not a timid list, especially when you consider how relatively young and new several of those names were to American screens at the time. Weinberg intuits connections between that great age of his young adulthood up through the early sound era, and the underground poetry of 1960s filmmaking.

If he seems dismissive of some other art filmmakers of his time, figures we might today think of as Olympians, perhaps it’s because he’s more attentive to the achievements of those who preceded them, the Titans. “The current flurry [over Ingmar Bergman] … would come with better grace if all who showered such an accolade of praise on him had similarly recognized his great predecessors.” He likes a couple of early films by Michelangelo Antonioni … but just those two.

In 1970 he wrote a skeptical essay on three recent films by Antonioni (Zabriskie Point), Fellini (Satyricon), and Visconti (The Damned). Precisely because he respects their basic ambitions and skill, he has little patience for what he perceives as the inanities or the preciousness of their films’ attempts to titillate, to shock, or to make a statement.

“Forty-five years ago, out of a milieu as convulsive as pagan Rome—post-World War I Berlin—came a truly erotic film, Variety, a masterpiece not only of sophisticated film making but of imagery in the delineation of sex (heterosexual, to be sure, which is not quite so recalcitrant for the artist to deal with) that did not play at suttee with one’s sensibilities but reinforced them by veracity—and in its own intellectually measured way it went the whole way. The irony is that Fellini’s film, for all its literalness, never really does. Petronius, in any case, was not the bitter moralist that Juvenal was in the latter’s own satires, and neither is Fellini, for whom this film … is a veritable “Roman holiday,” with all that this dubious phrase implies. The point is: I never read a word by director E.A. Dupont in rationalization of his Variety. They didn’t have to “protest” so much in those days—they just quietly made masterpieces. Today, the plethora of interviews a director gives, to get publicity for his film, become part of the film; we have to take it all into consideration, in order to fully understand his work.”

This judgment runs contrary to subsequent conventional wisdom of the rest of the twentieth century, which was that cinema got more erotic as it got more sexually frank, and that this was all good. It’s not that Weinberg is a prude—hard to conclude that he is, given his contemporaneous support for a number of sexually radical and queer experimental films—but that his criteria for assessing high-quality eroticism in cinema are simply different than the dominant criteria of subsequent generations. Contrast his words with Pauline Kael’s famous review of Last Tango in Paris, which includes a passage that remarks more generally on what she referred to as the arrival of eroticism in cinema in the early 1970s:

“Many of us expected eroticism to come to the movies, and some of us had even guessed that it might come from Bertolucci, because he seemed to have the elegance and the richness and the sensuality to make lushly erotic movies.”

Kael was only about a decade younger than Weinberg, but—I’m taking her as emblematic, here, not trying to zero in her specifically as a person—her basic premises and value system seem to mark some kind of decisive shift from the old to the new. (Now, of course, we hear about Gen Z’s purported discomfort with sexual frankness in cinema, and in some ways, the old is once more new. But let me remain clear: neither Weinberg, nor I, argue for puritanism.)

Someone who thinks that Dupont’s Variety and Gustav Machaty’s Ecstasy are high water marks of artful cinematic eroticism would be some kind of unicorn, today. But here’s an area where Weinberg’s forgotten sensibility has a distinct advantage: it isn’t nearly so easily taken in by the marketing, the hype, the programming of novelty. (Whereas the garden variety film journalist or influencer now seems to have no ideas outside of marketing, hype, and novelty.) The person who retains an older perspective might see more readily when something is been recycled, and they’re more sensitive to how and why the recycled product might be inferior, despite all advertisements to the contrary. It’s not unusual for Weinberg to pick out some want of “originality” in a newer film:

“Wistful was it to see King Vidor try to recapture a passage of visual poetry from his early Bardelys the Magnificent in Solomon and Sheba, and fail. (The low-hanging branches of a willow tree brushing the camera’s lens as it passes slowly in a boat carrying the lovers.) But the old magic was gone. Eleanor Boardman and John Gilbert were not there, nor was Vidor’s heart, only his mind, remembering. ... Love wasn’t there, either, love for what he, Vidor, was doing … and for the lovely, fragile beauty of Eleanor Boardman, his inamorata at the time.”

He continues:

“Our current crop of directors are eclectics, picking from others what they can use. Vidor picks from himself, being one of the “old guard” who originated film imagery, but Ingmar Bergman in Wild Strawberries went back a decade for the old doctor who sees himself in a coffin—an exact counterpart of which appears in Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel, made almost ten years before. And Kurosawa’s shadow of a doll dancing to a music box in Drunken Angel was antedated yet another decade by a similar scene in Von Sternberg’s Dishonored.”

And so on. Even Chaplin couldn’t always be “original,” such as when he quoted René Clair’s work in Modern Times. Vigo’s A Propos de Nice “antedated La Dolce Vita, L’Avventura, La Notte, etc., by thirty years, far more clearly and, as a result, far more piercingly.” Viridiana, says Weinberg, is a “searing” film but Buñuel “said it all and much stronger in his 1930 L'Age d'Or.” He acknowledges, “Little, indeed, is new under he sun.”

If his audience has forgotten, Weinberg remembers for them.

---

I recommend watching Arthur Lipsett’s 1962 NFB documentary, Experimental Film, which features Weinberg and other figures in a panel discussion, with extended clips of some of the work under consideration. The speakers seem relatively cool toward the crop of experimental films coming out in those years, like Robert Breer’s early stuff or Lenica and Borowczyk’s Dom. The “bad” sort of experimental films make no effort to communicate, says one participant; they don’t have meaning or evince any real dedication to craft, says another. One panelist suggests that the films work in a subjective and introspective way, and therefore a film like Dom might have “two or three meanings,” although not much more than that. Weinberg seems to be quite unmoved by the experimental endeavors, although he concedes that Norman McLaren is a poet and therefore an artist. Interestingly he says this directly to NFB producer Guy Glover, who was McLaren’s lifelong partner; I don’t think Weinberg was merely being conciliatory for personal reasons, but perhaps he mentioned McLaren specifically in that moment because he understood the personal relationship.

Weinberg as a columnist didn’t traffick in gossip, exactly, but he did share worldly facts or personal anecdotes that delighted and that illuminated some aspect of a work of art. Add up enough of these, and you flesh out a sensibility so that it isn’t merely a pre-determined agenda; include them in criticism and they start to enliven even the least fashionable, least discussed art—making this material fit again (as it always was) for the actual world. Miguel de Unamuno reminded his readers that every philosophy was grounded in the philosopher who was a man (sic) of “flesh and bone.” I wish to see more of that in criticism, past, present, or future, and certainly part of what Weinberg provides.

1. The late Peter Nellhaus, who sadly left this world earlier this year, titled his blog, Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee, after Weinberg’s column for Film Culture, “Coffee, Brandy & Cigars,” which in turn was inspired by the title of Alexander Roda Roda’s book of stories, translated into English as Brandy, Tobacco, and That Damned Thing, Love. Many entries of “Coffee, Brandy & Cigars” are collected in Saint Cinema; I’m not yet sure what Weinberg’s other books are like.