-
An Interview with Arthur Penn (Richard Lippe and Robin Wood)
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Arthur Penn Richard Roud, ed., Cinema: A Critical Dictionary; The Major Film-makers, Vol. 2, 775–78. Kinugasa to Zanussi© Martin Secker & Warburg, 1980. Arthur Penn’s is a cinema built on tensions and paradoxes. A gentle, sensitive, civilized man, he has made films notorious for their violence. His general orientation is toward author-director’s cinema, the European art-movie, and he admits to idolizing Ingmar Bergman; yet his films are intensely American in subject matter and usually rooted in the traditions of genre cinema, and he has only once directed from his own scenario (Alice’s Restaurant [1969], coscripted with Venable Herndon, based on Arlo Guthrie’s record and on factual material ). He has worked in both theater and television, and the style of his films can be partly described in terms of a tension between these two “pulls”: one thinks of him primarily as an actor’s director, yet he talks of editing as the most important aspect of the cinema, the essential creative act, and shoots a great deal of material (either using several cameras or refilming the same segment of action from different setups) from which he subsequently “extracts” (his word) the film. The richness of his films arises, nonetheless, above all from the remarkably alive, responsive performances he elicits from his actors. On two occasions (The Left-Handed Gun [1958], The Chase [1966]), the editing has been taken out of his hands; yet the films not only survive but impress as indisputably personal works. The Chase, which he himself partly rejects as a Hollywood film rather than “a Penn film,” remains arguably his best work to date, central to his preoccupations, consistently vivid in its realization. Through all this one can trace a coherent psychological pattern: on the one hand, a reliance on, and respect for, the instinctual (American 176 robin wood cinema; the gravitation toward Westerns and gangster movies; the spontaneous, intuitive work with actors); on the other, a persistent yearning after intellectual control (European cinema; the desire to be total author; the conscious, objective decisions involved in editing). The oppositions are hardly as neat as this makes them appear: there is no reason, for example, why conscious intellectual decisions shouldn’t play an important role in the direction of actors. yet anyone who watches Penn direct is struck by the spontaneous, participatory nature of his involvement. He even at times mimes the action from behind the camera during shooting, out of view of the actors, as if to obtain the performances he wants by some kind of sympathetic magic. This psychological pattern is reflected in the films, which consistently express in dramatic terms the struggle between spontaneous impulse and conscious control, the “holiness” of the first (in Blake’s sense: “Everything that lives is holy”)10 counterbalanced by the necessity for the second. Much of the quality of the films grows out of the interaction of these opposed drives—out of Penn’s implicit acknowledgment of the validity of each and the resulting sense of a dislocation or disharmony inherent in man’s nature, in the human condition. Made in 1958 when he was thirty-six years old, Penn’s first film, The Left Handed Gun, is centered on the struggle of Billy the Kid (Paul Newman) toward consciousness and self-awareness. His confused impulses of violence are complexly motivated, hence complexly evaluated , originating in a sense of moral outrage at a monstrous criminal act defended (indeed instigated) by the law, escalating into a willful and futile destruction. Against him are set two authority figures presented, if less inwardly, with great sympathy: Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston), the gentle pacifist father-substitute whose murder provokes Billy’s career of destruction, and Pat Garrett (John Dehner), the sane, steady, settled defender of law and order. Penn’s fourth film, The Chase, repeats this pattern, the values embodied in the spontaneous, instinctive Anna and Bubber Reeves (Jane Fonda and Robert Redford) set against the efforts at control of Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando). [35.175.121.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:50 GMT) Arthur Penn 177 Penn doesn’t, as a rule, write his own scripts (though he admits to contributing in various degrees to all of them); on the other hand, he never accepts subjects unless he finds them congenial and feels he can make them his own by a process of assimilation and transmutation. He has associated himself repeatedly with William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker, producing it on stage and...