Arthur Penn: New Edition

Notes

The Chase Flashback, 1965 Chapter 2 of Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New york: Columbia University Press, 1986), 11–25. This essay constitutes a flashback in two senses. The minor sense: I wrote a chapter on The Chase in a little book on Arthur Penn published about fifteen years ago, in the days of my critical innocence (or culpable ignorance, as you will)—innocence, above all, of concepts of ideology, and of any clearly defined political position. The major sense: the film was released some years before the period with which this book [Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan] is concerned. My evaluation of The Chase has not changed, but my sense of the kind of importance to be attributed to it has changed somewhat: I now see it as a seminal work, anticipating many of the major developments that took place in the Hollywood cinema during the decade following its production, hence a fitting starting point for this investigation. The present account will differ from the earlier, not only in approach but in ambition. There the aim (within the framework of an uncomplicatedly auteurist study) was to provide an appreciation of The Chase as “an Arthur Penn film,” despite the obviously collaborative nature of the project and despite its auteur’s own explicit reservations, marking a phase in a personal development. Here, while reaffirming my admiration for the film (and for Penn’s work in general—Night Moves is among the finest Hollywood films of the 1970s), I use it partly as a pretext for a number of more widespread concerns that are basic to this book: to establish a far more complex attitude toward the auteur theory; to introduce certain critical/theoretical concepts fundamental to my present position, which will reflect in particular on assumptions about “realism” and the “realistic”; to initiate a discussion of the 182 robin wood differences (specifically, the ideological differences, though of course all differences are in a looser sense ideological) between the classical and modern Hollywood cinema (one can take 1960 as a convenient, though to some degree arbitrary, point of demarcation). We may begin with Penn’s own attitude to the film and with the bourgeois myth of “the artist” that would have us attach a definitive importance to it: the myth of the artist as a superior being, donating to the world works that are the result of his conscious intentions and over which (at least if they are successful) he is assumed to have control . It may appear superfluous, after two decades of structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, to attack the “intentionalist fallacy” yet again, but it dies hard, as anyone involved in film education will be aware. If the director says his film is bad, how can the critic assert Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) and Delly Grastner (Melanie Griffith). Night Moves (1975). The Chase 183 that it is good? If the director claims total unawareness of certain layers of meaning in his work, then how can those layers of meaning exist outside the critic’s imagination? If the director (“the artist”) says he had no control over a given film, then how can that film be worth defending? One of the major concerns of twentieth-century aesthetics has been progressively to answer, and in effect dismiss, such questions : first, through the “primitive” use of psychoanalysis (the artist is not aware of his own unconscious impulses), a use that proved perfectly compatible with, and assimilable into, traditional aesthetics; then, through Marxist concepts of ideology (where traditional and modern aesthetics part company), revealing a whole range of cultural assumptions, tensions, and contradictions operating through codes, conventions, and genres, largely beyond the artist’s control; finally, through the sophisticated use of psychoanalytical theory that seeks to explain not merely the individual “case” but ideology itself, the construction of the subject within it, the relationship between subject and spectacle. yet an important sense remains in which the production of a work is an intentional act—(the intentions of several or many may of course be involved)—and the discernible presence of authorial “fingerprints,” “signature,” “touch,” etc., remains one of the clearest tokens of the specificity of a particular text. The error of primitive auteurism lay in its reduction of the potential interest of a film to its authorial signature , so that a film was worth examination only insofar as it could be shown to be characteristic (stylistically, thematically) of Ray, Mann...