Post-New Wave History

Jun 3

New Hollywood Cinema

1. What was the Paramount Decision and how did it affect the film industry in the ‘50s and ‘60s? Why did Hollywood’s audience dwindle dramatically in the late ‘60s?

The Paramount Decision was the Supreme Court decision in 1948 to declare the Major 5 film studios as creating an unconstitutional monopoly. It forced these production studios to let go of their rights to theaters, through which they used to distribute their films. By breaking up the monopoly and making it more difficult for distribution, the Supreme Court fundamentally changed the American film industry. It allowed independent filmmakers to buy out theaters, allowing for new authors of films to emerge from beyond the Major 5 film production studios. Additionally, big production studios began to distribute films by “roadshowing” them. Roadshowing entailed moving from location to location, where films became moving events more akin to concerts. The films produced in the American mainstream in this period tended to be big spectacle films, such as musicals and epics.

Film audiences gradually dwindled from 1948 until 1967, as film audiences tired of watching spectacle films enshrined with outdated Hollywood values. With the value shifts of the counterculture, anit-war, feminist, civil rights and black power movements, audiences preferred movie-going experiences that did not adhere to the traditional Hollywood production code. At this point, production executives tended to look to younger filmmakers for answers: movie brats such as Scorsese, Spielberg, and Coppola emerged to define a New Hollywood Cinema that met the demands of these changing values.

2. What were the formal and thematic features of Hollywood Renaissance films before the rise of the blockbuster? How did these films balance Hollywood classicism with art cinema innovations? In what ways did secondary markets drive formal changes?

Hollywood Renaissance films tended to be formally self-conscious and innovative, making reference to older films while willingly engaging in experimentation. The new Hollywood Renaissance filmmakers such as Coppola and Scorsese tended to borrow from art cinema aesthetics, such as European new wave and art cinema films, to formally experiment in their films. However, their experimentation cannot be overstated -- much of New Hollywood cinema remained adherent to classical Hollywood themes. This was due to the role played by multinational conglomerates in dictating certain terms to filmmakers, who had to occasionally compromise their visions for the needs of the production studios.

Additionally, multinational conglomerates holding major American production studios tended to keep an eye out for tertiary markets to further drive profits up. The most obvious examples of these tertiary markets include soundtrack choices, as production studios owned the rights to music artists’ records. They utilized popular music from recording artists to enable profit-making beyond the theater, where moviegoers could buy film soundtracks and ensure the film lives after the credits roll.

3. What is the pathos of failure? How may it be applied to both The Rain People and clips shown in class during week two? Discuss the prominent political and countercultural dimensions of Hollywood Renaissance cinema. How does The Rain People both advocate and critique a feminist point of view?

The pathos of failure is a term used to describe a major theme of Post-Classical Hollywood cinema: confusion and disillusionment with normative cultural modes. The pathos of failure typically manifests in an aversion to straightforward narrative arcs, due to the confused and more prominent motives of a protagonist. Typically, the protagonist would feel a profound sense of alienation towards normative culture, which would be failing in delivering on its promises. These themes mimic broader cultural dimensions of disillusionment across America, emerging from within counterculture, anti-war, New Left, black power and feminist movements broadly critiquing normativity in their own ways.

For example, in the Rain People, the main protagonist expresses a feminist critique of the nuclear family and patriarchal marriage structure, leaving her husband behind on a journey across America. Her journey is aimless, mimicking her profound confusion and showcasing the pathos of failure. Yet, while the film flirts sympathy with her feminist critique, it ultimately limits the possibility of full feminist adherence because of the nature of its conclusion. The female protagonist cannot escape her duties as a mother, as the script relentlessly shoves the older disabled male figure of “Killer” to act as her new baby. When the film concludes with Killer’s death, it resolutely pushes her in the direction of keeping her child and returning to her husband.

4. Why is hegemonic analysis useful in dissecting the social dynamics of mainstream, commercial cinema? How does The President’s Analyst satirize politics and culture on both the Left and the Right? Be specific.

Hegemonic analysis takes into account historically domineering attitudes and ideologies in approaching films that appeal to different ideologically-minded audiences. In the context of mainstream commercial cinema, hegemonic analysis examines the different ideological impulses utilized to bring together diverse audiences for commercial profit.

In the context of the President’s Analyst, the film plays both left and right wing ideologies for laughs. The hippies on the left seem to be enjoying the commune, but the film satirizes their practices by approaching it from the outside, and ultimately does not side with it. As for the right, the police and surveillance are jokingly approached without reckoning with them as lived realities, whether positively or negatively.

5. How does the film maintain a hegemonic balancing act with respect to the following cultural pressure points: Civil Rights; the collapse of the Great Society; and the Conservative Revival? In what ways may the film’s vision be understood as both Utopian and cynical?

Civil Rights: Personified through the black agent working for the CIA equivalent - talking about a very vulnerable, specifically racial experience at the beginning of the film but then works as an agent of the state for the rest of the film.
Great Society: War on Poverty had failed, playing into growing support for Conservative movements in the United States
Conservative Revival: By the start of the 1970s, the hippie culture of the 1960s was coming to a close. Nixon’s idea of a “silent majority” stood in strong opposition to 1960s counterculture and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Electra Glide in Blue portrays this struggle in the literal battles between the cops and hippies. In a way, both are endangering the other; the hippies attack and run from the police and the police harass and question the hippies.
Deals with the Silent Majority. The Silent Majority are people who are conservative who do not involve themselves directly with politics and the media. They stick to themselves so no one would know their political beliefs. But these people accumulate a majority, because they’re all conservtive.
It is utopian in the way that the random Therapist is chosen out of everyone to work for the President. Everything is great. He has his own home, can bring his girlfriend, and live well. This gives the idea that this could happen to everyone. There’s not much turmoil. There’s an idealized atmosphere throughout the film because he smiles so much. Yet the cynicism comes from the paranoia of the surveillance state. Everyone is listening to him. Everyone is a spy. Everyone wants to kill him. And the film ends up becoming cynical and crazy.

6. How does Electra Glide in Blue address cultural anxieties in ways that parallel the work of Hollywood Renaissance films? In what ways is this cultural address different? How does the film reflect upon the myth of the American West in an affirmative manner? Discuss the more cynical aspects of this reflection as well. Be very specific.

In Electra Glide in Blue, the pathos of failure is quite enveloping. It follows a typical Western hero as he watches the West fade away into obscurity due to Nixon-era corruption. On the right, the institution of police has become corrupt and has failed to deliver on its promises of justly dealing with its subjects. On the left, the hippies look completely expended and devoid of any sense of joy or mystique. The film concludes with the death of its titular police officer, alluding to a new pathos of failure: not strictly normative society, but even the so-called alternatives to normative society have failed.

This differs from the typical cultural address of the late 1960s Hollywood Renaissance because it is noticeably more expended, and less hopeful. In comparison to Easy Rider, for instance, “the violent deaths of the protagonists appeared not as a sign of revolutionary countercultural defiance in the face of an unjust America, as it had done in Easy Rider, but as the tragic outcome of needless social conflict in a fundamentally good society.”

7. Illustrate Shiel’s argument by looking closely at one sequence from the film.

Shiel’s argument is as follows: “Emphasizing the political meanings of cinematic space, this essay examines the representation of the American West in the unjustly neglected road movie Electra Glide in Blue (1973) for its telling allegory of the social divisions of the Nixon era and the temporary infiltration of Hollywood cinema by the 1960s counterculture.”

“In Electra Glide in Blue, the representation of the invasion of the rural space of the West by the sociopolitical divisions and moral corruption of the Nixon era presents an allegory of the continuous incorporation of the historically empty space of the small town and the wilderness into the structures of modern urban America. While not actually present as a setting in the film, urban California—and particularly Los Angeles—is present everywhere in the film as a structuring absence. Electra Glide in Blue was based on the real-life killing of a motorcycle police officer by migrating hippies in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 11, 1968—the first time in fifty-two years that a police officer was killed in the line of duty in that city. A local newspaper editorial reported the killing as a sign of a “black cloud” that was “sweeping” into rural Arizona from the nation’s cities.”

A scene that illustrates this argument is the scene in which Winterfield argues with his superior, who remains emblematic of Nixon-era institutional corruption.

8. How does Horwath’s model of an “Impure Cinema” expand the term’s of Elsasser’s “Hollywood Renaissance” argument? How might you apply Horwath’s ideas to an analysis of films screened during weeks 2 and 4?

“In mid-to-late Sixties public discourse, the discrepancy between “official” images and rhetoric and real world experiences (regarding the Vietnam War, for instance) became increasingly obvious, and this gap in turn called into question all conventional means of representation previously considered valid and true to life. As the liberal consensus in American society was coming unstuck, for a brief time the generally accepted “realism” of American television and Hollywood films seemed to be open to debate. American films had begun to acquire aesthetic means of encoding such doubts since the early 1960s, as numerous new cinematographic “movements” – in tandem with the new social movements – gained a foothold in the United States (primarily in New York).

“It was a cinema that pushed political boundaries…. At the same time, it was a cinema that could not help internalising these boundaries. It allegorically staged the defeats and set-backs of this “time of renewal” and unconsciously placed itself in an untenable position: politically, by more or less failing – much as American society did – to develop an alternative way out of the crisis (as manifest in films from Easy Rider to All the President’s Men);9 aesthetically, by generally seeking to reconcile its “modernist” objectives with the demands of a readily accessible cinema of entertainment (from Bonnie and Clyde to Taxi Driver); and economically, by entirely misunderstanding the willingness of a film industry – temporarily weakened by economic setbacks – to make concessions.”

“As should be apparent from such an account, the deep-seated contradictions in New Hollywood films still have the power to shape any critical engagement with this era, especially in Europe. There is a multitude of temptations to resolve the contradictions: by drawing strict lines between autonomous artistry and studio capitalism, or between “opportunistic” and “authentic” pairs of actors; by extricating individual films from their ambivalent contexts of production and displaying them as “pure”, ideal artefacts; by distilling from films political intentions and messages which were often barely implied; by postulating a glorious age of new beginnings which was mostly experienced by those involved as a series of humiliations.”

Therefore, the films’ “pathos of failure” represented the filmmakers’ failures as well -- their inability to move past an “untenable position,” their inability to find alternative solutions to the failures of normative society, and by needing to reconcile with production studios’ tertiary markets and Hollywood normative classicism. This cinema is “impure,” in that its various political and social impulses cannot be separated from another and seen as “pure” parts. They are all enmeshed together.

Italian New Wave

1. What was the Italian “Boom,” or Economic Miracle? Discuss its impact on Italian social life. Why did the Italian film industry thrive during this period?

The Italian boom represents a moment in Italian history of transformation, from a primarily agrarian economy to rapid industrialization and explosion of consumer culture. The boom comes from privatization in the aftermath of the post-war US Marshall Plan, securing Italy within US spheres of influence during the Cold War. This explosion of consumer culture and the invention of consumer subjectivities created new urban lifestyles focused on advertising, both internally and externally. Externally, Italian films could market Italy as a product for international consumption -- internally, films marketed the urban lifestyle of mass consumption as a necessity. Therefore, these films thrived financially.

Additionally, the boom created a massive rift between rural and urban spaces in Italy. The latter spaces represented new-ness, “modernity,” against the backdrop of a “backwards” and “traditional” rural space. Movement increasingly became towards the city and away from the village or farm.

2. How do the Trevi Fountain sequence from La Dolce Vita (1960) and Divorce, Italian Style (1961) engage critically with the effects of the boom while remaining symptomatic of it?

La Dolce Vita and Divorce, Italian Style both showcase the boom’s grandeur and flash in their critical engagements with it.

La Dolce Vita showcases an “American” actress in a fountain, where an Italian journalist rushes to get enveloped in the dream of a boom. As he arrives, the fountain suddenly stops running and morning comes, with an Italian delivery boy watching hilariously. This overtly critiques the boom as an ending facade. Yet, the scene remains rife with a male gaze that showcases the American actress, the boom itself, as “attractive,” remaining symptomatic of its impulses rather than revealing it as deeply ugly.

Divorce Italian Style showcases the boom as an unreality that makes no sense to the

rural masses, critiquing its facade as well. Yet, the film’s main character remains a man consumed by the impulse of the boom towards urbanity, and the film still retains an infantilizing attitude towards rural Italians. It simultaneously showcases the boom as “American” and “foreign,” while heading straight towards it.

3. In what ways is Italian comedy of the 1960s socially progressive like Neorealism? How does I Knew Her Well (1965) reveal the cultural contradictions beneath the surface of the Boom? How does the film denounce the economic system yet remain sympathetic toward Adriana? What is the “art of getting by?”

Like neorealism, Italian comedies of the 1960s poked at social contradictions within normative/hegemonic Italian society. I Knew Her Well reveals cultural contradictions beneath the surface of the boom by pointing to its failures on delivering its promises to Adriana, an actress migrating from rural Italy to Rome. Adriana adorns new fashion design every day that passes by, practicing “the art of getting by” in order to make it in the film industry in Italy. Yet, she is constantly rejected, exploited, and mocked by the men she meets along her way, most of which hold executive positions in the industry.

By showing Adriana’s plight, the film denounces the economic system of the “boom” and

reveals its empty promises. Yet, it remains sympathetic to her desires of attaining stardom in Italy by showing her attempting the “art of getting by” and aligning with her against the exploitative industry. At some point, Adriana can no longer “get by” any longer -- but until then, the film remains invested in her journey.

4. How does Baschiera support his claim that Italy did in fact produce a new wave cinema? How does I Knew Her Well illustrate the author’s concept of new wave filmmaking?

Baschiera supports his claim for an Italian new wave cinema by comparing it to similar new wave movements across Europe. He highlights how new wave cinemas are generational revolts against an older generation of filmmaking; in the Italian case, the generational revolt is against neorealism aesthetics. By approaching new waves as cross-European, Baschiera argues that overlooking the Italian generational revolt is symptomatic of a hyper focus on internal boundaries of new waves rather than their generational impulses.

Italian new wave is also a “new wave” because of its criticisms of the role of the church, the tenets of the state, and the nuclear family. The Italian comedies mask these critiques within sardonic humor and allusive images. Not unlike other “new waves,” Italian new wave carried a distinct political critique with it.

Spanish New Wave

1. Why did Francoist Spain attempt to “soften” its image in the immediate postwar years? How did this affect national film culture?

Spain exported New Spanish Cinema, which mimics broader new wave and art film tendencies across Europe, in order to “soften” its image under Franco. Signaling “modernity,” these films acted as cultural ambassadors to potential European foreign investment after the war. By distancing themselves from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Spain could present itself as more European and therefore more agreeable to neighboring European nation states.

This affected national film culture by creating two different types of Spanish films, both of which operating as mechanisms of state power. The films receiving “Certificates of National Interest” usually guaranteed distribution to films to be released locally, which often pushed state propaganda. The films receiving “Certificates of Special Interest” were usually the more “artistic” films which had somewhat more daring, though certainly hidden, political critiques of the Franco regime. These are the films that were exported to other European art cinema gatherings and film festivals, promoting a facade of democratic politics.

2. What was the Salamanca Conference (1955)? Why were so many of the Spanish filmmakers in attendance inspired by Italian Neorealism?

The 1955 gathering of film professionals known to film historians as the "Conversaciones de Salamanca" was an important turning point in Spanish cinema. This was the first opportunity for a group of young graduates from the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas (Spain's first official film school), to air their views on their situation as artistically ambitious and socially progressive filmmakers in a stifling cultural context. More broadly, this was among the earliest instances in which discontent was articulated by dissident intellectuals and artists. It was only one year later that signs of unrest appeared in universities. Spanish cinema was declared “dead” here, and in need of a revival.

The Salamanca Conference was a debate/discussion by graduates of Spain’s first film school on the subject of Spanish cinema, the social climate, and their roles as artistically ambitious and progressive filmmakers. Acting as overseers, several representatives of the government were in attendance, including García Escudero (future creator of NCE). This discussion labeled Spanish cinema as false, unrepresentative, formulaic, and useless. The graduates seeked clearer censorship, more funding, and more freedom to create socially reflective films.

Many were inspired by Italian Neorealism because neorealism is rooted in a collective class consciousness and critique of society, in solidarity with the working class. The filmmakers amongst these intellectuals and artists were inspired by Italian Neorealism because of its attentiveness to social issues and its critique of structures of power. It showed everyday struggles of people in Italy to create social change, but these everyday struggles were often on a smaller and more personal scale so as not to directly challenge the regime.

3. Why did Spain undergo a new age of openness in the early 1960s? What were the effects on the film industry? Be specific. Discuss the most salient features of the New Spanish Cinema. Why did Franco allow this movement to flourish? Why are the movies from this tradition part of the “canon” of world cinema? Why is the “old” Spanish cinema neglected in the majority of critical studies on the history of Spanish film?

Because old Spanish cinema and commercial cinema during the Franco regime was largely propaganda and entirely state-controlled, these films are not explored in critical studies on Spanish new cinema. However, these films are more locally interesting, because they showcase the vast majority of commercial media consumed within the borders of Spain during the Franco regime, unlike exported new Spanish cinema.

4. Discuss the multiple ways in which Cria Cuervos (1976) adheres to the New Spanish Cinema paradigm. How may the film’s political perspective be understood as oppositional? In what ways are the film’s aesthetics allusive in nature? Discuss the film’s sexual politics. How do Cria Cuervos’ gender dynamics interrogate the tenets of traditional Catholicism?

Cria Cuervos, like most New Spanish Cinema, borrows from broader European art film and new wave aesthetic sensibilities. It showcases a soft critique of the Franco regime to be exported across Europe, showcasing the facade of democratic politics within the Franco regime. In that way, it operates in the exact same way it is meant to operate as a mechanism of state power.

However, the film’s political perspective can be understood as particularly oppositional because it arrives as Franco lies on his deathbed and explores how younger generations engage with national memory. The mother in the film signifies the Spanish nation before Franco, who is represented by the father, a military official who limits the mother’s potential as a pianist through domesticity. The kids are the new generation of Spaniards who are trying to rediscover memories of their mother, who passes away before they are born. They are attempting to revive a lost spirit of the nation from before Franco met the mother. Yet, the aunt of the film represents the loosening grip of state power, as she attempts to police the memory of Franco and of Spain. The children reenact memories and discover stories through the maid, who represents the lower and working classes who remember much of the violence of the regime.

The film’s aesthetics are allusive because of the film’s symbolic approach to representing Spain within the nuclear family unit, and because of its engagement with ghosts and haunted memories. It portrays an anti-Francoist critique implicitly because of censorship laws, which created a shared language of allusive aesthetics between this film and other New Spanish Cinema films. The film is full of long takes in which the lines between past, present, reality and fantasy are blurred, challenging the official record of nation-state history. Ghosts from the past who endured the violence of Franco return, reminding the children that there can be a reality that is not the reality of the regime.

5. The film is in many respects a ghost story. How does it incorporate spectrality, fantasy, and dream in ways that are politically oppositional and culturally resonant? How does it confuse the boundaries between fantasy and reality and for what purpose?

The film’s aesthetics are allusive because of the film’s symbolic approach to representing Spain within the nuclear family unit, and because of its engagement with ghosts and haunted memories. The film is full of long takes in which the lines between past, present, reality and fantasy are blurred, challenging the official record of nation-state history. Ghosts from the past who endured the violence of Franco return, reminding the children that there can be a reality that is not the reality of the regime.

German New Wave

1. How did the American film industry dominate the postwar German film market and how did this affect the types of films produced in Germany? What was the Oberhausen Manifesto? What was the Kuratorium and how did it assist young filmmakers?

At the end of the war the western Allies had felt it was vital to ‘re-educate’ the German people in order both to ‘denazify’ Germany and to build up the western zones of Germany as a buffer to the Soviet influence in eastern Europe; and American films were quickly identified as an effective way of disseminating western notions of freedom, democracy and capitalist enterprise. Thus, by the end of the 1950s the Allies’ handling of the film industry in Germany had left West German cinema economically vulnerable and artistically impoverished. It had become apparent even in the mid-1950s that, if the German cinema was to survive this American legacy, government intervention would be necessary. Representatives from the industry began to lobby parliament and by the end of the 1950s criticism of West German cinema was being voiced from a number of quarters. In 1959 two young filmmakers, Haro Senft and Ferdinand Khittl, campaigned to highlight the need to improve the quality of films and to provide grant aid for film projects. Two years later film critic Joe Hembus condemned the industry’s ‘factory-like production system where standardised models are turned out on an assembly-line’

The Oberhausen Manifesto came out of these condemnations to declare the rise of New German cinema. Eventually the government responded to this mounting criticism by setting up the first film subsidy agency, the Kuratorium junger deutscher Film (Board of Young German Film). Launched in 1965 by the BMI, the Kuratorium was given a brief to promote the kind of

filmmaking demanded by the Oberhausen Manifesto signatories and to ‘stimulate a renewal of

the German film in a manner exclusively and directly beneficial to the community’

However, this renewal of the German film was almost extremely short-lived. Having made their first feature films, the new directors became ineligible for further Kuratorium funding and were faced with limited possibilities for financing subsequent films. If they had failed to win a Federal Film Prize which carried a cash award for future production work, they had to turn to the diminishing commercial sources. Furthermore, the Kuratorium was dependent on the repayment of its loans from box-office receipts to provide the financing for further film projects. Although the first batch of films had been well received, they did not do well enough in the cinemas to fully repay their loans, leaving the subsidy agency with rapidly diminishing funds.

At the same time the commercial sector viewed Kuratorium-funded films as unfair competition.

In a market where it was increasingly difficult to produce films on a commercial basis, young

filmmakers were being given money to make whatever films they liked. The film industry started

to lobby the German government, demanding that any film subsidies should be directed towards

revitalising the commerical sector, and was successful in bringing about a more commercially

orientated revision of film policy. In December 1967 a new Film Development Act (FFG) was

passed which raised a levy on every cinema ticket sold in the FRG to provide funding for film

production, and the Film Development Board (FFA) was set up to adminster these funds. In

complete contrast to the Kuratorium’s promotion of first-time feature film directors, FFA

funding was awarded to any film project as long as the producer’s previous film had grossed a

certain amount at the box-office during the first two years of its release. Consequently, first-time

directors were not eligible for FFA funding, and most of the new films had not done well enough

at the box-office to trigger the FFA funding mechanism. Distributors also started to withdraw

films by the new directors and replace them with industry products, so that the commercial

sector could monopolise the new subsidy money.

2. How does Yesterday Girl (1966) articulate the critical tendencies of the New German Cinema? How does the film address the need for critical analysis and historical reflection?

Yesterday Girl introduced contemporary moral problems in post-war Germany by reflecting on the absence of critical reflections on the Holocaust. It showcases a broadly-felt blindness to the Holocaust in multiple scenes in which government individuals actively reject thinking about its lived reality, and in scenes in which university professors engage with its moral problems without addressing its historical reality. In that way, the film gives rise to critical analysis and historical reflection on a pivotal moment in both German and global history.

3. What is the Romantic tradition in German culture? How is this tendency embodied in a distinctive strain of the New German Cinema? How is it different from the modernist impulse of the New German Cinema?

The romantic tradition emphasizes a Germanness deeply connected to the Bavarian natural landscape, far removed from the incursion of modernity. These traditions are embodied in the Heimat film, or the “homeland” film, a series of apolitical German films that evoked a romantic homeland, belonging to it, triggering nostalgia for nature and romanticism. These films remained escapist by nature, exploring a will to remain forgetful about the German recent past.

These films contrast with New German Cinema, which responded to the apolotical and escapist tendencies of these films. Instead, New German Cinema had a more modernist impulse that engaged with contemporary German realities: more urban, more political, and less romantic. These films reflected on the legacies of Nazism and of the post-war German reality in creative and unexpected ways.

4. How does The American Friend (1977) dramatize and visualize the complicated postwar cultural dynamic between the United States and West Germany? What values are associated with each culture? Why does the film finally descend into madness, according to Beard?

One might describe The American Friend very roughly indeed as a project to put the alienated Wenders hero, here one Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), into an American narrative, and to witness the kinds of incongruities, conflicting pulls of feeling, and ultimate disasters which such a configuration would bring about. But one must note that in modifying his usual protagonist for such a juxtaposition Wenders has aligned him much more clearly with certain “German” values which have been pointedly excluded from earlier Wenders heroes: namely a home, a wife and child, a stable and traditional craft as a restorer and framer of old prints and paintings. He has also given him an incurable blood disease, which carries its own symbolic weight as a commentary on Europe and Germany at this point in history

Both Jonathan and Bruno move from German to American narratives. In both cases the German narrative is characterized by relative order and by positive qualities of “home.” There are severe problems with both of these “Germanies” which cause the characters to pursue an “American” course of action. In the end, though, it is clear that “Germany” is to be preferred to “America.” “American” behaviour shares a number of traits in both films. It is associated with an acting out rather than a passive or inward response to life. Moreover the patterns of this acting out conform broadly, and sometimes precisely, to the patterns of event in American genre narratives. Crime and violence, getaways, and finally sudden death, are the principal major components of resemblance. Equally important, however, is the sense of incongruity that arises from the juxtaposition of these German protagonists and the American acts they perform

But in both films this sense of irony and absurdity is merely a prelude to a final destination in the presentation of “America” as a form of chaotic disjunction so extreme that it must be called mad. In The American Friend acting out is at the beginning only an imaginary activity. That is, Jonathan is a passive, inward-looking person whose actions do not stray from the narrow traditional path of his family and his profession. His method of dealing with anxiety is traditional, too. Overt expressions of feeling are only available in the secondary (imaginary) form of American popular music. It would never occur to him to act out as a response to his giant problems (fatal blood disease, feeling of entrapment, existential malaise). His condition is an internal (“German”) one. Only when he begins to be caught up in the acted-out “American” scenarios of Ripley and Minot does he begin to understand how action can serve as a response to psychological pain. It is a characteristic of these actions that they are gratuitous, or nearly gratuitous. Ripley’s decision to give Jonathan’s name to Minot is taken rather lightly and reveals a large gap between cause (Ripley felt himself casually insulted by Jonathan) and effect (Jonathan’s life is knocked to pieces). Similar gaps appear in the very nature of Minot’s scheme as we gradually discover it: it is not merely ill-conceived, it is impossible, ridiculous, lunatic. Its preposterousness is a fitting quality given the massive incongruity of Jonathan’s role as a gangster’s hit-man. And so is constructed a situation which finds Jonathan looking at an elaborately forged medical report in Paris, trailing a man through the Paris Métro system with a gun in his pocket and finally shooting him, receiving large sums of money in payment, plunging further down the path of irrational action in agreeing to the second murder on the train, re-encountering Ripley as an action-hero-saviour, and engaging in the final siege of the villa and drive to the sea. In all these events it is the sheer, unbelievable fact that Jonathan is doing them, that they are palpable and actual rather than—as they “ought” to be—imaginary or fictional (Hollywood-movie-like) which is the cause of radical incongruity and finally madness. As Jonathan contemplates a pistol-with-silencer in his Paris hotel room, or a steel-cable professional garotte in the swaying washroom of a train, he is overcome with an ever-renewed sense of disbelief. The sign on Bruno’s lift chair, “Is This Really Me?,” might well be Jonathan’s motto at these moments.

Basil Alsubee

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