<p>And, we all know and appreciate how much you know about the film world.</p>
<p>Watch some Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Bergman, de Sica, and Rive Gauche Nouvelle Vague directors (not the arid Cahiers du Cinema school), then get back to me.</p>
<p>Tsk, tsk. Iâll take that to go. Just wrap it in a bag.</p>
<p>@wesleyan97â </p>
<p>Mais non! You donât like Truffaut?</p>
<p>hehe, just Les 400 coups. A great auteur, but what Iâve seen from him otherwise left me cold. </p>
<p>Ironically, it was Truffaut who, along with Andrew Sarris, popularized the term âauteurâ. He wasnât necessarily talking about himself, but directors like Rossellini (whose widow donated his papers to Wesleyan), Hitchcock (his interviews with Hitch practically resuscitated the aging directorâs reputation in the seventies), Renoir, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Fellini, etcâŚ</p>
<p>Back when Laurence Mark, (Class of 1970) headed the Film Series, we saw âLes Regles du jeuâ, âLâannee derniere a Marienbadâ, âLa Belle et la Beteâ, âMaria Montezâ, âLâAvventuraâ, âThe White Sheikâ, âBicycle Thiefâ - as well as The 400 Blows - all in the same year. </p>
<p>He didnât resuscitate Hitchcockâs reputation. I donât think reputations get resuscitated anyway, but rehabilitated. Careers are resuscitated. In any event, what Truffaut did for Hitchcock was to take his work seriously, something no one had really done before. The other directors you name (except Rossellini) made films that were (at least superficially) less conventional and were considered real artists well before the theorists descended upon them. But thank you for disclosing how auteur theory became âa thingâ, asâlike Brownâs locationâthis had been shrouded in the deepest of mysteries. My first year (at Bowdoin) I worked on the film series and pushed for as much serious cinema as possible. I didnât bother at Wesleyan, as anything to do with film seemed to be dominated by majors or wannabe majors; also, it was apparent looking at the first semester calendar that we were in good hands. After watching âStrictly Ballroomâ one winter night just before finals, many of us left the CFA theater so joyful we were all dancing in the snow and ran to MoCon (RIP) for tray-sleds. I also remember a spring showing of âCries and Whispersâ (a personal favorite), after which the crowd dispersed into the night, each of us staggering away with a new (or deepened) awareness of lifeâs inevitable horrors as well as the hells we create for ourselves and visit upon each other. Fun!</p>
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<p>Well, rehabilitation implies there was something scandalous about the reputation in question; so I wouldnât choose that word either. In any event, Iâm glad we agree that New Wave cinema wasnât discovered in 1997. B-) </p>
<p>I didnât write that he had rehabilitated Hitchcockâs reputation. âResuscitatingâ a reputation doesnât make sense as a metaphor and certainly isnât idiomatic. That was a point of English usage. </p>
<p>It depends on how and when you came upon Hitchcockâs reputation. He was already dead by the time you you were born and his reputation was pretty well set. In 1970, I daresay, most people of my generation knew him primarily as the host of a popular anthology series on television and the putative editor of a collection of pulp magazines both of which traded on an adolescent fascination with the mabre. Thereâs a good argument for Truffautâs having breathed new life into Hitchcockâs reputation as an artist.</p>
<p>Fair enough, but my assertion was that he hadnât been taken seriously as an artist EVER. A bankable creator of entertainments yes, but certainly not someone whose work would later be used to help larval lit crits wrap their minds around Lacan.</p>
<p>Youâre right about Truffaut et al reminding the the film world about Hitchcock. I didnât mean to elide the period between his great success and Truffautâs identification/invention (depending on the esteem in which you hold H.'s work) of him as an âauteur.â </p>
<p>@wesleyan97â
</p>
<p>But, you could make that case for every American director of Hitchcockâs generation. Clearly, he had an enviable reputation as an artist within Hollywood. Cary Grant made more movies with him than any other director. That says something. Truffaut merely did for Hitchcock what Pauline Kael was already doing for such artists as Howard Hawks, John Huston, and Raoul Walsh and what Jeanine Bassinger would later do for Frank Capra.</p>
<p>He had the ability to fill seats and was recognized as a brilliant TECHNICIAN. The stuff that people admire him for nowâthe âgaze,â the nihilism spackled over with glamour and romance, and all the ironyâwas lost on audiences, most of his colleagues, and perhaps even lay beneath his own consciousness. In some ways, the latching on to Hitchcock by intellectuals says as much, perhaps more, about their own fetid preoccupations than his âart.â BTW, Iâm a huge Hitchcock fan but always watch his films with keen awareness of the ways in which his pathologies dovetail with my own. Anyway, weâre wayyyyyyy off topic. I donât even remember what motivated me to initiate this thread. Ah, right, bitterness about my first college enjoying such wealth and prestige and my second having taken a hit these past years. Vanity. All is vanity. </p>
<p>No, Michael Curtiz was a better example of a âbrilliant technicianâ. Your nitpicking views on Hitchcock are of a piece with your views on Wesleyan - mercurial and a touch too narcissistic to be of much help in forming an objective opinion about either. </p>
<p>News for you, old man: Wesleyan kids tend to be both mercurial and narcissistic, but mostly in an endearing way. This sets them apart in ways that appeal to some and turn others off. It is also a school that inspires mixed reactions, as one sees throughout the forum, often from visitors. Wesleyan is NOT a place to make oneâs mind up about, especially as it decide if and how to pursue ambitions that lie beyond its present financial reach. I would love to see the school become in practice what it has always been in spirit. But to do so requires solidifying the fundamentals, in particular emphasizing writing in all disciplines like Amherst and Hamilton. Beyond that, aggressive fundraising with as-yet unthought of curricular additions to bring in $$$ from those who canât justify giving on the basis of nostalgia, who want to see something substantive that sends out graduates capable of transforming, not just entertaining or profiting from, the world.
Second, Hitchcock HAD BEEN KNOWN as a reliable director of entertaining star vehicles who created terrific set pieces and used clever techniques to surprise and entertain viewers. Herrmannâs scores in the âgreatâ films did the heavy lifting in creating real tension and authentic emotion. Much as Bergmanâs films without Sven Nykvist lack what we consider the quintessential Bergmanian touch, Hitchcockâs work pre- and post-Hermannâwhile often entertainingânever rises to the heights we associate with his best efforts. In Bergmanâs case, the problem lay in his being a theater director and not knowing how best to translate his lacerating insights onto the medium of film. Nykvist intuited what Bergman was after and captured the rawest, most intimate closeups ever seen in ways that advance the story. Frankly most of the scripts and their beating-a-dead-horse themes donât hold up after all these years, but the indelible images do. With Hitchcock, the problem was misanthropy. He didnât like people much, especially not actors (save Cary Grant), and the feeling seems to have been mutual. Where Bergman had affairs with pretty much all of his actresses (Ullmann, Thulin, Andersson, and others) and drew out their most vulnerable interiority, Hitchcock stalked and bullied his actresses, making their performances seem quite stiff and guarded. And when a scene required intense emotion (.e.g., the climaxes in Vertigo), it was the score that communicated these, not the performances. In fact the only performance with any sincerity in Vertigo was the thankless one played by Barbara Bel Geddes, in whom Hitchcock presumably, like âScottie,â had no sexual interest. The world of Hitchcock lacks any trace of human love; all his âerosâ (in the Greek sense) as a director went into the storyboards. Far from ânitpickingâ Hitchcock, Iâin my inexpert, untrained wayâseek to unpack him so as to understand what gives his films enduring appeal despite their stiltedness, aridity, and overreliance on set pieces and music cues. Perhaps itâs the sadism, voyeurism, and cynical humor that hold up best after all these years, precisely what gave audiences their frissons and would later be appreciated and verbally formulated by the Cahiers crowd. Thereâs a reason twisted characters like Ĺ˝iĹžek take such an interest in Hitchcock, and itâs not his ability to entertain.</p>
<p>@â Englishman </p>
<p>You didnât respond to one of circuitriderâs or wesleyan97âs substantive points.</p>
<p>You just keep repeating that Wesleyan is no more, and when you get a thoughtful response to your mantra you ignore it. I guess if you say it often enough, maybe it will come true.</p>
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<p>Of note, in Rothâs yearly Wesleyan 2020 update, it was mentioned that Wesleyanâs ED applications hit a record high this year, so last yearâs application numbers may have just been an anomaly.</p>
<p>@smartalic34â </p>
<p>âWe have also been able to extend our âno loanâ financial aid packages to families earning less than $60,000 per year [up from $40,000].â Awesome :-)</p>
The move to a 3 year BA would be pretty welcomed I think. Now if America could move towards a similar shrinking of curricula for professional schools as well.