Imitations of life

It took some hours of procrastination and a cup of strong coffee, and my finger may have trembled as I clicked the “play” button, but I did finally watch the trailer of the forthcoming film Hitchcock, about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho in 1959-60. It was nearly as unsettling as I had imagined – and not just because Psycho is enormously dear to my heart, or because one likes to think that the world in which that film was made was necessarily a black-and-white world, or because I admire Stephen Rebello’s book on which this new movie is (very loosely) based. On the tiny YouTube screen was one of the most honourable actors of the past few decades – not hamming it up exactly, but imitating away.

A two-minute trailer is limited evidence to base a judgement on, but Anthony Hopkins’s performance in the Hitchcock role looked like mimickry to my eyes, as opposed to the considered acting that involves building a character from the inside out. The attempt to make his features approximate Hitchcock’s – such as the quadruple chin and the studied downward curve of the lips – made me cringe a little (it isn't as blatant as the use of prosthetics to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt resemble Bruce Willis in Looper, but still). In any case there is a touch of contrivance to the casting of Hopkins (such a well-known actor, now almost as closely associated with the playing of diverse real-life figures as Charles Laughton was in an earlier time) in this part - one wonders if the motive was the creation of a lucrative casting coup with the equally respected Helen Mirren, who plays Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville.

In 1992, Robert Downey Jr played the title role in the biopic Chaplin, but - though Charles Chaplin was among the few movie personalities who was even more recognisable worldwide than Alfred Hitchcock - there was an essential difference in effect. The Chaplin on view in most of that film was not the iconic Little Tramp but the real-life person, whom very few viewers had any direct association with. Which meant Downey Jr had some space to work out his own interpretation of the character, to not be shoehorned into familiar tics and mannerisms. Hitchcock, on the other hand, always appeared in trailers, interviews and TV introductions as “himself” – he performed the same droll gestures (standing about stiffly, saying outrageous things in the most deadpan manner) in the same starched three-piece suit that was presumably attached to his body when he emerged into the world, much like Karna’s kavacha. And this is the figure that Hopkins has been called upon to play. Saddled with such a character – someone who is a vital part of our recent pop-cultural mythology – even a fine actor can be reduced to a pawn.** (The real Hitchcock, who believed actors should be treated like cattle or chess pieces, may have enjoyed this.)

Watching Hopkins as Hitch – or Meryl Streep accumulating a bundle of carefully observed tics and presenting them as “performance” in her imitation of another imposing real-life figure, Margaret Thatcher – one sees signs of things to come. Film history is at a point where we can expect an increasing number of biopics about people who lived recently enough that we have video evidence – and strong memories – of their real selves. And if these biopics are to be made as box office-friendly as possible, one can expect broad simplifications in scripts and shortcuts in portrayals.

A related component is that with important anniversaries looming around every corner, there will soon be no getting away from films about our cinematic past. Consider just the very near future: in 2014 the movie world will celebrate 75 years of Gone with the Wind (75 years, in fact, of that cinematic annus mirabilis 1939), and personally I’d be astonished if a high-profile project about the making of GWTW has not already germinated in the mind of a screenwriter or producer. (What back-stories! What drama! Who could resist the possibilities of the real-life scene – as compelling as anything in Gone with the Wind itself – where David Selznick first laid eyes on his Scarlett, Vivien Leigh, her face lit up by the flames from the burning Atlanta set, at a point when production was already well underway?) 

Two years after that, Citizen Kane will celebrate its diamond jubilee year, and so it will go. Critics often complain about excessive meta-referencing in contemporary cinema – that Quentin Tarantino, for instance, only makes films that are about his film-love – but it is entirely possible that 30 or 40 years from now we will have a film about Tarantino’s life: in other words, a movie about a boy who watched lots and lots of movies and then made movies that paid tribute to those movies. By that time mainstream filmmaking may be closed into a self-referential loop, with little room for anything external.

Yes, of course I’m being cheerfully alarmist. And yes, trailers can be misleading – it’s possible that the complete Hitchcock will reveal a more shaded performance with Hopkins reaching for a poetic truth about the director’s personality, as opposed to caricature. But given that this is a commercial project meant for relatively painless consumption, I doubt it. I will watch the film, but with my fingers splayed over my face and violins shrieking in my head, much the same way that unprepared audiences first experienced Psycho in 1960. In the age of meta-cinema, it is appropriate that a film about the making of a scary film should be... scary.

------------


** No wonder Ranbir Kapoor said in an interview that he wanted to wait a while before taking on the daunting role of Kishore Kumar in a film. Who can blame him?

 [Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

Barfi!, and the anatomy of a reaction

There is a paradox built into the reviewing process: the films one really enjoys or really dislikes are such immediate emotional experiences that there is something almost dishonest about exiting the hall and trying to express your thoughts in writing a few hours or days later. By this point one has had enough time to analyse or intellectualise the experience, which in itself is not a bad thing – it is part of the process of critical engagement and articulation. But what sometimes happens during this period is that the emotional effect begins to wear off: the things you really liked about the film might become less tangible and the little flaws that didn’t much affect your enjoyment while you were watching it might now begin to colonise the mind.

I have touched on this before in my many rambling posts about reviewing. I have also touched on how one’s response to a film depends on an unquantifiable or unknowable combination of things – from the mood you are in on the day you see it to whether you’re seeing it alone or with company; the lingering effects of something you’ve just read, or a conversation you’ve just had, or something you’ve recently lost.

So here is... not a review, but a small (and necessarily inadequate) attempt to make sense of why I was so affected by Anurag Basu’s Barfi! despite the fact that I can easily make a list of its weaknesses and irritants.

One of those irritants is the film's romanticising of the lives of people who aren't “normal”, and central to this romanticising is the use of the idiom of silent-movie comedy to tell the story of a man who can't hear or speak. Thus, the very first sequence is a funny chase performed in the Keystone Kops style, complete with the famous Chaplin gag of a large statue being inaugurated to reveal the underdog perched on it. The prettifying conceit here is that in some way perhaps the world really does play like a soundless comedy film for the protagonist; all will be well if you can perform a few pratfalls, or evade your pursuers by playing see-saw on a ladder, to a lilting background score.

“Khamoshi pyaar ki zubaan hai,” the film’s narrator/leading lady Shruti tells her mother at one point, trying to make the case that she and Barfi can be happy together, and indeed much of their courtship is presented in the language of sweet silent-era romances. Later, even a bank robbery – where Barfi is trying to get hold of money for a vital kidney operation for his father – is shot in this mode. But in a way, this has the effect of undermining Barfi’s deafness and muteness: as a viewer immersed in this charming silent-movie world, one almost comes to believe that he is speechless not because he can’t talk but because this is the way the film is. In any case his condition is treated as a relatively minor detail, the way we might be told that he is left-handed or that he has an extra thumb. One rarely gets a sense of the effect it has had on his personal growth and personality – it’s something of a plot MacGuffin.

Nitpicking further, one can point to the film’s unnecessarily convoluted narrative structure and its facile incorporation of a mystery subplot just to keep the viewer in prolonged suspense about what will eventually become of the central relationship. (I was relieved that Saurabh Shukla’s policeman was around to clarify the plot chronology at a vital stage.)

This sounds like a very negative “review”, doesn’t it? And yet, oddly, none of the things mentioned above were deal-breakers for me because the film’s stronger moments worked so well and because I was usually happy to treat it as a collection of lovely vignettes rather than as a consolidated story with properly developed characters and perfectly tied up loose ends. One reason it may have worked for me is that I’m a big fan of wordless storytelling: if I were to make a list of my favourite movie sequences, very few of them would be dialogue-heavy. And on a scene-by-scene basis, the silent moments in this film are quite expertly handled.

Psychoanalysing my own reaction further, I have to say that these days I’m more vulnerable than usual to sentimental – even saccharine – movies. Life has been that way for the last three months; sad songs continually play in my head. More specifically, I felt a personal connect with an aspect of the central relationship in Barfi! – the Barfi-Jhilmil bond, which doesn't hinge on the things that are usually very central to human lives: being able to discuss common interests, for example, or even speak with each other in conventional language. (This is explicitly set against the commonsensical advice Shruti’s mother gives her: that she should spend her life with someone who can understand what she’s saying.) Without spelling things out too much, I have had recent experience of the ending of such a relationship – one of the most meaningful in my life – and if personal experience of that sort won’t inform your feelings about a sentimental film, what will?

Of course, I’d like to think this chord wouldn’t have been struck if these scenes in Barfi! were poorly executed. And so, to return to a quasi-“objective” analysis: I liked that this film sidestepped so many of the obvious minefields in its path – that it kept its head in moments that might easily have turned farcical through over-acting or over-writing, or just by showing one more reaction shot than was necessary.

Take a commercial project with glamorous, big-name stars cast in deglamorised roles and you’re treading on thin ice; the fourth wall between the film and the viewer becomes very fragile. Priyanka Chopra’s performance as the autistic Jhilmil could easily have sent the whole edifice crashing down with a single false note: for example, a self-consciously giggly response to one of Barfi’s antics that might have brought a scene dangerously close to a conventional, coquettishly romantic moment between “Ranbir Kapoor” and “Priyanka Chopra”. Instead – and I’m sure good direction had a part here – she plays Jhilmil as a girl whose limited attention span never lets her stay in a moment for more than a few seconds at a time, even when something key is happening in the context of the narrative. And it works. If you have to be critical, I suppose it’s possible to call it a one-note performance, but I think she handled that single note well – and to my eyes at least, the deglamorised look didn’t feel gimmicky.

I liked a few of the visual touches too. There are some nice little sight gags – beginning with the opening shot that has “Muskaan” written atop an arch that resembles an inverted smiley (a pointer to the bittersweet nature of the story that is about to unfold)? There is also the slightly fetishistic use of the distorted mirror/dark glass motif. This is a film full of glass surfaces that provide imperfect views of things, or surfaces that don’t exist: from the paperweight that Jhilmil looks through to Barfi's first glimpse of Shruti's future husband as a ghostly reflection to a night-time view of what seems like the headlights of a single car but is revealed to be two bikes riding together. In less literal terms too, the characters often see through a glass darkly – losing touch with their real feelings, not being able to understand the full picture. In the end, perhaps this is why there is something appealingly direct and honest about the Barfi-Jhilmil relationship, even if it is an idealised one: they know they are happy in each other’s company, and that’s good enough.

Certainly it was good enough for me. At another stage in my life, it might not have been.

Dreamer's factory: Dadasaheb Phalke as a silent-movie hero

[From my Business Standard film column]

Around a hundred years, a Bombay-based lithographer and amateur magician named Dhundiraj Govind Phalke developed an interest in moving pictures, which eventually led him to make India’s first feature film Raja Harishchandra. Watching Paresh Mokashi’s 2009 biopic Harishchandrachi Factory, I realised how little we know about the details of Dadasaheb Phalke’s life – and about his landmark film, only fragments of which still exist.

Apart from teaching himself the craft of filmmaking, Phalke had to overcome the many prejudices of his time, such as the disdain for the idea that anyone would ever want to watch images moving on a screen when they could see live actors on a stage. His story invites some romanticising, and one thing to understand about Harishchandrachi Factory is that it isn’t a strictly realist telling of Phalke's life (in any case, it covers a period of only around two years). Instead, it has the mood of a picaresque tale about an underdog sallying from one adventure to the next, triumphing over major and minor obstacles – most of which (even the possibility of his losing his eyesight) are presented in lighthearted terms, as if to reassure the viewer that everything will turn out okay.

On the Wikipedia page for Phalke, there is an old photo of him looking vaguely Chaplinesque as he examines a strip of film, his head cocked in concentration. Though it’s a still image, it evokes the jerkiness of silent-movie footage – you can almost imagine it coming to life as part of a speeded-up sequence that shows an intrepid director tinkering about in his studio.

I think this is the spirit that the makers of Harishchandrachi Factory were trying to capture. Everything about their depiction of Phalke (very nicely played by Nandu Madhav) points to it: his own unflagging optimism, the support of his equally sanguine wife, their cheerful children and emotionally secure family life (there is no reference to Phalke’s first wife and child, who had died long before the events of 1911-1913 took place). The difficulties – the selling of an insurance policy and his wife’s jewellery, the social ostracising from those who believe he is dabbling in black magic – are glossed over.

Sailing to London despite having no contacts in England, Phalke discovers that the world is his oyster (and the lilting background music seems almost to goad him on). He immediately meets a fellow Marathi who helps him procure vegetarian food; sauntering into an editor's office, he is welcomed and given the help he needs. In barely the blink of an eye, we see his wife suddenly waking up to discover that her husband is back home, coochie-cooing at their new baby – it’s as if she had been dreaming, and he had never left at all. (I was reminded of how cinema can “magically” transport us to distant places and back within seconds.)

Later, the little problems surrounding the shoot (such as the impossibility of getting women to play women’s roles – and the near-impossibility of getting male actors whose fathers are still alive to shave off their moustaches!) are presented as a series of jolly episodes. Even the penultimate scene, where Phalke is applauded by a London audience after the screening of his film, suggest the self-effacing Little Tramp, blinking at the limelight. The subtext here is that Phalke quietly turns down an offer to practice his art in England, choosing instead to help set up this new industry in his homeland; we see that he is practicing his own, modest version of swaraj. But the tone of this scene isn’t didactic – it’s the tone of comic whimsy.

In other words, Harishchandrachi Factory is not what anyone could call a gritty, hard-edged film – it may be open to the criticism that it isn’t a “serious” biography. But I think its tone has a poetic aptness: when you consider how Phalke’s factory paved the way for the creation of so many dream-scapes over the decades, it’s fun to see his own life-story being given the texture of a very pleasant dream.

P.S. Watching Harishchandrachi Factory, I was reminded of another affectionate (and romanticised) depiction of a real-life director – Tim Burton’s 1994 movie Ed Wood. One of the most stirring scenes in this film has Edward Wood Jr, legendary bad-movie director, running into his idol Orson Welles at a bar. Talent-wise, the two men stand at opposite ends of the creative spectrum (if Welles directed “the greatest film ever made”, Wood directed “the worst film ever made”), but they are kindred spirits in one sense: they are forever being pushed around by others and expected to make compromises. “Visions are worth fighting for,” Welles (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) tells Wood in his baritone voice. "Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?"

The rub is that this sequence (which you can see here) is wholly fictional - there is no record of Wood ever meeting Welles in real life. But it feels right; it’s a scene of which you can say, “It should have happened this way.” Harishchandrachi Factory contains a few such moments.

In the Little Tramp's footsteps

Hard as it is to believe, we are nearing the hundredth anniversary of the start of one of the most important movie careers ever. A while ago, in this book, I came across some transcripts of inter-office memos by Universal Pictures, circa 1912 - the memos have people in high positions discussing the worth of a young comic who had applied for a job at the studio, and the first one reads:

“Interesting eccentric comedian. Better in sketches with dialogue than sight gags. However, not outstanding enough to warrant either testing or sending to coast.”

And later, when the test did happen after all (because there was an unanticipated vacancy):

“Many objections have been raised to the use of the derby hat...also, the moustache must go. And do not allow him to walk comically. This may look all right on English music hall stages but for mass audience we must try to avoid offending people who are bow-legged, or crippled.”

Happily, Charles Spencer Chaplin won the battle to keep his hat, his moustache and his walk, and here we are a century later, still marvelling at the effect he had on a new art form that was searching for direction – most popularly as a performer, but just as vitally as a filmmaker and all-round creative genius, one of the first true auteurs.

Eagle Home Entertainment has recently made available a series of Chaplin’s feature-length movies in good, restored prints, and it’s been a good excuse to catch up on films that I took for granted when I was a child. There are many gems here, including The Gold Rush, Modern Times and, from later years, Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux, but if I had to pick a favourite it would probably be the lovely City Lights, which Chaplin determinedly made as a silent film at a time when talkies were all the rage. (A sly opening scene has pompous officials speaking gibberish while inaugurating a statue – probably a reflection of what Chaplin himself felt about talking movies!) This story about a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl while also managing an oddly intimate, on-again-off-again friendship with a drunk millionaire, combines all the best qualities of his work: imaginative physical comedy (notably the superb boxing-ring scene), unforgettable little gags (the "lucky" rabbit foot, the spaghetti and the streamers), gentle romance and pathos.

To watch the classic Chaplin films is to marvel at the influence they have had on cinema over the decades – and to discover, almost from one scene to the next, how strongly his work has seeped into popular culture across the world. (It's a bit like realising that a favourite novel - say, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come - gets its title from a phrase made popular by a Shakespeare play.) Everyone knows about the effect he had on Raj Kapoor’s work, for example, but watching the beautiful last scene of City Lights where the tramp meets the girl, her sight now restored, I was reminded of the final moments of the Kamal Haasan-Sridevi tearjerker Sadma, where a man finds that the girl he had cared for through a mental ailment no longer recognises him now that she has regained her memory.

The City Lights sequence is (somewhat uncharacteristically for Chaplin) very understated, while the Sadma one belongs to a tradition of high melodrama, but the emotional link is so strong that it almost doesn't matter. To my eyes at least, Haasan almost comes to resemble Chaplin in that scene; even his moustache seems to droop in a similar way. But then, optical illusions of this sort are part of the Little Tramp’s legacy - you find traces of him in the unlikeliest places.

It also barely matters that the first film ends on a seemingly hopeful note whereas the latter's ending is sad and pessimistic; in the Chaplin universe, the possibility of melancholy exists in the most joyful situations, and vice versa. In any case, the viewer's knowledge of the Tramp's screen persona - the fact that he's a drifter perpetually bow-legging it from one situation to the next - makes it difficult to imagine a genuine romantic union between him and the flower girl, and this could be one reason why the last scene of City Lights is so movingly ambiguous. As Andrew Sarris put it, the final close-up is "the definitive image of a man who feels tragically unworthy of his beloved". It's a classic Chaplin theme.

[From my film column in Business Standard Weekend]

Chollychaplum and others in Garson Kanin's Hollywood

It isn't often that I chortle loudly twice while reading the first page of a book, but Garson Kanin’s 1967 memoir Hollywood (And the People Who Made It) - an ancient copy of which I picked up from the Blossom Book House in Bangalore last month - had me right from its opening sentence, which reads “Mr Samuel Goldwyn and I sat alone in his throne room, looking at each other.”

To fully appreciate this situation, some context is required: Kanin was what one might call an artist with intellectual aspirations, a skilled writer who worked in many different capacities in the film and theatre worlds from the 1930s onwards; Goldwyn, on the other hand, was a Big Producer, the “G” in MGM, a face of the money-driven side of Hollywood. This is their first meeting. Any encounter between two such personalities has funniness inherently built into it, and the mood is set by Kanin’s carefully respectful “Mr Samuel Goldwyn” and his throwaway use of “throne room”.

But what follows is even droller. Kanin nervously begins telling Goldwyn an anecdote involving George Bernard Shaw, realises after a few seconds that the producer is looking distracted, but continues with the story anyway. (Oh, Christ. Goldwyn looked bored. I was flopping. My palms were moistening. Should I stop? Too late. I forged ahead.) When he’s done, Goldwyn nods sympathetically at him, pauses and says:

“Shaw is a real tough bastard. Hard to get along. To do business with.”

This is a running theme in Kanin’s Hollywood: creative people who hope to produce important and lasting work, being forced into the position of “doing business” with the men who pull the strings, and the many tentative relationships and great and mediocre films that emerged from these collaborations. This book isn’t a conventional history or study of the movie world. It’s unstructured, anecdotal, conversational – and just as affectionate as Kanin’s Tracy and Hepburn (which I wrote about here). In fact, Hollywood reminded me a great deal of David Niven’s Bring on the Empty Horses, another book that appears, on the surface, to be not much more than a compendium of gossip and funny stories about Hollywood celebrities, but which ends up providing some very sharp and incisive sketches – and arguably revealing more than a self-consciously academic work would.

Sam Goldwyn is in some ways the central figure in this book (and as the narrative proceeds we gain an unlikely respect for him), and the other subjects of Kanin’s reminiscences include John Barrymore (who used little “blackboard” prompters with his lines scrawled on them while shooting a film, even though he could recite most of Shakespeare’s soliloquies on demand), Ginger Rogers (who determinedly continued using her old toilet at RKO Studios even after she had become a star at Paramount), Charles Laughton, Harry Cohn and Carole Lombard. But one of my favourite chapters is the one about Kanin’s relationship with Charlie Chaplin (or as he insists on calling him, “Chollychaplum”), specifically a passage where Chaplin is struggling with the idea of playing Hitler in The Great Dictator and Kanin goads him on:

Chaplin began to eat, unhappily. I took another swig. “Look,” I said, “I’m not a believer and anything even suggesting the supernatural gives me a pain, but once in a while there’s something in circumstance or in fate that’s absolutely shattering, and this is one of those cases […] here is a time in the history of man when the greatest villain civilization has ever known and the greatest comedian civilization has ever known bear a physical resemblance to each other. Think of it. It’s, well, unbelievable, but we have to believe it because it’s there. I took a deep breath and continued in an awesome tone, “Who but God himself could be capable of such an idea?"

Chaplin, a man not easily impressed, was impressed. Drama is frequently based upon a triangular structure, and one consisting of Hitler, Chaplin and God was not bad.

“Well,” said Chaplin modestly, putting down his fork, “I don’t know...”

“Of course you do,” I said, “You don’t have to decide about this picture. It’s all been decided for you. It’s inevitable. A foregone conclusion.”

There was a long pause. We finished dinner.

“You may be right,” said Chaplin.

The following day, he called the picture off for good. The subject became taboo for several weeks.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how some iconic movies start to get made.

100 years (more or less) of "Hollywood"

[Did this - somewhat basic - tribute essay for Business Standard Weekend]

Intro: Whether you love its vitality or hate its excesses, cinema wouldn't have been the same without Hollywood


The early years of film history are so heavily shrouded in mist – especially with many key works from the first two or three decades having been lost forever – that one must be cautious about pinning down dates, or suggesting that a particular studio, industry or director was the “first” to achieve something. One thing is beyond dispute though: a hundred years ago, give or take a few months, some very interesting developments were taking place in a small Los Angeles municipality called Hollywood. Studios like Paramount and Warner Bros were setting up camp and calling in trucks full of unwieldy motion-picture cameras. Artists with names like D W Griffith, Charles Chaplin and Mary Pickford were being drawn towards the region, almost as if by some mysterious magnetic force – as if a nascent art form knew that it had found a space from where it could begin showing itself off to the world, and that it need the right sort of people to get it going.

And show off it did. From the ground-breaking silent epics of Griffith to the inventive masterpieces of Buster Keaton and Erich von Stroheim in the 1920s to an explosion of sound films in a variety of popular genres – Westerns, musicals, screwball comedies, noir – in the 1930s and 1940s, American cinema quickly took the lead in demonstrating the possibilities of the medium. Of course, much pioneering work was happening in other countries at the same time – notably in Russia and Germany – but they couldn’t match the scale on which things were done in Hollywood. So it has remained to this day.

Today, a century after those beginnings, Hollywood is less a tangible place and more a state of mind. Geographical accuracy has never mattered to most people who use the word: growing up in India in the 1980s, for example, it was common to hear any English-language film (even a British one) being referred to as “a Hollywood movie” – even by film magazines, which should have known the difference.

For serious film buffs, “Hollywood” has often been synonymous with a crass, studio-governed style of moviemaking – one that is sometimes seen as the antithesis of art. The very word sometimes elicits knee-jerk negative reactions, partly because popular American movies are considered rude envoys of American cultural imperialism. There’s a stage in the trajectory of most film students when it’s fashionable to be snobbish about Hollywood (even the classics) and learn that the really “worthy cinema”, the cinema of integrity, comes from other countries – Italy, Denmark, Japan, Iran.

This view of things is understandable to an extent, especially when you look at the amount of big-budget cinematic dross that America churns out each year, and consider that many small countries barely have the resources to produce even half a dozen (good or bad) movies annually. But there’s another side to the argument. The fact is, in no other moviemaking industry in the world has commerce and art combined so fortuitously, so often, and with such strong reverberations for the rest of the world, as in Hollywood.

It’s true that for decades the studio regime and the star system led to certain artistic constraints, and there are plenty of stories that testify to this: for example, the rewriting - and compromising - of a script because a character played by a matinee idol couldn’t turn out to be a bad penny (or a "wrong 'un") at the end of a film. But it’s equally true that those same studios, and the talents working under the limitations they imposed, produced a rich and vibrant cinematic legacy that explored the full potential of narrative filmmaking. Directors realised powerful individual visions even while operating under the watchful eyes of their financiers (who, by the way, weren't always philistines; sometimes they were good at reining in artistic temperaments that might otherwise have self-combusted). Star-actors showed tremendous versatility not by submerging themselves in a dizzying variety of characters but by exploring the range of emotions within a certain type of role, dictated by their popular screen persona. And the world responded. When cinema exploded internationally in the 1950s and 1960s with an outpouring of independent, “art”-driven films from countries such as France and Sweden, the debt to the American film was enormous. The new European directors expressed their love and admiration for Hollywood, pointing out the subtle and complex techniques embedded in the best of its movies, and this led to a renewed study of American genre films, many of which had earlier been dismissed (by homegrown critics) as "mere popular entertainments".

American cinema would see a second renaissance in the 1970s, with the flowering of a generation of filmmakers who were students first – deeply knowledgeable about and respectful of movie history – and directors second: Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, De Palma among others. And though the decades that followed haven’t been quite as rich, Hollywood, for all its excesses, has always had space for the high-quality “indie” film.

But of course, the ambivalence continues. I remember a discussion with a friend who had just discovered the films of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and was (for reasons that I can’t quite fathom or relate to) smugly proud that this “Asian” filmmaker had been an inspiration to Western directors like Sergio Leone and George Lucas. His face fell when I pointed out that Kurosawa himself had been deeply influenced by the very American films of John Ford. In the 21st century it would be silly to think of “Hollywood” as the be all and end all of filmmaking, but there’s no question that it has been the wellspring for many of the best developments in the seventh art.