The Sacraments of Genre: Coppola, DePalma, Scorsese
1. The general assumptions about the basis of the neorealist aesthetic and particularly Bazin's version of what he believes to be Rossellini's practice has been recently challenged by Peter Brunette; see especially "Rossellini and Cinematic Realism," Cinema Journal , 25 (Fall 1985), 34-49. Brunette here and elsewhere in his view of Rossellini is specifically concerned with the way in which every discourse is constantly subject to erosive counter-discourses that ultimately threaten any classical sense of "unity" in the films, along with, it is implied, the conventionally moral implications of such unity. The connections I shall argue between the seemingly distinct aesthetic of the postwar neorealists and the "school" of Coppola, DePalma, and Scorsese complement some of Brunette's views, although from the angle of film history rather than that of critical theory. On the influence of Fellini's melodramatic style, see Naomi Greene, "Coppola, Cimino: The Operatics of History," Film Quarterly , 38 (Winter 1984-85), 28-37. [BACK]
2. Connecting a particular style with a particular politics is tricky business at best, even though theater has traditionally been the mirror of social structure, and film to a certain extent follows in its ideological wake. But I still wonder why the Nazi tendency in propaganda (with the prime exception of Riefenstahl) was toward historical melodrama, while the Fascist was toward documentary. Perhaps it has to do with the relative positions of Nazism and Fascism on the Great Man/Everyman axis, and the way each defined its audience. [BACK]
3. Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979), 101. [BACK]
4. Caul's mistake has been psychologically interpreted as caused by his paranoia. But to root the explanation exclusively in his character diverts at- soft
tention away from the aesthetic self-criticism of The Conversation . In art paranoia may be just another name for aesthetic unity. [BACK]
5. The successful Ewok siege of the Death Star substation in Return of the Jedi contains the film's only energy because it arises from a similar tension in the imagination of George Lucas. [BACK]
6. Compare the very un-Coppolan moment in The Conversation when we discover that Caul has hidden the crucial tape inside a hollow crucifix. [BACK]
7. The relations between directors and stars can be arrayed on a spectrum from conflict to conspiracy. The basic question remains who is left inside the film and who is allowed to escape. With the examples mentioned above, compare Robert Altman's "erasure" of Paul Newman at the end of Quintet . [BACK]
8. See Pye and Myles, 168. [BACK]
9. The modernist and minimalist SoHo of After Hours of course geographically overlaps with the Little Italy of Mean Streets . Perhaps the title should appear as After (H)ours , to emphasize the denaturing of any ethnic characteristics in either its setting or its hero. [BACK]