Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism. - Softcover

Taylor, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691089558 ISBN 13: 9780691089553

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Gone with the Wind an inspiration for the American avant-garde? Mickey Mouse a crucial source for the development of cutting-edge intellectual and aesthetic ideas? As Greg Taylor shows in this witty and provocative book, the idea is not so far-fetched. One of the first-ever studies of American film criticism, Artists in the Audience shows that film critics, beginning in the 1940s, turned to the movies as raw material to be molded into a more radical modernism than that offered by any other contemporary artists or thinkers. In doing so, they offered readers a vanguard alternative that reshaped postwar American culture: nonaesthetic mass culture reconceived and refashioned into rich, personally relevant art by the attuned, creative spectator.

About this title

Review:

"Could someone tell me what critics are for?" the director Tom DiCillo once asked, wearing the kind of jovial grimace you might expect from the guy behind Living in Oblivion. A little stuffy and academic, Artists in the Audience nevertheless defends the role of those among us who watch, react, and report. Taking as his heroes two avant-garde critics, Greg Taylor traces our own obsession with camp and cult movies to their beginnings. Parker Tyler, a poet who wrote for View, and Manny Farber, a painter who reviewed films for The Nation, were Greenwich Village bohemians who sought highbrow delight (or "weightier entertainment value," as Tyler put it) along the margins. Starting in the 1940s, Farber and Tyler began to hold movies up to more serious scrutiny, but at the same time they groomed their readers to resist middle-class values by grooving on the Wildean fringes, "the aesthetically incomplete, fractured, uncontrolled"--Plan 9 from Outer Space over, say, Mildred Pierce. As apostles of cinematic energy they anticipate Pauline Kael and Film Comment. But they mainstreamed giddiness too, championing what Dan Aykroyd's twitchy theater maven in Saturday Night Live skits of the 1970s called the "deliciously bad." Finally, their desire to shake up conventional notions of taste à la Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol relates to our present wassailing in cultural debris--in psychotronic Z-budget movies, in bad-for-you TV, and in academic panels devoted to teasing out the deconstruction of gender role-playing in The Valley of the Dolls. --Lyall Bush

From the Back Cover:

"Greg Taylor's Artists in the Audience is one of the more innovative works of cinema studies that I have read in some time. It's essential reading for anyone interested in the history and theory of film criticism, and it touches as well on important issues in art history and cultural studies."--Robert Sklar, author of Movie-Made America

"Since World War II, cinema has challenged American intellectuals to define their relation to popular culture. In this incisive history, Greg Taylor traces many attitudes dominant today-the search for momentary pleasures in mass entertainment, the ironic celebration of movies' wilder side, the phenomena of camp and cult films-back to the work of Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, and a series of avant-garde filmmakers. He shows how critics of great ingenuity and panache managed to revolutionize tastes, convincing guardians of middlebrow culture that Hollywood movies came alive as art only when treated with a mixture of offhand respect, humor, and bravado. This is a witty, thoughtful account of a crucial period in intellectual tastemaking."--David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0691089558
• ISBN 13: 9780691089553
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208