The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy

by Robert B. Ray

Here is a in 1939, when the Hollywood Studio System, at the peak of its power, produced such films as Gone with the Wind , Ninotchka , Stagecoach , The Wizard of Oz , Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , and Wuthering Heights , the movies' number-one box-office attraction was not Gable, Garbo, Wayne, Garland, Stewart, or Olivier. In 1939, 1940, and 1941, the most popular performer in the American cinema was Mickey Rooney, who owed his success primarily to a low-budget MGM series that concentrated on his character, Andy Hardy. Here is another at some point in the past decade, film studies, once the most innovative of the humanities disciplines, began to harden into a catechism of predictable questions and answers. By committing itself exclusively to rational critique, film studies left itself overmatched by the enormously popular, seductive, and enigmatic representations that constitute the movies. And by eschewing experimentation with the forms of criticism, film studies ironically cut itself off from the new methods of research and writing prompted by the twentieth century's revolution in communications technologies. Robert Ray's book about Andy Hardy proposes that alternative ways of thinking and writing about the movies can be derived from the humanities' equivalent of science's pure research--the avant-garde arts. Drawing on the Surrealist tradition, with its use of games, chance, fragments, anecdotes, and collage, Ray invents for film studies new forms of research that imitate the cognitive habits encouraged by photography, computers, and the cinema itself. In doing so, he reveals that even the Andy Hardy movies, a routine product of the Hollywood Studio System, were, after all, rich and mysterious.

Genres: Film

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

what if we exploded standard film criticism to do it in an ever expanding number of new ways ? what if we applied the lessons of the surrealists, benjamin, freud? i have been saying this already!!! stop telling me the plot i already don't care about in the first place. make a criticism that is itself an exploratory work of art. make me think about the piece by sidestepping the matter at hand entirely. etc etc. i read this guy's other book like ten years ago and noted this one as want to read then only just now got around to reading it. not really a big mistake as i probably needed to digest and appreciate all the sources he's working with anyway. fun stuff!
we should always be playing exquisite corpse.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very useful even for scholars not interested in film.

[ML Character · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book remains a very good complement (read: juxtaposition) to your typical criticism book. I remembered being surprised by how much I liked it back in grad school and it held up.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fresh and interesting approach to film studies. The author plays surrealist games with his classes, taking film stills from unseen (and "uninteresting") films as jumping off points for essays and explorations.

[Brian Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The experiment to change film theory through avant-garde practice doesn't work, but it's an entertaining journey and something needed to be tried.