A Cinema Of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman

by Robert P. Kolker

The "New Wave" style of American film of the 1960s and 70s--characterized by exciting, narrative innovation and sometimes adventurous reworkings of older film genres, as well as images of solitude and explosive violence--has come to an end. Erasing virtually all traces of 60s and 70s experimentation, American film in the 1980s has returned with a vengeance to a more linear, conventional style.In this newly revised edition of The Cinema of Loneliness , Robert Phillip Kolker continues and expands his inquiry into the phenomenon of cinematic representations of culture by updating the chapters on the directors discussed in the first edition--Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman--to include their latest work, and by substituting for the chapter on Francis Ford Coppola a chapter on the cultural, political, and ideological formations of eighties films and the work of Steven Spielberg. He incorporates new discussions to include the more recent films, such as Arthur Penn's Four Friends (1983) and Target (1985); Stanley Kubrick's direction of The Shining (1980) and Full Metal Jacket (1987); Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), After Hours (1985), and The Color of Money (1986); and Robert Altman's A Perfect Couple (1979), Popeye (1980), Streamers (1983), A Fool for Love (1985), and Beyond Therapy (1987).Placing the films of Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Altman in an ideological perspective, Kolker both illuminates their relationship to one another and to larger currents in our culture, and emphasizes the statements their films make about American society.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Media Tie In, Art, Pop Culture, Collections

410 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 1980

About the author

Robert Phillip Kolker, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, taught cinema studies for almost 50 years. He is author of A Cinema of Loneliness, The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and the Reimagining of Cinema, and editor of 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays and The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is what grabbed me, but the penetrating essays on film form—and the directors who subverted convention to create an open, inquisitive cinema—are what held me. There were many revelations. For example, I’d always experienced Stanley Kubrick as icy and inaccessible; this book helped me see how he used that cold eye to “document (human) loneliness in the face of progress” through films such as “2001.” For Kubrick, characters are “less the psychologically motivated creations we are used to seeing in American film and instead more obsessive, maniacal ideas released in human form” (think “Full Metal Jacket” and “The Shining”). The author deepened my appreciation for the body of Oliver Stone’s work by explaining that he consistently uses “temporal editing as a major tool in the cinematic representation of history… inviting us to look at what we believe we know and to imagine alternative fictions…” That explains the exhilarating feeling I get each time I watch “JFK.” We can all appreciate the kinetic energy of a Martin Scorsese film, but for those of us who seek to understand what drives Scorsese’s manic violence, consider this: “He is addicted to cinema… a filmmaker who devours other films and infuses what he absorbs into his own work… to create films in dialogue with one another.” In this way—through allusion—he keeps “the history of cinema alive within any individual film.” I get chills just thinking about the sweep of this statement!

[Alex Abbott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Largely delved into the Marty and Altman chapters for my thesis, but really neat piece of film criticism. Rocks there’s multiple moments where I was reading something about The Long Goodbye or Mean Streets and said to myself “I thought the same exact thing!”

Agree with my professor who recommended this 1) It’s a little reliant on auteur theory 2) there could certainly be a little more female representation in film subject and director, I don’t think looking at Elaine May’s first two screwball riffs would be too unheard of for this subject (especially considering how much Kolker refers back to Hawks), but she made 4 films vs Altman making something like 300 million. But still Kolker’s head is in the right place for most of these films and knows what he’s talking about.

[Leftjab · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting read - gets a little too film theory for my tastes, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Would love the author to make a companion to this about six more contemporary filmmakers. He kinda starts this book in the 4th edition of this one: David Fincher, Todd Haynes, Ramin Bahrani, maybe throw Jeff Nicholls in there, David Gordon Green, Kathryn Bigelow, Wes Anderson, PT Anderson? As the book is an exploration of the modernist legacies of Hitchcock, Welles, and Ford (the modernists of the golden age of the Hollywood studio system), he has little time for Tarantino, and probably at the time of writing this edition, PT Anderson was seen in the postmodernist mode for aping Tarantino, Altman, and Scorsese - but I would hold that Anderson's 21st Century movies (Punch Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Inherent Vice) have taken Tarantino, Altman, Scorsese and even elements of Ford and Welles (not to mention Ophuls) and incorporated them into his approach; There Will Be Blood would make a fine night of viewing alongside McCabe and Mrs. Miller (and Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue!). I'm guessing Lynch and the Coen Brothers fall into the postmodern absurdity realm, though I would think that both filmmakers have transcended this several times over (Tarantino owes so much to Lynch - Blue Velvet is a defining American movie of the 80s - but Lynch's brand of black humored surrealism owes very little to Welles or Ford, though MUCH to Hitchcock, maybe even moreso than DePalma who has made a career blatantly ripping Hitchcock off.) (The Coens are all over the place - though their treatment of genre in a way owes much to Altman, quite possibly the only other filmmaker who has made so many movies in varying genres that nonetheless feel the work of one imagination. Maybe Michael Winterbottom but he has entered into Altman's 80s in his career lately.)

It's funny to see the author's tastes writ large - his pages on superhero movies and 80s action heroes are very close to my heart (rightfully at the start of the Spielberg section!), and I liked his expounding upon what he sees as the more important works in the directors' respective filmographies, but I was also wondering about my personal favorites he skimmed over, most likely because they strayed thematically from the book - Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (not even mentioned), Stone's The Doors (also not mentioned, understandably, but I love it!), Scorsese's After Hours (barely mentioned). Altman's California Split gets a few pages and it as well doesn't have the heft of McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Nashville, but I love it nonetheless. Full Metal Jacket gets pages but largely in the Spielberg and Stone sections. (Corollary to this - Arthur Penn is a difficult director to pin down. Kolker rightly spends a great deal of time with Night Moves - an excellent film - but beyond the seismic impact of Bonnie & Clyde, Penn seems to me to be a fringe director more than a focal point. Mickey One is interesting in how it blatantly integrates French New Wave technique into an offbeat American story, but I wonder how much the impact of Bonnie & Clyde can be attributed to Warren Beatty more than Penn. Altman and Beatty had a tempestuous relationship on McCabe as well and Kolker spends arguably as many pages on McCabe as he does on Bonnie & Clyde - a key film in this context that is also strangely missing is Hal Ashby's Shampoo. Thematically Shampoo, Bonnie & Clyde, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller are all connected - though it would contradict Kolker's auteurist approach to say that the driving creative force behind those movies was Warren Beatty rather than their respective directors!)

An excellent book for film nerds like myself.

[Martin Raybould · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert P. Kolker loves Scorsese and hates Tarantino. Whether you agree with his opinions or not it cannot be denied that Kolker's analysis of U.S. movies is rigorous and incisive. His critique of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull made me want to watch all three masterpieces again. The chapters on other great American auteurs illustrate how superficial the writing of other film critics is.

[Carol Storm · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sections on Stanley Kubrick are brilliant, especially A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and DR. STRANGELOVE. On the other hand, it's hard to take THE SHINING seriously, and Professor Kolker takes it very, very seriously indeed.

The more you read of Kosker's writing, the more unpleasant his personality becomes. It's a classic case of a dazed, embittered Sixties Survivor who wants to keep fighting all the old battles over and over, just like some old Kentucky colonel forever mourning the fall of the Confederacy.

I have nothing against the Sixties, or Sixties radicals, but the premise of this book seems to be that the only movies that matter are the movies that reinforce the leftist politics of the critic. This makes some sense, I suppose, with a movie like Dr. Strangelove, which can be read as an anti-military satire. But when it's a movie like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the whole thing becomes problematic. Because the radicals who "rescue" Alex after his "cure" are revealed to be just as stupidly greedy for power as the government ministers they attack. This is not a complex insight, but it seems to be completely beyond Kolker's grasp. He goes so far as to call psychotic teen murderer Alex "admirable" (the reasons are a little vague) but never seems to notice that the canting, preening, murderous radical F. Alexander is simply contemptible. Stanley Kubrick and Anthony Burgess were men of the world, guys who came up the hard way, and they had no illusions about the sanctity of the left. Robert Kolker is a college professor who knows from nothing about hard times. Or hard men. Or anything, really, but the sanctity of his own convictions.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything about phallic symbols, patriarchy, and film as a tool of social change and collectivization is pretty silly, and Kolker tends to look at film a lot differently than I do, but he's one of the most readable academic film theorists, and his focus on form and content instead of plot mechanics and symbolism (again, except for the phallic symbol stuff) is welcome. He's admittedly weak on analysis of acting and music, but he has some insightful things to say about each filmmaker's specific formal style, especially Scorsese's and Altman's.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

I confess - I've only read the Scorsese and Kubrick chapters. But the Kubrick chapter is groundbreaking. To prevent all of our ears bleeding, I wrote my thesis with many of Kolker's principles in mind. If you want to know more, contact me. Really - I could use any extra interpretations.

[Michael Clayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic look at five of the most influential directors from the best period in Hollywood's history.

[Joey · Rating 4 out of 5]

i enjoy films. i enjoy loneliness. this book is a must read for anyone who wants to read about loneliness in some of the most intersting films of the past 30 or 40 years.