This rewriting of film history overlooks what contemporary society has lost: sophistication. While admirably beginning their book with discussions on the high-art achievements of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad and Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte and L’Éclisse, Farber and McClellan demean the educated worldliness of those filmmakers in favor of piddling social- justice concerns about sex and race.
They cite “a bizarre episode verging on racism” in L’Éclisse, “in which Vittoria puts on a blackface performance,” and La Notte’s “strange sequence in which [Marcello] Mastroianni and [Jeanne] Moreau visit a nightclub where a black female contortionist performs,” indicating “surprising racial insensitivity on the part of an upper-class white filmmaker of the era.” But the fact that Antonioni was already cognizant and supremely insightful about sex and race and Western culture is what makes those films still amazing — and instructive — beyond most movies made this century.
The best films of 1962 have passed the test of time. Recent decades of Oscar and critics award-winners have not, even though Farber and McClellan praise some for following 1962’s example. In an unctuous epilogue, the authors depart from artistic concern and pander to “a passionate belief in the possibility of social justice and the value of community involvement.” I can imagine David Lean crying “Rubbish!” Right now is always the right time to introduce people to great movies — and to beware disingenuous revisions of movie history.
