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For a long time, Quentin Tarantino has spoken of his plan to walk away from filmmaking on his own terms—after making ten features, and by the age of sixty—while he still has plenty of vigor to devote to other kinds of work. He just reached sixty, and, having made his first nine films (he lumps the two “Kill Bill” installments together as one), he’s already at work on the tenth and, presumably, last, which is tentatively titled “The Movie Critic.” The movie-centric subject suggests a follow-up to his previous film, “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood”; he says that it will be set in 1977, but denied rumors that it would be about the longtime New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. (He says that the critic will be male.)
If Tarantino follows through on his planned exit from directing films, he’ll join élite company; it’s hard to think of notable directors who’ve preceded Tarantino in ending their careers voluntarily. Perhaps the greatest to have done so is Douglas Sirk, the German filmmaker, born in 1897, who emigrated to the United States; signed his first Hollywood contract, in 1942; and made his name there, in the nineteen-fifties, with melodramas such as “All That Heaven Allows,” “Written on the Wind,” and the remake of “Imitation of Life.” At the height of his success, in 1959, he ended his studio contract and returned to Europe, simply because, he said, he “had had enough” of Hollywood. It’s far more common for great directors to have their careers truncated by commercial ostracism, to be put out to pasture far too early because their movies were expensive and their box-office returns deemed inadequate—that cohort includes Buster Keaton, D. W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, and Elaine May. (Josef von Sternberg’s withdrawal from Hollywood, in the early nineteen-fifties, seems to have been a case of mutual exasperation.) Also, some of the great Black directors who’ve made illustrious starts have often run up against an impenetrable wall of white producers blocking their subsequent movies. Such first-rate filmmakers as Christopher St. John, Wendell B. Harris, Jr., and Julie Dash have been unable to make more than one dramatic feature.
The most noteworthy counterpart to Tarantino’s announcement is the ballyhooed retirement of Steven Soderbergh, who, in 2011, announced that he was leaving Hollywood, and, in 2013, when he actually left, explained that he could no longer endure studio interference in his work. Like Sirk, he was fed up with the industry—but unlike Sirk, whose movie career was almost entirely bound up with big studios in Germany and the U.S., Soderbergh began as an independent filmmaker and thereby knew a degree of artistic freedom that not only loomed as an ideal but also remained an easily accessible possibility—all the more so inasmuch as Soderbergh is also an artisanal, hands-on filmmaker who, since 2000, has also been the director of photography on all his fiction features and, from the start of his career, in 1989, the editor of most. All Soderbergh needed to do was find an alternative movie economy, in order to move ahead as a director by going back as an independent (of sorts), and he found it—with television and streaming services. Soon after retiring from Hollywood, he started work on a TV series (in the event, “The Knick”); when he made “Unsane” (shot on an iPhone) and “Logan Lucky,” he produced them on his own; and his features “High Flying Bird” (also an iPhone movie) and “Kimi” were backed by Netflix and HBO Max, respectively. Yet his prolific retirement is also, in its essence, a sort of failure: at the same time as he declared his desperation to be free of studio strictures, he also expressed the desire to search for a new aesthetic essence of movies, and spoke, in 2013, of his frustration with “the tyranny of narrative.” He said, “I’m convinced there’s a new grammar out there somewhere,” and added, “If I’m going to solve this issue, it means annihilating everything that came before and starting from scratch. That means I have to go away, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take.” In an odd way, his extensive career since then, which has included some excellent films, hasn’t in any way innovated as profoundly as he intended. He continued his search for the new grammar but, in fact, didn’t jettison everything he knew—he has indeed moved ahead, incrementally, but hasn’t gone back to zero to start over.
Tarantino, too, started as an independent (like Soderbergh, a Hollywood independent, with a million-dollar budget and Hollywood actors)—but then he went big and has never come down to earth. He’s not a hands-on filmmaker; he has made films that are increasingly elaborate and grandiose. The scale of his projects inflects his plans for retirement. As early as 2009, when he was forty-six, he announced, “I intend to quit at sixty. . . . I’m going to write novels and write cinema literature, and stuff like that.” He’s already written one novel (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” based on his film) and one book of “cinema literature,” the remarkable, riffy “Cinema Speculation.” Meanwhile, he has also left the door open to directing a TV series, but he has expressed the view that streaming is inimical to the kind of movies that he wants to make—and he has even expressed doubts about his final movie if he’d have to make it for a streaming service rather than for theatrical release.
Above all, Tarantino’s plan is rooted far less deeply in his view of the business than in his view of himself. He has long fretted that “most directors’ last films are fucking lousy,” and has even suggested that he could imagine going out with “Once Upon a Time,” and that, in a way, he’s already done: “If you think about the idea of all the movies telling one story and each film is like a train boxcar connected to each other, this one would sort of be the big showstopping climax of it all. . . . And I could imagine that the 10th one would be a little more epilogue-y.”
The differing approaches that Soderbergh and Tarantino take to the very notion of cinema retirement set up an artistic dichotomy that both puts their individual careers into an illuminating perspective and reflects two defining ideals of the art of movies. This dichotomy is reminiscent of the one suggested by another pair of great Hollywood artists from another generation, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. Hitchcock made cinematic cathedrals—mighty freestanding spectacles of pomp and gaud, in which ordinary people were thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Hawks, with ironic understatement, filmed the plain essentials of people at work and showed extraordinary character emerging in ordinary circumstances.
Soderbergh’s films, with their fascination for the details of work and their radical emphasis on the creative process (including his own), suggest a kinship with the films and the ideals of Hawks. Tarantino’s films have something of a Hitchcockian grandeur; for him, movies are an event, whereas for Soderbergh, they’re an activity. Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” came out in 1992, and he’s now preparing his tenth feature. The prolific Soderbergh, whose début fiction feature, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” premièred in 1989, reached his tenth dramatic feature by 2001, and has made twenty-two more of them since then—nearly one a year, in addition to a handful of documentaries and two seasons of the TV series “The Knick,” for which he directed all twenty episodes. If push came to shove, Soderbergh, stuck in one room, would video that room, and himself, with his phone and find a way to edit it into something; Tarantino wouldn’t film at all, but would write. For Soderbergh, his retirement from Hollywood is cinematically busier than ever; the proliferation of activity enables him to diffuse his artistic mark far and wide, but modestly, even under the radar. For Tarantino—whose personality and speaking voice have been essential parts of his artistic persona, as in his appearances in interviews, on podcasts, and even onstage to promote his new book—a cinema-free retirement would eliminate the curtain, the screen, that separates him, and his voice, from the world, and would turn the world into the stage for his modes of direct address.
With his retirement, Tarantino burnishes his legacy; his worry about tarnishing his name with potentially weaker later films suggests something disturbingly funereal about his very approach to auteurship. It’s as if his films, far from being (as he says) part of one story, are more like the stones of a crypt, posthumous works made in advance. His films are marmoreal, solid to the point of opacity, with more or less no offscreen aura; his images have a frame around them—one that is, in effect, black, like a funeral portrait. By contrast, Soderbergh’s images have no frame whatsoever, almost no border, and they’re translucent, even transparent, yielding to the world around them, the conditions of their creation, the thought that goes into them rather than the thing that they are. At their best, they offer a documentary-like view of modern life; at their worst, they vanish and leave no trace in memory. Tarantino, at his best, creates iconography, moments that are images of memory itself—and at his worst obtrusiveness, things remembered involuntarily with annoyance. Soderbergh’s films take power as their subject; Tarantino’s are objects and embodiments of power. Soderbergh’s films have the elusive curl of question marks; Tarantino’s are exclamations, and who can blame him, with his distinctively vehement voice (in person and cinematically), for not wanting to become an old man who yells?
Soderbergh knows one big thing, the cinema itself; for him, cinema is everywhere, and it speaks through him no matter what he does. Tarantino has a huge toy chest of knowledge and enthusiasm, an amazing collection of movies from the history of cinema stocked up in his mind; he gives their multiplicity the unity of his voice, his personality, his public image, and he is, so to speak, their delegate, their representative. Soderbergh has an idea of cinema; Tarantino has ideas about individual movies, which is why each one that he makes counts, why each matters so desperately. Soderbergh risks insignificance, merely vanishing; Tarantino risks the illusion of significance, being a nuisance. Soderbergh escaped from Hollywood in order to evade its limitations; Tarantino’s planned escape seems meant to evade his own. The very fear of risk, the sense of pride and even vanity with which he protects his name, could stand as the ultimate form of self-criticism. Perhaps the very title and subject of his planned final film suggests that it might be the most personal of all his movies. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
