Word: kazan
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Director Elia Kazan is like Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl: a great artist who did bad political deeds [CINEMA, March 8]. His art doesn't cancel out the evil he did in naming names of people who were involved with the Communist Party. Your writer Richard Schickel made the wrong argument in favor of Kazan's honorary Oscar. Schickel stated that Kazan's films are so good that they cancel out his misdeeds, saying history resists easy moralizing. The right argument is that Oscar should be about great art and cinematic achievement, and Kazan deserves the Oscar for that reason. MITCH...
...Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, that most cautious of Hollywood institutions, would abandon the town's ruling narrative conventions and embrace historical indeterminacy by voting--without dissent or demur--to present this year's honorary Oscar to a proud, fragile, now almost silent old man named Elia Kazan is astonishing. And to some of its constituents, adherents of both the old and new left, shocking...
...them, the great directorial career this award honors--one of the few such in America that actually changed the way people perceive movies--is irrelevant. To them, Kazan, 89, is a traitor who, almost a half-century ago, when anticommunist blacklisting plagued American life in general and show business in particular, "named names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and, worse, has ever since refused to register shame or apology for so doing. To them, precisely because he was the most powerful individual to choose this course, he remains the central symbolic figure in the cautionary political fable...
...Around the industry last week, one sensed that many judged 47 years of relentless contumely more than sufficient punishment for Kazan's ancient apostasy. It is not at all clear how many supporters are rallying to a campaign led by two formerly blacklisted screenwriters, Abraham Polonsky and Bernard Gordon, urging the audience at the Oscar ceremony to "sit on their hands" when Kazan accepts his award unless he recants his sins. This curious plan represents something of a tactical retreat for Polonsky, who only weeks ago was "hoping someone shoots [Kazan]" because "it would no doubt be a thrill...
Here, this writer should probably admit his biases. He speaks as a lifelong liberal, appalled since coming to political consciousness by the kind of Stalinoid bullying and terror inherent in Polonsky's chilling remark. Also as a lifelong cineast who came to aesthetic consciousness as Kazan was achieving his unprecedented (and so far unduplicated) status as the leading director in both theater and movies. And, finally, as one befriended by Kazan a decade ago, when I began producing a TV documentary about...