Among the many books that commemorate the centenary of Saul Bellow's birth, one discovery is surprising: Saul Bellow has been writing film reviews for a while. Between 1962-63 he wrote four film reviews for the bimonthly magazine Horizon, all of which were included in Benjamin Taylor's newly edited collection of Bellow's nonfiction essays, Complex Thoughts.
Sure enough, Saul Bellow is impressive. The first, written in September 1962, is an ode to the work of Maurice Engel and the concept of independent cinema. The second is dedicated to Luis Buñuel, specifically to "Villadiana" and a film I haven't heard of, "The Stranger in the House" (although judging by Bellow's synopsis, this should refer to the film "It's Called Dawn", and I haven't seen this yet).
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It's Called Dawn In his essay on Buñuel, Bellow is nowhere near as high as he could have in his review of Engel: he did not see Buñuel as a director. The third, "Insights into Mass Production," was written in January 1963 and is the best of the four reviews. That's his sociological analysis of American life based on the trend of Hollywood films. This kind of article is not uncommon today. Bellow proposed the psychological trend in modern cinema, in which Hollywood used popular Freudianism to convey a certain new insight: the plot of the film, as well as the acting, were often based on the enlightenment of psychological theories. Heroes are those who heroically struggle to survive from mental illness, while villains are subjected to the twin torments of masochism and sadism, and this torment needs to be pitied in Hollywood's view. One of the great examples of this point of view used by Bellow is the film Psycho. The character of Norman Bates, medically influenced by the House of Horrors: *is actually a victim of his own ** mother-love complex. Psychiatrists make us see criminals as objects of clinical treatment, so that there is no moral punishment and only medical interpretation. 」
Bellow argues that this political metaphor for criminality as a social disease rather than a moral downfall, and by extension, Hollywood's perception of America: Perkins Jr. is even presented as a healthy, charming, sincere-looking young American – and that's exactly what Hollywood wants to mislead us. In fact, the handsome and charming teenagers who were given the name of Johnny no longer exist, because their depravity has been laid bare before our eyes. Bellow analyzes the 1961 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play of the same name, Summer Smoke, and proposes the film's edifying significance in this view: Puritanical repression is sinful, human nature cannot be whitewashed, the human body is a sacred object, and sex should be accurately understood as some form of divine worship. 」
Summer Smoke and Clouds, he stressed, is precisely the liberalization of this conception that has become a dramatic event in the field of cinema. And the liberalization of this idea has even developed its own religious piety. Bellow's argument is strictly politically valid, and it is valid even now. Hollywood and its independent subsidiaries have followed this path throughout. However, Bellow is only a quasi-fan of the film to give a non-artistic analysis of the issue. Hollywood's demagogic masterful tricks have contributed to its unfathomable success. Thanks to Hollywood, the United States is full of movies, and the country is like Hollywood's corporate campus, and just a few years later, what used to be a place full of cabarets has become a destination for audiovisual entertainment, and it still is. 
Robin Williams and Saul Bellow are, in a sense, like fish fed in a Hollywood pond, some of whom are already aware of the water quality problem. When the conspiracy of Hollywood's hidden politics was slowly exposed by those audiences who were familiar with it, a kind of politicization of commercial films came into being. This may be partly due to the fact that Hollywood was indisputably the first to enter the stage of history as a propaganda machine during World War II. But on the other hand, it is also due to Orson Welles's solitary and fearless spirit of exploration, which makes the art of cinema appear in an artistic manner. This assertion is another major contribution of Bellow's writing. Bellow's essay builds on the film critic Manny Farber and his 1952 essay for Review magazine, "Cinema is no longer a movie," and distills the essence of the argument:
What Manny Farber's films are capable of containing, in addition to novelty and exoticism, also has a psychological dimension. This implication makes you think about a series of questions such as the hero's mother-love complex and the paternal factors behind the character's impulsive behavior. Bellow's summary of Farber's article is accurate but incomplete. Farber's analysis points out that the popularity of this new style of pretentious cinema has led to the over-seriousness of cinema in its critique of capitalist society by catering to those who are hungry for change. This characteristic encompasses a range of specific video styles borrowed from high art (Faber), such as understated imagery, shallow focus photography, quirky gestures, disturbing action beats, hollow sounds, and so on. 
Saul Bellow complains that the mission of cinema is no longer to present a clear and understandable picture of reality – to tell at least an entertaining story, but more to extend the meaning of the visual experience by giving the viewer a way to take care of reality. To put it simply, what Faber complains about the most is symbolism: the image of the film is only a mere image, not as a reflection of reality, so that the image of Hollywood films is not as full of space as it used to be. But Farber seems to be a bit evasive in his approach to his arguments – he doesn't reveal the mystery until the end of the article: these phenomena seem to have begun with a 1941 film called "Citizen Kane." Putting aside the clumsiness of the acting, the film itself is exhilarating. 
Citizen Kane His insights (the word insight is apt here) are wise and accurate: Citizen Kane changes everything. Farber analyzes the details of the spectacle of vaudeville effects in Wells's first film, arguing that the film's influence exploded after the war. But Farber also disparages Citizen Kane, bemoaning its influence on the one hand, and deploring the loss of old-fashioned, fluid naturalistic imagery on the other, and lamenting the fact that a new style of cinema has gained the upper hand
Citizen Kane is a kind of inheritance of static pictographs, so much so that metaphor and symbolism have deliberately and decisively replaced the narrative, characters, and behaviors that Hollywood films used to pursue. These films should be seen as an X-spectrum (not literally) of pluralistic modernity. The brilliance of Farber's analysis lies in the choice of Joseph Mankiewicz's comedy "The Words of Man is Terrible" to demonstrate this new type of cinematic theory. Farber hated the film (he called it one of the most obscure films of all time), but he could at least see its extraordinary innovation.
But Faber, like Bellow, sees the change in the aesthetic style of New Hollywood (a term more appropriately placed in the historical context of the forties and fifties than the seventies) as the result of sociological and political influences. What has really changed, however, is the aesthetics of the image itself: what Orson Welles presents on the screen is first and foremost his own triple identity as a choreographer and director. The film's humbling of the plot to the genius of the director himself is first attributed to a certain director-centric ideology. Wells dragged the magic of cinema from behind the screen to the front of the stage; Or perhaps the prevalence of wartime missions has made the audience aware that there is still a lot of magic to be discovered (or to be revealed). And the utilitarian character of this ever-changing film industry (especially the rise of independent producers in the early days of the court's antitrust laws) has shifted checks and balances away from the big studio bosses.
Citizen Kane, however, is still a bunch of filmmakers who are creative and eager to set aside the stereotypes of the studio system and show their talents freely (such as Hitchcock, Mankiewicz, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Seck, Otto Preminger and Vincent Minnelli), there is still a bunch of filmmakers who wantonly label themselves and ruin their films because of their lack of creativity. Some filmmakers—or rather theirs—are ruined by the interference of the big studio system; Others** are better suited to benefit from such a system under the control of large studios. As contemporaries (Bellow was born in 1915, Faber was born in 1917), it was the films that were absolutely dominated by the pre-war big studio system that shaped their view of cinematic art.
With his passion for cinema and his insight, Farber has in his own way raised the grievances of the work of Hollywood directors who have been buried for lack of justice. If Bellow does the same, how can it be more than the category of four **?! However, in their striking and suggestive connections, they reveal the great and supreme theatrical device of modern cinema – the directorial talent that makes audiovisual language representation take precedence over narrative texts. As a leading artist, Bellow believes that the essence of art lies in the dramatic tension between the artist's own ideas and the characters in his works.