There’s an ad hominem lurking behind it, though. Or it’s something similar to an ad hominem.
This is a matter of personal preference, of course, which can’t really be challenged except in the most ridiculous cases. I wonder though how a person who conflates the artist’s personal or political life with the art could ever enjoy a movie?
A theatrically released movie almost certainly has at least a hundred people, and sometimes far more, involved in its production. It is a virtual statistical certainty that every single movie you’ve ever watched or enjoyed included the contribution of one or more thieves, assholes, wife-beaters, rapists, child abusers, embezzlers, drunk drivers, racists, homophobes or bullies. Most of the people who made the movie will be decent human beings but inevitable some are awful. If not every movie, 99.5% of them. Is it that you can enjoy the art as long as you’re cheerily ignorant of which person among them is a big dickhead? If so, you’re just trading the specific for the generic. You KNOW there’s a rat in the barn, but it’s okay if you don’t know where in the barn the rat is?
I’d think it was obvious that knowledge of the problematic behaviour or opinions of the artist is required for it to influence ones enjoyment of the artwork. I’d also think it was fairly obvious that some of the people working on a movie are more significant than others.
It’s not rare to be particularly interested or disinterested in the products of a particular director, but I’ve yet to hear someone say they don’t bother watching movies where Limelight Catering supplied the food.
Or, to put it another way “This is a matter of personal preference, of course, which can’t really be challenged except in the most ridiculous cases.”
Maybe it would be clearer to look at it the other way. Can one judge a work of art to be bad even if you admire or agree with the author?
I recently watched the God Is Not Dead movie. I agree that God is not dead, and that people should not be forced to renounce their faith as a condition of getting a passing grade in a class. But it still was a bad movie. I don’t think that’s much different from saying that Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will were good movies even if they were propaganda for causes with which I very much disagree.
Or even, perhaps, saying on the SDMB “I generally disagree with what so-and-so says, but that was a well-written post”.
That’s a well-stated point and underscores what I and others have said earlier – that some people will associate the artist(s) with their personalities to different degrees, that it often depends on the art form in question, and that the same person may react in completely different ways to the relationship between artists and their art depending on the specific circumstances. IOW, the whole discussion is kind of silly because the answer to the question is always just two words: “it depends”.
And as I said earlier, there’s little point in discussing “what should be” when all that really matters is “what is”. We can’t change how we react to the totality of a work of art, including what we know about its creator, just like we can’t change how the art affects us emotionally independent of its objective technical qualities. Because it’s art. Roger Ebert, in my view the greatest movie critic who ever lived, was especially adept at navigating the difficult ground between the technical and the emotional, the objective and the personal, and did it with consummate skill and breathtaking honesty.
But I think that it is also human nature, that knowledge of the authors view points might lead one to be unconsciously looking for areas in which that view point comes out in their work and so distract from the enjoyment of the work itself. Reading Enders Game while constantly looking for evidence of homophobia might make it less enjoyable.
Somewhat similarly I can no longer enjoy movies featuring Tom Cruise although I liked his work in the past. It isn’t so much that I am morally opposed to his Scientology beliefs, although I despise the religion, I see him more as a victim than an perpetrator. The problem is that every time I see him on screen I think of this video, and its hard to take him at all seriously in any non-parody role.
Let me try and explain again: “Nazi” and “Propaganda” are not terms under dispute. They are accurate. So Triumph remains a “Nazi Propaganda” film regardless of whether the Nazis won or not. Unlike what you said.
Propaganda is propaganda regardless of whether in the service of good or evil.
Unless you’re trying to make the same argument Leni did, that Triumph was just documentary not propaganda. To which I’d say “Bullshit”. When you help design the rally you then film, you’re not a neutral documentarian.
That’s exactly how I feel, despite the fact that I try to be non-judgmental and feel that artists deserve to have their work separated from their personal idiosyncrasies as much as possible. Which all goes to the point I made earlier about how it depends on the specific circumstances. I just can’t stand to watch a movie with Cruise in it, and it’s not just because of that video, there are many others, there are talk show interviews, etc.
The whole point of a movie is to create an absorbing imaginary world that, for a couple of hours, you can really believe is real. If the movie has Cruise in it, I don’t see his character, all I see is a simpleton and a nutcase and I can’t bear to watch his mug projected on a giant screen. So sue me – I can’t help it!
One day I walked into the lunchroom and there was Triumph of the Will on the TV. I was surprised, because the company was in Skokie and many of the workers were Jewish. I pointed out the glaringly obvious to a Jewish friend and he said, “Yes, but it is magnificent Nazi propaganda.” Since then I have tried to keep my beliefs separate from my artistic judgement and now only avoid Tom Cruise movies because he is creepy and annoying, not because he is a Scientologist.
I’m not sure that’s a perfect parallel. It’s perfectly possible to consider “not a scumbag” to be a necessary but not sufficient quality of good artists. THere are definitely folks I agree with politically and who seem like great people whose art I don’t care for.
For myself, at the far edges of the question, I am unbalanced. A person who agrees with me in every possible way but who writes mediocre fiction isn’t someone I’m going to read much of. Charles De Lint comes across that way to me, for example. A person who writes good fiction but is an obnoxious presence politically is also someone I’m not going to read much of. Hi, Orson Scott Card! But if someone is rightwing in general but not an asshole about it–hiya, Robert Silverberg!–I’m fine reading their stuff.
IOW, you can disqualify yourself in my eyes by being a truly terrible human being. But you can’t qualify yourself by being nice.
It’s a digression, but just to clarify this slightly, the daughter claimed ( and was backed by her brother ) that it was MZB herself that molested her. Breen was a convicted rapist and known paedophile. But he apparently preferred boys and as much as she was horrified by his actions, I believe his daughter claimed he was the more loving of her parents. I don’t think the claim was ever that he molested her, just others.
