Michigan TodayOnline . . . Fall 1996
By Davi Napoleon

'Film is the art form of the 20th century,' Bert Cardullo writes in his 1994 collection of essays Film Chronicle, because it 'embodies all the technological impulses, cravings and interests of our age in the employ, not of machinery, but of human spirit.'
In the film panels above. . .
Trip (Denzel Washington) restrains Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) as fellow Union soldiers jeer the Black troops of the 54th Massacusetts Volunteer Infantry in Glory (1989), directed by Edward Zwick, screenplay by Kevin Jarre. 'The battle sequences alone are enough to remind us that...war makes equal, suffering humbled beasts of us all, no matter how glorious or ignoble the cause. ...[Paradoxically, the battlefield was both the first and the last level playing field on which they [the 54th] would play.'    Marion the trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), with whom the angel Daniel falls in love in Wings of Desire, a 1988 German film directed by Wim Wenders, co-written with Peter Handke. Inspired by the poetic imagery of Rilke, Wings of Desire is an allegory of the artist as angel who forsakes immortality for the sensual pleasures of loving, living and dying: who gives up his narcissistic, internal, knowing art for an art that captures the surface of the world, and in capturing that surface, suggests its depths, its interiorities, its secrets, without actually revealing them.
hen Hollywood's John Turturro (Do the Right Thing, Barton Fink) was studying acting at the Yale School of Drama, he asked a schoolmate in the criticism program to help him shed his thick New York accent so he could speak in rounded stage tones. The schoolmate advised Turturro to keep his accent. "I told John his asset was his ethnicity," recalls Bert Cardullo, now associate professor of theater and drama at Michigan. "He was certain I had shaken my New York accent through training," he adds. Not so.

Cardullo was born in an Italian neighborhood in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, but when he was 7 his family moved to Miami where his father, a printer/engraver, sought better jobs. Cardullo's feelings about the move remain ambivalent. It took him far from the maternal grandmother he loved but exposed him to a world more complex than the ghetto of his childhood. Besides, the ethnicity that has served Turturro well would not have done for Cardullo, whose career is marked by a resistance to being defined. In addition to teaching, he serves as the U-M theater department's first dramaturge (see below) and is the film critic for The Hudson Review. And he has four books in progress to add to the nine others he has written, edited or translated. His Film Chronicle: Critical Dispatches From a Forward Observer (1987-1992), published by Peter Lang in 1994, was praised for the passion, audacity, clarity and accuracy with which he discusses recent films from 14 countries.

Early on, Cardullo knew he wanted a life in the arts rather than the science and math urged by his father. He majored in German at the University of Florida because he loved the literature. He longed to enter a broader field, however, something that might catapult him out of himself in an immediate, visceral way. "I tend to be reclusive," he explains, "and I knew that was not a good thing."

Upon graduation, he tried assorted jobs, including high school teaching. An editing post followed at Cornell University Press. In Ithaca, he audited theater history classes with Marvin Carlson and did some research for the school's theater. Without consciously looking for it, he discovered a place to combine the theoretical and the practical, the personal and the social. He knew his life would be in theater, but for a time he was certain that it would not be in the academy. Later, he reviewed theater for a paper in Stamford, Connnecticut, until a fellowship lured him into the MA theater program at Tulane University, where a professor encouraged him to apply to his own alma mater, the Yale School of Drama.

Cardullo flourished at Yale. He earned a doctorate in fine arts and studied critical writing with his favorite film critic, Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic. Kauffmann invited Cardullo to private screenings when The Hudson Review was looking for a new film critic in 1986. The Review's editor, Frederick Morgan, appreciated Cardullo's "broad knowledge of movies, national and international" and gave him the job. Cardullo's background in literature and theater serves him well when he reviews film, and he advises students who want to be critics to take a roundabout route, doing undergraduate work in something other than theater or film.

Theater departments can be narrow. Cardullo turned down an appointment at one school that told him to stop writing on film--he would receive no credit toward promotions or tenure for it. At Michigan, however, he's able to teach film in the theater department and wear his many other hats as well. When department chair Erik Fredricksen directed Michigan students in The Broken Pitcher, a play by Heinrich von Kleist that appears in Cardullo's collection German Language Comedy, he feared translator Cardullo might protect the script from dramaturge Cardullo, or that scholar Cardullo would want to do an erudite production. That didn't happen. "He was absolutely into making it visual, physical, kinetic," Fredricksen learned. Cardullo also provided reams of historical information.

Students find Cardullo energetic and committed. Doctoral candidate Robert Knopf, who has been Cardullo's student and teaching assistant, noticed that "he prepares every single course from scratch no matter how many times he's taught it, so he never goes stale." That may be because Cardullo tried his hand at acting first. "Teaching for me is a kind of performance," he says. "Just as an actor playing Hamlet for a second time should not interpret the role as he did for a different production, a teacher must reconceive a play each time he teaches it."

Actors don't have to be scholars, he says, but he fears too many schools "train the instrument but not what makes the instrument go, the mind." He sees the classroom as a place to provoke students to think and to disagree; "People are so afraid of offending somebody else that they don't say anything."

Cardullo is hard on students, a passionate perfectionist. When a student balked at his suggestion that she see a writing tutor, he explained that a medical doctor who made light of a serious condition might find himself on the wrong end of a lawsuit if he didn't send a patient to the proper specialist. "I take the doctor in my title seriously," he says.

Making Plays Work
In his recently published What is Dramaturgy?, Bert Cardullo and other critics explore the little-known field of dramaturgy (a word derived from the Greek for the workings of a play). Dramaturges are usually in-house critics who help directors and other members of thecreative team see and solve problems before a show opens. The dramaturge researches everything that may be of use: When and where does the drama unravel? What was going on in the world then and there? Who is the playwright, and what light do his life, times and other writings shed on the work at hand? How has the play been staged in the past?

In Cardullo's view, a dramaturge is "an intellectual go-fer" whose responsibilities include preparing a casebook for the director, attending rehearsals to answer questions for everyone in the company and writing program notes and study guides for audiences. But this is no ordinary go-fer. He is the theater's "artistic conscience," ensuring faithfulness to articulated aesthetics and protecting the text against those who would misinterpret it or stage it dryly.--DN.

Davi Napoleon '66, '68 MA, is an Ann Arbor freelancer and a columnist for Theater Week magazine.

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