View image Robert De Niro in the last shot of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America”: How does this make you feel?
“Sometimes the best movies are the ones we make up.”
— from the trailer for Michel Gondry’s upcoming “Be Kind Rewind” (2008)
* * *
“This wasn’t the film we’d dreamed of, this wasn’t the total film that each of us had carried within himself . . . the film that we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live.”
— Paul (Jean-Pierre Leud) in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculin-Feminin” (1966)
* * *
Between the idea
And the reality…
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
— T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (1925)
In his review of Kent Jones’ book “Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism,” David Sterritt (for 35 years the film critic of the Christian Science Monitor) poses a challenge to movie critics and filmgoers alike:
Given his gift for perceptive film-critical thought, I wish Jones would now address himself to a problem that few critics (including me) have tackled with the care, energy, and resourcefulness that it demands: the predisposition of nearly all film critics to approach their subject(s) in terms that value the emotional over the intellectual and the descriptive over the intuitive. Good movies touch our feelings, of course, but that isn’t the only thing that makes them good; and while Jones knows this–hence his high praise for masters of film-thought like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, for instance–he too falls into the commonplace pattern of privileging the feelings that good films give him, and signaling his reactions in telegraphic ways that won’t mean much to people who aren’t equally familiar with the film or filmmaker in question.
What’s needed today is a new paradigm of readily accessible yet rigorously thoughtful prose combining theoretical analysis with intuitive ideas about cinema and the aesthetic world it creates.
OK, so let’s tackle it! (Prepare to comment.) Seriously.¹
When somebody says they “admire” a movie without much “liking” it (or being “moved” by it), they may be addressing, at least superficially, what Sterritt is getting at above. But how much can we, or should we, attempt to separate our emotional responses from our intellectual observations, our descriptions (“This is what happens”) from our intuitions (“This is what’s going on”)?²
My standard joke, when somebody asks what a movie is “about,” is to describe the movie in stylistic or thematic terms — which, in all honesty, speak to me more directly and powerfully than the plot. What’s “Barry Lyndon” about? Oh, it’s about slow, stately zooms. Or, it’s about a man who keeps trying to exert his free will only he can’t because he’s trapped in a Stanley Kubrick film/frame. To me, both those descriptions are just different ways of saying the same thing, and in stating them I’m only being semi-facetious.
December 14, 2012
