For some time now I've been watching as many of the greatest movies ever made as I can. Years ago I became interested in reading film criticism, mostly off of the A.V. Club website, and then in Roger Ebert's film reviews. He is famous for writing scathing reviews of hackneyed movies, but more interestingly, he writes about movies from a pop philosophical perspective. Many of his reviews reach beyond what we might think of as film criticism and act as stand alone essays. An example is this one of Synecdoche, NY, which is a baffling movie when first watched, but on repeat viewings becomes one of the best movies I've ever seen. I purposively say "best" rather than favorite. Without his review ( http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081105/REVIEWS/811059995 ) I think I might never have gone back to watch it a second time, but his writing made the movie sound so appealing, I had to see it again. Like Ebert, I'm not done with it, and will watch it again (.
His ongoing project is to review many of his old favorites in the "Great Movies" section of the Chicago Times Website, and oftentimes his reviews will make me work harder to understand why these movies is so revered. Like the AFI, I do feel like there is a bias towards older films, and even after trying to enjoy some of these movies I still found them quite boring and pointless. Still, because of this list, and because of these reviews, and have stumbled upon some movies which have expanded what I even thought possible to do with a movie.
This is the first of hopefully many posts in which I record, and process my thoughts about cinema (using the words cinema and film instead of movies is how to make yourself sound smart!), and explain why film can be not just entertaining, but as rewarding as reading a great book, or going to the opera, or watching a play. So here we go.
To make movies a valid art form there needs to be a specific reason as to why a story needs to be told using a camera rather than any other method. I imagine that the early plays were popular because they were able to do something that traditional storytelling was not, which was to provide a living embodiment of a character with which the audience could empathize with more immediately. A character is no longer something in the imagination, but has taken a physical form and can speak to the audience directly, or interact with his fellow characters. The empathy of the viewer becomes more engaged as the emotions and pains of the actor are more real than in story form. There may be other advantages to using the form of a play over story, but it seems that the main one is to draw out the emotions of the audience even more than stories.
I feel that the above paragraph doesn't even come close to doing justice to the topic, and perhaps I'll explain more later. For now, it'll have to do.
Movies, then it seems, have to be able to express something, or bring some preexisting aspect of storytelling to the foreground that can't be done as well in plays, poems, stories or novels. While thinking about this, I again stumbled across the Hitchcock movie "Notorious," and it revealed to me a small portion of how movies can do something unique among storytelling formats (I'll talk more directly about Notorious in a different post). As silly as it sounds, my revelation about movies was this: they use a camera to make them. The wonderful invention of the camera let's the viewer quite literally see what a character sees. It allows the director to focus in on tiny details, and microscopic reactions in the faces of characters without dwelling on any of them. In a novel, when a detail is pointed out it can throw off the rhythm of the story, while in a movie, if a camera lovingly flickers over a key being passed off between two people while maintaining the action at a constant pace. When a glimmer of a smile passes across an actor's face oftentimes the viewer won't even be sure he saw it. Or as an example, near the end of the movie, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," while Spencer Tracy (who in real life was ill and dying) was giving a final, long speech about love and race and everything, in the back of the shot his wife, played by Katherine Hepburn, begins to well up. The light glistens off each tear as she stands silently in the background, not even in focus. In a movie i found otherwise unaffecting, seeing those tears in her eyes overwhelmed. The beauty of that shot could go unnoticed because of its subtlety. Later, Robert Osborne (The guy who hosts most TCM things) informed me that those tears were not planned, but actually Katherine Hepburn realizing she was witnessing perhaps the last time anyone would ever see Spencer Tracy acting. That fact made it even more interesting to me that I found the shot so incredible.
These little moments, which continually I find to be the most affecting parts of movies, are one reason why movies do something no other genre can do. It might not seem like much, but never before movies, were actors able to bring so much to a story without drawing attention to themselves. These powerful moments, lurking in the background of great movies are something that cannot be replicated. Plays might try, but think about this. In the movie Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are dead, Gary Oldman (whichever he was), throughout, was discovering the laws of physics through accident, and when he did so it was briefly acknowledged by the camera and then passed over. This wasn't part of the script for the play on which the movie was based. If, even in a play a director tried to accomplish this, it would require that he draw attention to that behavior. Because of the virtues of movies, however, Stoppard was able to show us this display (which is the most memorable part of the movie for me). It's often been quoted to me from somewhere, that there's no such thing as subtlety in filmmaking. I think that's wrong, and that subtlety tends to exist in films in a way that it cannot exist anywhere else.
This only seems to cover a tiny portion of why film is great, and I hope to expand on this post in the next.
It's getting late, and I'm getting tired. Good night y'all.
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