I hope it’s clear how much I love movies and was shaped by classic American and French cinema. It may be one day that a few decades of film (let’s say from 1915 to the late ’50s) will be looked back on as a halcyon period, like German-Austrian music from Bach to Mahler, some of which was played to sweeten the days in the concentration camps. The history of the shining light and the screen suggests we have learned to feel detached from reality, grief, and politics. So many people, from Lenin and Chaplin to Zuckerberg and Jobs, have believed that moving imagery on screens might unify and enlighten the world. Isn’t it pretty to think so? The screen has also distanced us; it has made us feel powerless, helpless, and not there. The array of watching devices that have swept over “cinema” in the last thirty years will accelerate and spread, and of course they are helpful and profitable—just look at the economy they have produced. Might they also be the lineaments of a coming fascism? Don’t be alarmed, it will be so much more polite or user-friendly than the clumsy version of the 1930s, but as deadening as the shopping malls of Americana, the nullity of so many of its schools, the unending madness of its advertising, and the stony indifference of technology.
This book is a love letter to a lost love, I suppose. It has the semblance of being a history, but it might be some kind of novel, called The Moviegoer. I am probably not American enough to diagnose this country from the inside. Yet I am no longer English enough to be an outsider. Still, I know what Don DeLillo meant in White Noise (1985, just before Blue Velvet) when he looked at “the most photographed barn in America” and said, “They are taking pictures of taking pictures.” As I near completion (December 2011), Fear Factor is coming back on NBC television, with contestants in a three-thousand-gallon tank of cow blood (USDA certified) trying to retrieve the severed hearts of cows with their teeth. About time. But why severed? Cut to David Foster Wallace:
A certain subgenre of pop-conscious postmodern fiction, written mostly by young Americans, has lately arisen and made a real attempt to transfigure a world of and for appearance, mass appeal, and television; and that, on the other hand, televisual culture has somehow evolved to a point where it seems invulnerable to any such transfiguring assault. Television, in other words, has become able to capture and neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism that television requires of Audience in order to be commercially and psychologically viable at doses of several hours per day.
Imagine what it felt like in the 1880s to see photographs and series like those taken by Eadweard Muybridge. Imagine that night in Paris in 1895 when the very slow and friendly locomotive came toward the screen and people felt fear or excitement. Remember the face of Margaret Sullavan looking into the empty mailbox in The Shop Around the Corner. Think of Psycho in 1960 and asking the movie not to do anything like the shower scene again. Imagine the man in The Moviegoer, the Walker Percy book, seeing what had to be William Holden and feeling that a casual movie was strolling down the street. You can still sense the marvel of having this shining version of reality there before you as a plaything and a philosophy. It was a time in which the mere act of looking and wanting to see possessed an innocence and an energy. It seemed like a way of growing up. How lucky to be alive then and there.
Who knows how much will change between this book passing from my hands to yours? You should be ready for the loss of theaters and video stores. Be open to something like Apple TV, activated by voice controls. But notice some sly “necessary” institutional control of its menu, if order is to be preserved. The technology is so potent and dynamic now that “entertainment” can run very close to social stability and political unease. Not every nation wants a “Spring.”
Be prepared for the word “movie” being replaced by “hits” or “bites”—or “viddies” (a term Anthony Burgess used in A Clockwork Orange in 1962). There may be astonishing, obscene, and horrific innovations—we will chase fear and longing to the end. There may even be new works of art as profound as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (1974), or Mulholland Dr. (2001).
That last film is typical of a natural trend toward old movie forms being appropriated. Lynch’s film is not just its own story but an anthology on the “blonde in Hollywood.” For all its arresting originality, it wants to bring other movies and sad women to our mind. Moreover, cheeky kids are remaking classics all the time with impunity: on YouTube there is a short version of the Al Pacino Scarface. It is 1 minute and 40 seconds, and it is all the uses of “fuck” in the film. This joke went up in 2006 and six years later it has had 1.9 million hits. Scarface is a pretty good nasty entertainment: its marriage of violence and flash makes rascals of us all. But the short version reappraises it in so thorough a way I’m not sure I have time now for the long version. Short versions could become a cult—as well as longer versions. Another YouTube marvel is the seventy-four-second dissolving montage of Lindsay Lohan growing older: as of April 2012 it got six million hits.
Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) may be the grandest example of interfered-with film. It is the Hitchcock classic played at two frames per second, a rate that makes a twenty-four-hour viewing. I must admit, I have only seen part of it, which is not unreasonable or impractical, though it is a mark of our new habit of watching just a fragment of things on-screen.
24 Hour Psycho is both tedious and every bit as potent as the 1960 movie. It is Psycho without sound, fear, or suspense; and without those atmospheres the picture is revealed as beautiful but poignant: to see Norman and Marion trapped together in dread slowness is to weep for them. (I have also enjoyed the text of a play, Mote—Motel with a letter dropped out—by José Teodoro, that makes new stories out of Psycho.)
The deliberation of 24 Hour Psycho allows us so much more access to time, repetition, and the mechanics of filmmaking. I believe Hitchcock would have welcomed this “invasion” and watched it endlessly, for it’s a lesson in his way of working in advance. It seems like a dreamy, nearly infinite rehearsal for the film, as well as a distant, inching memory of it. It makes Psycho feel ancient, like the cave paintings in Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)—the perfect description for the great film archive.
You have to see it, or part of it. Did Gordon have the right to do it? I don’t know, but rights are going out of fashion. He had the means and the mind, and I understand his own claim, that it “is not simply a work of appropriation. It is more like an act of affiliation.”
The appropriation doesn’t have to come as a film. Am I alone in finding more pleasure in Geoff Dyer’s book Zona than in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, to which the book is devoted? If I had to choose between all of Godard’s work and his Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–98), I’d take the Histoire(s). This was an eight-hour video, shown as a film, but it comes in other forms, including a set of books. It is the piece of creative criticism Godard was born to deliver. If you want something similar, but more lyrical, there is Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory (1998 and 2008), which is an interactive labyrinth on Godard’s subject. At the age of ninety-one, Marker was the least known master of film, but he was still e-mailing friends beautiful photographs of people riding on the Paris Métro that are as entrancing as the few mobile seconds from La Jetée.
This kind of creative anomaly with film first struck me in 2000 in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, where I saw the exhibition “Hitchcock et L’ Art,” conceived by Guy Cogeval and Dominique Paini, which had premiered in Montreal. This was not just a survey of art works that had influenced Hitch, but a new Hitchcock experience. There was a darkened room with spotlights picking out objects on blood-red silk—the knives, scissors, telephones, keys, watches, and poison that figure in his films. There were sets and rooms from his world. The visitor was more than just a voyeur; he was in the screen. That is the next big thing: us in their movies. As it was, the show seemed to me as stimulating as the best films Hitch
cock made.
I have even tried such games myself.
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, I taught at Dartmouth. The school had a modest but very useful library of films, most of them on 16 mm. One item was The Clock, made by Vincente Minnelli in 1945. It’s a romance, in black and white, in which a young soldier (Robert Walker) has a two-day leave in New York and meets a girl (Judy Garland) and falls for her.
The film runs ninety minutes, and the Dartmouth print of it was on two 16 mm reels of exactly the same length. So my show was a mathematical idea before it was anything else.
I asked the projectionist—a sympathetic man named Jerry Cate—to help me. In the theater where films were run for classes there was a screen wide enough to play two 16 mm images without overlap. So Jerry set up two projectors side by side but sufficiently apart. On the left-hand projector he threaded up reel one of The Clock, to play forward, with sound. On the right-hand projector, he loaded the second reel, with all the film on the lower, or uptake, reel, to play in reverse and without sound.
—We started the two projectors at the same time.
So the film ended as it began. The story was moved forward and played backward from its finale concurrently. The two halves met tidily in the middle. The audience yelled with glee. We did not damage the print.
The effect was ravishing: it may be the most exciting film show I have ever seen—and it meant that The Clock took only forty-five minutes. (For the committed film watcher, the saving in time is liberating.) You may be able to try it for yourself, though those projectors and prints are harder to find nowadays.
How was it ravishing? It woke the audience up. I don’t mean that the Dartmouth students were asleep or inattentive. But this was a fusion of narrative, cinema, and technology that no one had witnessed before. Looking at the screen was miraculous again. And if that sensation ever disappears, then our whole adventure with the movies and the screen is over. Nothing will remain but us being intimidated by the stupid promises of advertisements and other lies.
Backward motion is fantastic—it is as lovely as it is uncommon, or impossible: with people running in reverse upstairs (like Danny in the snowy maze in The Shining); pouring coffee from a cup to the pot; bursting out of the water in a pool, arcing through the air and coming to rest on a diving board that was trembling until the person landed. You look at these things as if you had never seen film before—the exhilaration is exhausting and transporting.
You also discover what a sweet, artificial thing story is. That is not a mocking of narrative, simply a revelation that story is just a series of tricks or steps, a mechanism, not too hard to guess in advance, and as systematic and serviceable as, say, a staircase—and as logical and mathematical. A story is something made and made up; it is a disguise of life, artfully and kindly done, but not life. It is lifelike. And stories are so artful, so manufactured, that they might as easily run backward or forward—Christopher Nolan did that with Memento (2000), but most flashbacks begin to play the same game. In short, you get the idea and the chance to see that movie is not just the illusion of reality (the fallacy of being there on the screen with its figures) but an artefact, a design, a game, a trick, an illuminated screen.
Thus the screen is as vital as the film, yet while every film is different and itself, the screen is always the same: patient, available, uncritical. It is timeless time on which the silly or suspenseful action of the clock’s hands do their dance of movement and liveliness. So we laugh and cry, and hope for the ghosts to be happy. That is what we call “movie.” But the screen is truth, or knowledge, and the absence of those things. It is fate, eternity, and implacability. If you wish, it’s god. And moviegoing, for decades, was people sitting in the dark, bathing in the spill of light from the screen and the possibility it afforded of a perfect or improved life. Whether it is Renée Falconetti as Joan of Arc or Judy Garland as Alice Maybery in The Clock, those figures are the ideals of happiness or spiritual fulfillment.
But if reverse motion is so beautiful and revelatory, doesn’t that reopen your eyes to the same wonderment in forward motion? I know it’s hard, because you are so used to forward motion, and it does so resemble life in cunning and artificial ways. But if you recall the age in which film was just still frames magicked into life you may appreciate that the artifice, the design and playfulness of reverse is there in forward, too. You are seeing a superb, insolent attempt to mimic, steal, and tease life. I realize that most films try hard to make you believe in the forward motion and the momentum of a story, a dream, or an experience. But none of them can escape the power of intervention in the story and its reality. That is why cutting is so important an assertion of unreality—even greater than that of music playing in the air of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia.
You are not watching life. You are watching a movie. And if, maybe, the movie feels better than life, then that is a vast, revolutionary possibility, and no one knows yet whether it is for good or ill, because the insinuation of dream does so much to alter or threaten our respect for life. Dissatisfaction and doubt grew in step with film’s projection of happiness.
The last source of delight is the opportunity in that odd presentation of The Clock to see that the most profound subject in all movie is time and the way it passes, and resembles itself. “Once upon a time” we say—once upon a time there were these young women in Paris, Céline and Julie, and they used to visit a house where a film was always playing. The players never noticed them watching—it was the old voyeur advantage. And then, in time, Céline and Julie…well, I promised not to tell you what happens to them, because story does matter even if it’s been happening now for nearly forty years.
In that showing of The Clock it was far easier to notice the abstraction of certain shots—close-up and long shot, fades and moving camera shots—because the process opened up the technology of narrative as well as the mechanics of projection. The views were no longer natural; they felt chosen; they radiated intention and their own framing capacity. Suddenly, you realized that The Clock, like time, was always in a circle, or a ronde. Everything has happened before, and will again—with tiny, vital differences that belong to us. And that is why we have to keep looking, to see our differences. And listening makes a curious, alternative existence, as real as speech and sound effects, yet as fantastic as music—lovely, impossible, lunatic, and phantom. It is like sex, and that’s why there is so little need to try showing sex itself in movies. We like to watch because we love the idea of attraction, and think of it as “desire.”
But it can be dread, too.
Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Janet Leigh in Psycho, another splash, half a second from twenty-four hours
Notes
Prologue: Let There Be Light
“In the movie films”: E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975), p. 297.
On Eadweard Muybridge
See E. M. Muybridge, Complete Human and Animal Locomotion (1979); see also Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: Father of the Motion Picture (1975), and Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003).
Part I: The Shining Light and the Huddled Masses
A Cheap Form of Amusement
“The poor kid is actually thinking”: Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (2010), p. 47.
“nothing is of greater importance”: Thomas Edison, Moving Picture World, December 21, 1907.
“These places are the recruiting stations”: Anna Shaw quoted in Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (1990), p. 38.
“How could a man”: Irene Mayer Selznick, A Private View (1983), p. 26.
On Louis B. Mayer
See Bosley Crowther, Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer (1960); Charles Higham, Merchant of Dreams: Louis B. Mayer, M.G.M. and the Secret Hollywood (1993); Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Le
gend of Louis B. Mayer (2005).
On movie moguls
See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988).
“Never mind now”: Selznick, A Private View, p. 17.
On D. W. Griffith
See Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (1983); Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith (1973); Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (2007); J. Hoberman, “First Movie in the White House,” London Review of Books, February 12, 2009.
“I have thought”: Schickel, D. W. Griffith, p. 33.
“It is another demonstration”: Ibid., p. 156.
“Never let me hear”: Ibid., p. 192.
“He stepped out”: New York Times, April 30, 1915.
“My father said”: Selznick, A Private View, p. 15.
“someone put the sun”: Robert Towne, Chinatown: A Screenplay (1983), Preface and Postscript, n.p.
“Did you know that guy?”: Lawrence Weschler, “The Light of L.A.,” in Weschler, Vermeer in Bosnia: A Reader (2004), p. 300.
“so radically different”: Robert Irwin quoted in ibid., p. 301.
“It is like writing history”: See Schickel, D. W. Griffith, ch. 10, pp. 272–309.
“It was David Wark Griffith”: Michael Powell, A Life in Movies (1986), p. 94.
On Charles Chaplin
See Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (1964); Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (1997).
“The stage manager came on”: Chaplin, My Autobiography, pp. 21–22.
On Buster Keaton
See Rudi Blesh, Keaton (1966); Tom Dardis, Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down (1979).
On Douglas Fairbanks
See Alistair Cooke, Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character (1940); Richard Schickel, Douglas Fairbanks: The First Celebrity (1976).
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