Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  You have been a great resource, for other writers. In 1982—that is, four years before you died—I said in an interview, “There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.” That is still true. We are still learning from you. We are still imitating you. You gave people new ways of imagining, while proclaiming over and over our indebtedness to the past, above all, to literature. You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

  I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness—and of the book.

  This time around, there will be no need for a great conflagration. The barbarians don’t have to burn the books. The tiger is in the library. Dear Borges, please understand that it gives me no satisfaction to complain. But to whom could such complaints about the fate of books—of reading itself—be better addressed than to you? (Borges, it’s ten years!) All I mean to say is that we miss you. I miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.

  SUSAN

  SEEING

  A Century of Cinema

  CINEMA’S HUNDRED YEARS appear to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories, and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be any more new films one can admire. But such films will not simply be exceptions; that’s true of great achievement in any art. They will have to be heroic violations of the norms and practices which now govern moviemaking everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world—which is to say, everywhere. And ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, will continue to be astonishingly witless; already the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative filmmaking, a brazen combinatory or re-combinatory art, in the hope of reproducing past successes. Every film that hopes to reach the largest possible audience is designed as some kind of remake. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the twentieth century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art.

  Perhaps it is not cinema which has ended but only cinephilia—the name of the distinctive kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love movies aroused was more imperial. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time. Cinema had apostles (it was like religion). Cinema was a crusade. Cinema was a world view. Lovers of poetry or opera or dance don’t think there is only poetry or opera or dance. But lovers of cinema could think there was only cinema. That the movies encapsulated everything—and they did. It was both the book of art and the book of life.

  As many have noted, the start of moviemaking a hundred years ago was, conveniently, a double start. In that first year, 1895, two kinds of films were made, proposing two modes of what cinema could be: cinema as the transcription of real, unstaged life (the Lumière brothers) and cinema as invention, artifice, illusion, fantasy (Méliès). But this was never a true opposition. For those first audiences watching the Lumiere brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, the camera’s transmission of a banal sight was a fantastic experience. Cinema began in wonder, the wonder that reality can be transcribed with such magical immediacy. All of cinema is an attempt to perpetuate and to reinvent that sense of wonder.

  Everything begins with that moment, one hundred years ago, when the train pulled into the station. People took movies into themselves, just as the public cried out with excitement, actually ducked, as the train seemed to move toward them. Until the advent of television emptied the movie theatres, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive, such as … it looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn’t raining. But whatever you took home from the movies was only a part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours—which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie.

  The prerequisite of being kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. And the conditions of “going to the movies” secured that experience. To see a great film only on television isn’t to have really seen that film. (This is equally true of those made for TV, like Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and the two Heimat films of Edgar Reitz.) It’s not only the difference of dimensions: the superiority of the larger-than-you image in the theatre to the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Since film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom, alone or with familiars. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theatre, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.

  No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals—erotic, ruminative—of the darkened theatre. The reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to be more attention-grabbing, have produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention. Images now appear in any size and on a variety of surfaces: on a screen in a theatre, on home screens as small as the palm of your hand or as big as a wall, on disco walls and mega-screens hanging above sports arenas and the outsides of tall public buildings. The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art at its most serious and for cinema as popular entertainment.

  In the first years there was, essentially, no difference between cinema as art and cinema as entertainment. And all films of the silent era—from the masterpieces of Feuillade, D. W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Pabst, Murnau, King Vidor to the most formula-ridden melodramas and comedies—look, are, better than most of what was to follow. With the coming of sound, the image-making lost much of its brilliance and poetry, and commercial standards tightened. This way of making movies—the Hollywood system—dominated filmmaking for about twenty-five years (roughly from 1930 to 1955). The most original directors, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles, were defeated by the system and eventually went into artistic exile in Europe—where more or less the same quality-defeating system was in place with lower budgets; only in France were a large number of superb films produced throughout this period. Then, in the mid-1950s, vanguard ideas took hold again, r
ooted in the idea of cinema as a craft pioneered by the Italian films of the early postwar era. A dazzling number of original, passionate films of the highest seriousness got made with new actors and tiny crews, went to film festivals (of which there were more and more), and from there, garlanded with festival prizes, into movie theatres around the world. This golden age actually lasted as long as twenty years.

  It was at this specific moment in the hundred-year history of cinema that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself. Cinephilia had first become visible in the 1950s in France: its forum was the legendary film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (followed by similarly fervent magazines in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Sweden, the United States, Canada). Its temples, as it spread throughout Europe and the Americas, were the cinematheques and film clubs specializing in films from the past and directors’ retrospectives. The 1960s and early 1970s were the age of feverish moviegoing, with the full-time cinephile always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen, ideally the third row center. “One can’t live without Rossellini,” declares a character in Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964)—and means it.

  Cinephilia—a source of exultation in the films of Godard and Truffaut and the early Bertolucci and Syberberg; a morose lament in the recent films of Nanni Moretti—was mostly a Western European affair. The great directors of “the other Europe” (Zanussi in Poland, Angelopoulos in Greece, Tarkovsky and Sokurov in Russia, Jancsó and Tarr in Hungary) and the great Japanese directors (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Naruse, Oshima, Imamura) have tended not to be cinephiles, perhaps because in Budapest or Moscow or Tokyo or Warsaw or Athens there wasn’t a chance to get a cinematheque education. The distinctive thing about cinephile taste was that it embraced both “art” films and popular films. Thus, European cinephilia had a romantic relation to the films of certain directors in Hollywood at the apogee of the studio system: Godard for Howard Hawks, Fassbinder for Douglas Sirk. Of course, this moment—when cinephilia emerged—was also the moment when the Hollywood studio system was breaking up. It seemed that moviemaking had re-won the right to experiment; cinephiles could afford to be passionate (or sentimental) about the old Hollywood genre films. A host of new people came into cinema, including a generation of young film critics from Cahiers du Cinéma; the towering figure of that generation, indeed of several decades of filmmaking anywhere, was Jean-Luc Godard. A few writers turned out to be wildly talented filmmakers: Alexander Kluge in Germany, Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy. (The model for the writer who turns to filmmaking actually emerged earlier, in France, with Pagnol in the 1930s and Cocteau in the 1940s; but it was not until the 1960s that this seemed, at least in Europe, normal.) Cinema appeared to be reborn.

  For some fifteen years there was a profusion of masterpieces, and one allowed oneself to imagine that this would go on forever. To be sure, there was always a conflict between cinema as an industry and cinema as an art, cinema as routine and cinema as experiment. But the conflict was not such as to make impossible the making of wonderful films, sometimes within and sometimes outside of mainstream cinema. Now the balance has tipped decisively in favor of cinema as an industry. The great cinema of the 1960s and 1970s has been thoroughly repudiated. Already in the 1970s Hollywood was plagiarizing and banalizing the innovations in narrative method and editing of successful new European and ever-marginal independent American films. Then came the catastrophic rise in production costs in the 1980s, which secured the worldwide reimposition of industry standards of making and distributing films on a far more coercive, this time truly global, scale. The result can be seen in the melancholy fate of some of the greatest directors of the last decades. What place is there today for a maverick like Hans Jürgen Syberberg, who has stopped making films altogether, or for the great Godard, who now makes films about the history of film on video? Consider some other cases. The internationalizing of financing and therefore of casts was a disaster for Andrei Tarkovsky in the last two films of his stupendous, tragically abbreviated career. And these conditions for making films have proved to be as much an artistic disaster for two of the most valuable directors still working: Krzysztof Zanussi (The Structure of Crystals, Illumination, Spiral, Contract) and Theo Angelopoulos (Reconstruction, Days of ’36, The Travelling Players). And what will happen now to Béla Tarr (Damnation, Satantango)? And how will Aleksandr Sokurov (Save and Protect, Days of Eclipse, The Second Circle, Stone, Whispering Pages) find the money to go on making films, his sublime films, under the rude conditions of Russian capitalism?

  Predictably, the love of cinema has waned. People still like going to the movies, and some people still care about and expect something special, necessary from a film. And wonderful films are still being made: Mike Leigh’s Naked, Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica, Hou Hsiaohsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and Koker trilogy. But one hardly finds anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies, which is not simply love of but a certain taste in films (grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema’s glorious past). Cinephilia itself has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish. For cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences. Cinephilia tells us that the Hollywood remake of Godard’s Breathless cannot be as good as the original. Cinephilia has no role in the era of hyperindustrial films. For by the very range and eclecticism of its passions, cinephilia cannot help but sponsor the idea of the film as, first of all, a poetic object; and cannot help but incite those outside the movie industry, like painters and writers, to want to make films, too. It is precisely this that must be defeated. That has been defeated.

  If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead … no matter how many movies, even very good ones, go on being made. If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.

  [1995]

  Novel into Film:

  Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

  WE TAKE IT for granted that film directors are, if they so wish, in the game of recycling. Adapting novels is one of the most respectable of movie projects, while a book that calls itself the novelization of a film seems, rightly, barbarous. Being a hybrid art as well as a late one, film has always been in a dialogue with other narrative genres. Movies were first seen as an exceptionally potent kind of illusionist theatre, the rectangle of the screen corresponding to the proscenium of a stage, on which appear—actors. Starting in the early silent period, plays were regularly “turned into” films. But filming plays did not encourage the evolution of what truly was distinctive about a movie: the intervention of the camera—its mobility of vision. As a source of plot, character, and dialogue, the novel, being a form of narrative art that (like movies) ranges freely in time and space, seemed more suitable. Many early successes of cinema (The Birth of a Nation, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Ramona, Stella Dallas, It) were adaptations of popular novels. The 1930s and 1940s, when movies attained their largest audience and had an unprecedented monopoly on entertainment, were probably the heyday of novel-into-film projects—the sleek Hollywood classic-comics of the novels by the Brontë sisters or Tolstoy being no more or less ambitious, as films, than those adapted from such bestsellers as Gone With the Wind, Lost Horizon, Rebecca, The Good Earth, Gentleman’s Agreement. The presumption was that it was the destiny of a novel to “become” a film.

  Since the film that is a transcription of a novel is riding piggyback on the reputation and interest of the novel, comparisons are inevitable. And now that movies have ceased to have a monopoly of entertainment, standards have risen. Who can see the films made from Lolita or Oblomov or The Trial without asking if the film is adequate to the novel—the making of invariably invidious comparisons depending on whether or not the novel belongs to literature. Even a minor novel, like Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, turns out to
be far richer than the film. It seems almost in the nature of film—regardless of the film’s quality—to abridge, dilute, and simplify any good novel that it adapts. In fact, far more good movies have been made from good plays than from good novels—despite the view that such films tend to be static and thereby go against the grain of what is distinctly cinematic.

  Directors of the 1930s and 1940s like Wyler, Stevens, Lean, and Autant-Lara were particularly drawn to good-novel-into-movie projects—as have been, more recently, Visconti, Losey, and Schlöndorff. But the failure rate has been so spectacular that since the 1960s the venture has been considered suspect in certain quarters. Godard, Resnais, and Truffaut declared their preference for subliterary genres—crime and adventure novels, science fiction. Classics seemed cursed: it became a dictum that cinema was better nourished by pulp fiction than by literature. A minor novel could serve as a pretext, a repertoire of themes with which the director is free to play. With a good novel there is the problem of being “faithful” to it. Visconti’s first film, Ossessione —adapted from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice—is a far nobler achievement than his handsome, respectful transcription of The Leopard or his stiff, rather absent version of Camus’s The Stranger. Cain’s melodrama did not have to be “followed.”

  There is also the obstacle posed by the length of the work of fiction, not just by its quality as literature. Until this past winter I had seen only one film adaptation of a literary work I thought entirely admirable: a Russian film, The Lady with the Dog, made from a short story by Chekhov. The standard, and arbitrary, length of feature films is approximately the time in which one can render a short story or a play. But not a novel—whose nature is expansiveness. To do justice to a novel requires a film that is not just somewhat longer but radically long —one that breaks with the conventions of length set by theatregoing. This was surely the conviction of Erich von Stroheim when he attempted his legendary, aborted adaptation of McTeague, called Greed. Stroheim, who wanted to film all of Frank Norris’s novel, had made a film of ten hours, which the studio reedited and eventually reduced to two hours and forty-five minutes (ten reels out of Stroheim’s forty-two); the negative of the thirty-two reels of discarded footage was destroyed. The version of Greed that survived this butchery is one of the most admired of films. But movie lovers will be forever in mourning for the loss of the ten-hour Greed that Stroheim edited.