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Movie Going: Thoughts on Watching and Reviewing (Becoming an Epinions Movie Critic).Sep 05 '01 (Updated Feb 15 '02) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line As Americans are led to rationalize pandemic disease, environmental destruction, geometrical population increase, and widespread homicidal rage, we are carelessly ignoring the exchange of our dreams for sensory pornography.
In this *third and last essay of a series, I shall attempt to pinpoint some of the recent developments in motion picture production which are already changing the way movies are viewed and reviewed. If you wish to review movies at Epinions, I hope you will consider the implications of what follows before you undertake the task of movie critic. We have already looked, in essays #1 and #2, at what ways, in the first hundred years of movies (roughly 1895-1995), our perceptions of the medium subtly changed. In the first essay, I suggested that, in the beginning, audiences saw the Movies as magic. Pioneer Director George Melies actually tried, with his first use of double exposures and fades, to make films (VOYAGE TO THE MOON, 1902; et al) into amusing illusions; while the Lumiere Brothers fascinated audiences with documentary realism in ARRIVAL OF TRAIN AT STATION (1895), later still with color (1907), and went on to send their camera teams around the World in what became Pathe News. [My father, who served in France with the Cameron Highlanders in the First World War, used to tell a story to illustrate how unstable the French were in Battle. He said, when bivouacked briefly under canvas behind the lines, his platoon was invited over by a French company to watch a movie one night. Half way through the film -- a "travelogue," he said -- the candle-lit projector caught the film on fire. Immediately, the Frenchmen fled, while my father and his mates stayed to help the projectionist douse the fire. What neither my father nor I knew when he told the story was that a fire in the Lumiere Theater in Paris early in the century produced cyanide gas from the nitrate film stock, killing many people. The French were just showing a practical and healthy respect for that fact.] When these two elements of "magic" and "documentary" were combined in the work of Griffiths, Chaplin, Von Stroheim and others during the 1920's, Hollywood and motion pictures as a mass art form became a significant reality. I suggested in my first essay that, after the coming of sound, movies from the heyday 1930's and 1940's created a dream state which was hypnotic and addicting, concentrating audience attention on the mythic Star System, as well as the story. (An important early sociological study of the apparatus of film making, by Ruth Powdermaker, was indeed entitled, Hollywood: The Dream Factory.) The fact that movies were often satisfying in various ways to individuals, and sometimes rose to high art, was in the minds of the Studio Moguls incidental to the gargantuan opportunity for profit that films represented. In Essay #2, I began to lay out an idea, based on the conclusions of Essay #1, that fear of Television in the 1950's caused the Studios to adopt expensive widescreen processes (earlier abandoned) and new stereophonic sound systems, etc. These devices, while impressive, especially for spectacle, destroyed the concentration of the audience. Movie exhibition became much more about the shape of the screen, the quality of the sound or the soundtrack -- not to mention the overwhelming necessity of selling popcorn -- than total immersion in the content of a film. (Paradoxically, color became generally cheaper and more "realistic" -- which is why many films of the 1960's and 1970's [TOM JONES, Richardson, 1963, for instance, before elaborate restoration] have deteriorated into orange blurs.) Successful films, as originally defined by, say, C. B. DeMille in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1923 and 1956), transmogrified into STAR WARS (Lucas) by 1977, and along with much poorer films, became almost cartoons of earlier incarnations of their type. And, gradually, by the 1980's, since the audience came to the theater now for many reasons, movies were transformed into advertisements for CD's, T-shirts, posters, cult memorabilia, and, of course, the stronger than ever Celebrity Culture, which formerly was seen, through fan magazines, as somehow separate from the movie going experience itself. In these years, I lost my innocence of lovely movie oblivion, becoming more the "reviewer" I am at Epinions today. And of course, movie criticism, which in the beginning was done by old sports writers, dismissive theater critics and then by the Cineastes like Agee and Kael, broke into a multitude of declensions (of which Epinions is one) which looked at movies from various artistic, generic and commercial angles. This change showed not only the movies' ascendance as the dominant dramatic art form in World Culture but also the fragmentation of the audience. I certainly have been fragmented myself to some extent, like most of us. What, then, is there left to be said? Well, for one thing, the process continues, and second, as I posited at the end of Essay #2, new factors have risen in the last ten years which, in the desperate need to hold the central audience, have allowed certain aberrations to be exacerbated. For instance, aside from the snobbish distinction made between crass movies of the James Bond type and the higher Merchant/Ivory sort, which has always been there, I see the resurgence of the animation film as a move to reduce the medium, even in live action, to its story board/comic book essentials. (You will remember the old producers' joke: "If we can only get rid of the directors and actors, we'll have this business beat!" For another instance, as I look at movies today, and read certain criticisms of them, I am struck that technical aspects of many films overwhelm the dramatic experience. When I saw THE PATRIOT last summer I thought it an overblown, pandering piece of jingoism, but I was impressed by the photography of the distinguished Caleb Deschanel. However, in criticism here and elsewhere, I saw praise for the generally spurious idea of the movie, but complaints that the FX and blue screen work was faulty. Several critics indicated that only a great shot of a man's head being taken off by a cannon ball redeemed the film. In other words, the meaning of the film and the technical presentation of the film emerged as separate entities, in the opinion of many viewers and critics. As I noted in my Epinion of THE GLADIATOR, that ambitious return to the time of DeMille suffered in my view because a technical crew (which listed 25 pages in read-out) filled most of the film's length with computer generated images. Hence, the principal players, Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, etc., who had to carry the actual story, played an inordinate number of scenes in close up, sometimes extreme close up, making the film monotonous and tiring, spoiling what was otherwise a pretty good movie. On the other hand, THE PERFECT STORM, the third Summer blockbuster, was criticized for either having too much story or too little story -- or for having "phony" blue screen effects. Frankly, on balance, I did not notice these failings overmuch and thought THE PERFECT STORM the best of the three. Especially, when some critics wanted the whole book filmed, and others insisted that this true story have a happy ending. But I wonder, if I see the film again, on tape or DVD, will I be looking for some tell tale digital line, a certain improbable height to a towering wave? When I see a cast of thousands, which ones are real? If several cars in a chase explode in flames, did it really happen? Or as time goes on, will all our film joys, even the stars, be figments of HAL 9000's imagination? Will T. S. Eliot's early 20th Century shadow which falls between the thought and the act darken -- or worse -- corrupt our movie-going experience. Such experience, I fear, will not be satisfactory in human terms. And here is my point, from my own experience, and from reviews I'm reading, I gather that more and more of our movie watching experience is a kind of pornography. We do not want a piece of Art as a whole. We want the sensation, the quick charge, the blood, the gore, the fire, the explosion, the orgasm -- without the meaning, the cost, the remorse or the consequences, good and bad. And that factor, if I am correct, will vitiate the power of the movies as Art, just as the same mechanism is destroying the quality of our daily lives. And of course, a score of magazines devoted to Home Theater, evaluate films in terms of their widescreen ratio, or how a given film energizes the woofer in THX or dts in Surroundaround: All the sensational pleasures of a half dozen types of pornography in the comfort of your own home. That many of the films they praise are rotten is generally ignored or clothed in PR hype. At least in subtle ways, "we are what we eat," and we are what we experience. Aldous Huxley, in his 1931 BRAVE NEW WORLD, saw a time when people high on "soma" would flock to large indoor areas where pieces of illusion equipment would provide three dimensional images of our heart's desire to interact with. Followed by perfunctory sex. That world is not far off. The Studio Moguls today are often only master accountants. Just as they scrapped silent film artistry for sound, just as they warehoused the traditional screen for Cinemascope, they eagerly plan to bring us electronic digital movies from a central point to theaters all over the World. No more 35 mm film. Undoubtedly, these productions will provide new opportunities for talented, artistic -- I almost wrote film makers. But the pornographic and voyeuristic elements that were inherent, or built in, to the old technology will rise a thousandfold more powerfully in the holopornography of tomorrow. Because that will be where most of the money is to be gained. In Ancient Days, Serapis and other oracular Gods or Goddesses of the Miracle Religions appeared in colored lights, smoke, and by reflection to the faithful, who crowded into great temples erected to house the miracles. But only a relative few could get close enough to see the wonder, could breath in the intoxicating incense. Then, they went forth and told the people in the streets. The Critic was born. Now you can see the Future perhaps: Magic! If after all I've told you about that Magic, you still want to be an Epinions Movie Reviewer -- to paraphrase a poem by a favorite writer of mine (Robert Graves) -- then open your box of Cracker-Jacks, and begin . . . . ------------------------------------------- *I have deleted this Epinion from its former category and re-published it here in a revised state because a glitch in the Epinions mechanism prevents me from updating it in the other place.  |
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