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Movie Going: Thoughts on Watching and Reviewing Movies (Essay #2).Feb 15 '02 (Updated Mar 21 '02) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line The drive for profit has caused Movie conglomerates to adopt flashy, distracting devices from widescreen and blue screen to combining crowd pleasers, in a pornography of the senses.
Note: I am republishing this essay here from notes because the original has been lost from my total list, for reasons I cannot conjecture. It forms the central body of a trio of pieces about Epinionating on Movies. The other two essays are listed at the bottom of this scroll. [If you have already read this essay, I apologize. There is no need for you to read it again.] ----------------------------- One night a few weeks ago, just after the lights went down, I entered a preview of FINDING FORRESTER. The theater was crowded, and not wishing to inconvenience others, or embarrass myself, I headed straight down front, where I saw the first three rows were populated with fewer heads. I found a seat in the center, near the aisle, of the third row back and, in an instant, looking up, I was confronted with images 30 feet high. When Sean Connery is 30 feet high, that's impressive! As the movie progressed on one of the Sony Metreon's large wide screens, I noticed how many things were going on in this rather concentrated but simple story: A group of young men, for instance, standing or moving around on an outdoor basketball court. Now they were all in focus; then only one, in close up (Jamal Walker played by Robert Brown). I was very conscious of these choices being made by the director, photographer and editor. And because I was so conscious of these choices, I found some of them arbitrary. On the soundtrack, as the young men thrust and parried with the basketball in full court press, was a man's voice singing a song in a folk style. Because I was on the extreme right of the screen, down front, the voice sounded loud, disconnected from the guitar accompaniment strumming distantly on the left bank of speakers, over forty feet to my left. My attention was taken away from the action by my sudden appreciation of the voice, the counterpoint of the song to the story, and the separate experience of the guitar. And of course, being a film in the post modern mode, even so elegant a director as Gus Van Zant had many other close-ups of the young men's faces, their hands holding the guard position in insert shots. The rapid action of the game was slowed down for dramatic purposes by these choices. Of course, if I had been sitting further back, these details no doubt would not have taken my attention so completely, but, as it was, I thought briefly, while noticing the pores in the players' faces, of earlier motion picture experiences. Since then, my mind and memory have played with the contrasts among my movie going experiences, at various stages of my life. This little essay is the second of three I intend to write on the subject: "Movie Going: Thoughts on Watching and Reviewing Movies." (You may look at #1, a few titles back on my list.) I quite well remember a Sunday afternoon in February 1941, when I first saw the film most critics call the greatest made in the early Sound Period of Motion Pictures. From the moment the RKO logo faded and the stark white letters CITIZEN KANE came up on the screen, to the warm voice of Orson Welles introducing his wonderful players at the end, I was oblivious, absorbed, fully lost in the puzzle of Charles Foster Kane. It remains, after nearly 60 years, a puzzle to which I occasionally discover another piece, a quality of Welles' genius, never again quite so effective than in this, his first movie. Now aside from the puzzle, and the film's reputation, and the fact that I have seen it in various forms and places dozens of times, there are other reasons why it and other films of that period remain fascinating -- while FINDING FORRESTER, a pretty good film, is beginning to fade from my specific memory. For one thing, CITIZEN KANE was in black and white, looked down upon by recent generations, but a form of photography which most corresponds to our dreams and nightmares (for males of a certain age, at least). Therefore, its brilliant photography, shot after shot, remains in my memory. So what, you say, that was a work of genius, and times have changed. What else does a . . . KANE or a CASABLANCA have which films today do not? Well, a second reason these films, indeed rather poorer ones in terms of story, are memorable is that their transitions were accomplished by dissolves, lap dissolves, pans, montage. Our attention was led from one scene to another. Jump cuts, as such, were used sparingly, usually in action sequences, if at all. They were seldom used simply to lay in another part of the story, as has become quite common in movie production during the last 25 years. There is nothing wrong with a jump cut except that it breaks our concentration. If a film has a great many jump cuts, our concentration, in the best of films, is fragmented. [Last night, I thought of that again when watching a sneak of the Coen Brothers' O BROTHER, WHERE OUT THOU? A sub plot involving Mississippi Governor Pappy Lee O'Daniel is crudely cut into the main action at several points, spoiling our sense of verisimilitude. And this comic homage to SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (Sturges, 1941) is a movie I liked quite a lot, by very talented, meticulous move makers.] Thirdly, perhaps because of black and white textures, key lights were used in earlier films to keep the audience looking at the star or an important character, even in a crowd. Today, partly from the influence of Television, and the obviousness of light in color films, the close up is generally the device relied upon to concentrate our attention. It can become tiring and monotonous, which was a major criticism I had of one of the year's Big Movies: GLADIATOR. However, movies -- big or small, good or bad -- now tend to rely on the close up routinely. The classic directors -- Wyler, Lubitsch, Ford, Huston, Welles, etc -- used close ups sparingly, and for a purpose. Welles said that the threat of a close up was one of few devices he used to get a better performance out of an unsatisfactory actor. Film music, when tasteful, and not Mickey-moused, provided an aid to mood, made transitions, called the audience's attention to certain facts. It is said, when Tex Ritter sang "The Ballad of High Noon" for Dimitri Tiomkin in Fred Zinnemann's heavy-handed metaphor for the Black List, HIGH NOON, 1950, movie music changed forever. Today, studios often throw all kinds of styles of music on the screen, no matter how jarring or inappropriate, in hopes the soundtrack CD will make a profit, even if the film is a bomb. And then there was the shape of the screen, initially square. It changed dimension slightly with the coming of sound slowly, and then scarcely for twenty years until the 1950's. In the Silent Film, of course, the director had to tell his story with no more than mood music, and the squarish screen nearly hypnotized us when a talented director had us in his power. The square screen concentrated the viewer's attention on just what the Director wanted an audience to see. (Welles, again, in his love of magic, was innovatively brilliant for having the key to "Rosebud" lying around in several scenes, unnoticed by the characters, or most of the audience, except for Charles Foster Kane, which was Welles' purpose.) In the late 1940's some critics remarked how several European directors were beginning to have more than one dramatic or comedic element going on in a scene. Little did we know, widescreen when it was adopted to counter TV in 1952 , would become such a craze that films not shot in it were masked to seem as if made in the format. The "busy" screen became the norm. The effect of widescreen, even when we sit directly in front of it, at a proper distance, is to scatter our attention. We look at something which takes our eye to screen left or screen right, and sometimes we miss a crucial bit of the plot. At no time, except in close up, can we see the scene whole, take it in without moving our eyes. I suspect that is one reason why today so many of us come away from a given movie with wildly different impressions of it. I don't know about you, but I can see in my mind's eye several important scenes or shots from dozens of films turned out in the 1920's, 1930's, 1949's, and 1950's. I can do that for many fewer films after the 1960's. I have liked many films since that earlier period, but they provide a much different experience. The final, horrific sequence of BONNIE AND CLYDE (Penn, 1967) is a sudden exception which comes to me. More recently, beginning really with STAR WARS (Lucas, 1977), I suppose, but accelerating in the last ten years, have come new distracting techniques, which may eventually transform, perhaps destroy the power of the Movies. I shall examine those factors in my third chapter of this discussion. Meanwhile, take an old movie to bed with you. Until next time. ----------------------------------- Other pieces in this series: Movie Going: Thoughts on Watching and Reviewing Movies (Essay #1) http://www.epinions.com/user-review-1ADF-3C3E2934-3A344664-prod3 Movie Going: Thoughts on Watching and Reviewing Movies (Essay #3) http://www.epinions.com/content_2096734340 ----------------- For a complete list of Macresarf1's Epinions, indexed by category -- many with URL's -- copy, paste to your search browser and go to the following: http://www.epinions.com/content_2514526340  |
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