The Big Screen
Page 65
In San Francisco, it is 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning (August 27, 2011). I am on the sofa, ready, in the old way; it is nearly time for the match (and a 90-minute game is like an old movie). Since about 1953, I have followed a London soccer team, Chelsea. For years I stood on the terraces in southwest London in crowds close to seventy thousand watching the Blues. It is a habit and a devotion. But here, six thousand miles away, I can watch Chelsea versus Norwich, live, as it happens (it’s 3:00 p.m. in London), on high-definition color television, with a little tea and toast. This is playing on Fox Sports, and part of our cable package (which rents at about $200 a month), whereas if I were in London, I doubt I would afford a ticket to be at the stadium (at least fifty pounds). See how enabling the screen and the media are these days? And in that very game (a 3–1 victory for Chelsea), a new player, Juan Mata, made his debut and you could see—you had to see—the way he turned and moved, his fluent instincts, the soccer of it. Seeing something can still be as moving as watching a naked woman in Muybridge turn to the right, or waiting for the moment in Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” number when he spins and the camera soars above him. At seventy, I have found nothing to match motion and emotion running together. John Wayne walking, a child making its first movements, Juan Mata—they all do it for me. I like to watch.
But as I watch the game, I realize the screen is not just the benign illusion of Stamford Bridge, where Chelsea play. There are two constant insignias stamped on my screen, top left corner and top right, for Barclays, the bank that sponsors the Premier League, and for Fox Sports, the channel that is showing the game. Very well, I sigh, those companies have a claim of ownership, even if it seems crass to assert it at every instant. But that is not all. Periodically, in a panel that comes and goes, they warn me of other matches they are about to show. Let’s be gracious; let’s say that this is a useful service and not just brutal advertising and a reminder that I am not at the game.
There is more still. At the ground, for the television cameras, there is a low billboard, a constructed electronic screen, no more than four feet high, that reaches from one end of the ground to the other. It is programmed with very basic verbal messages that move and change throughout the game. In the course of the match, there were signals on behalf of Barclays, Fox, Thomas Cook (the travel company), Samsung (“Experience the future of TV”), Adidas, Singha Beer, the gear worn by Chelsea players, and even messages in Chinese characters.
The skill and intimacy of the camera coverage are better than ever. Is any documentary practice more sophisticated? In addition, the coverage can go to slow-motion, close-up angles on any controversial or dramatic play. Many sports fans admit that what you see on the TV coverage surpasses being there. And TV is vital to the crazed economics of major sports, which steadily pushes old fans from being able to go to the game. So the experience itself is in question. Where sports once existed for their own sake, they are now there to sustain television. In Britain, the attempt by Rupert Murdoch to undermine the BBC began with the campaign to get more important sporting events on his network, Sky (formed in 1990).
That seems like an archaic struggle now, just as once it was a surprise to see moviegoers playing video games in the theater lobby. But so much has changed, and so much of it for the better that sometime it feels pushy to insist on the loss. In the 1970s, teaching film at an American university, a teacher had to hire a film on 16 mm and project it for the class, stopping and starting the show for the purposes of “film study.” That depended on the school’s having a projector, the teacher’s knowing how to operate it, and some worthy pictures’ being in distribution.
That clumsy yet exciting operation was overtaken by “video” in the late 1970s. That novelty has gone through many transitions in just over thirty years, from Betamax and videodiscs to VHS and DVD, with necessary upgrades of equipment along the way, but it is a gift for teaching. Not that the film industry showed much early awareness of this, but video also rescued the theatrical business. It appeared to the public as an obvious extension of television, just as they had once felt television was natural heir to the big screen. In the 1980s and for twenty-five years or so, video rental stores had a flood of hitherto unavailable titles. Not just the new films, not just movies that might have been denied theatrical release, but the treasury of “old movies.” For anyone from the 1950s and ’60s, who sometimes waited years to see certain titles, it was a breathtaking liberty. By today, thanks to companies like Criterion, a pantheon of classics is available with variant versions, interviews with the filmmakers, and shot-by-shot analyses conducted by scholars.
This is the state of modern cinephilia, which amounts to the happy and self-contained study of the art of cinema in the way a minority studies opera, ballet, and literature. Such people do see some films on theater screens, even if it’s not a movie print being projected. But most cinephiles live in apartments where shelves of DVDs and VHS tapes compete with bookshelves. In doing this book, I have frequently picked out a DVD and looked at it, often just a scene, to refresh my memory over a detail. In turn, movies have increasingly become cliplike, or the collected quotations from themselves. The total experience suffers from fragmented attention. It is not just our children who have attention-deficit “problems.” The condition, along with so much else, is in the technology. As Woody Allen is quoted in this book, that is what has taken over from Lubitsch and Preston Sturges.
There is a book called The Death of Cinema, by Paolo Cherchi Usai. He is senior curator at the George Eastman House archive and director of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. So you can guess where he stands. But he has some arresting facts. His book was published in 2001, and he said then that in 1999 the world had produced 1.5 billion hours of moving imagery. He predicted that 100 billion hours would be made in one year by 2025.
That footage or mileage is so overwhelming that it’s absurd to think of keeping it all. Cherchi Usai feels the tsunami of technology:
All our talk about budgets and legal rights, about the digital age and the vinegar syndrome [the way acetate prints naturally deteriorate] is meaningless if it does not preserve a thing that is no less precious than moving images themselves, the right to see them…. Life is short, and cinema won’t last forever. But for now it’s still here. It may become something else, but so what if it does? There are worse things. Physical pain. Not enough food, or none at all. Being alone. Losing interest in the art of seeing.
Cherchi Usai is a defender of the cause—Martin Scorsese did the preface to his book—yet I find it encouraging for him to admit that there are things more important than cinema. Do you recall what Francis Coppola said introducing Apocalypse Now, “It is Vietnam”? No, not quite. Film and its followers often join in a kind of rapt myopia that says nothing is more important. Richard Brody’s thorough and understanding book on Jean-Luc Godard is called Everything Is Cinema, as if to embrace many of Godard’s runic sayings—such as “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.” (The “Everything” line was one Godard gave Brady.) I knew Ray a little in his last years, and the truth was more complicated and demanding. “Everything” is available to be served by cinema, but our ordinary everything existed long before cinema and it will thrive still when the word has been abandoned.
I also echo something Paul Schrader said as long ago as 1990:
Whenever I get a chance I persuade students who are interested in films to stay away from film majors and take a hard-core undergraduate major in a traditional liberal-arts subject, because in the end nothing will stand you in better stead for making films. You can learn about films later, but you’re never going to have a chance to read the classics or psychology or philosophy the way you would in college, because that is where the mold is cut. If you don’t cut the mold with a liberal education you are a less interesting person, and a less interesting film-maker.
Alas, in twenty-one years, that advice has been neglected, though Terrence Malick is one example of the liberal arts background, and m
ore, as well as one of the finest eyes we have ever had. He translated Heidegger and taught philosophy at MIT. I know a sixteen-year-old so entranced by Malick’s The Tree of Life that he watched it five times in a couple of months, always on his computer screen. The film was still playing in theaters where he lived, but he had no interest in seeing it there. I like that kid (he is a young man now), but I feel he and I are not quite of the same species.
Whatever one’s view of The Tree of Life, surely its eye deserves a large screen. I loved that light and space in Badlands, Malick’s directorial debut, though I think Malick’s energy has moved fatally from narrative to introspection. Perhaps it is philosophy. My young friend might respond, Well, wouldn’t you rather be alone in a gallery with a Chardin painting than have a mob of people trying to get a better view than you? Fair point. Wouldn’t you rather hear Mahler on an immaculate CD, without audience distractions? No, that’s going too far: I want to see and feel the heave and bustle of the orchestra. But why shouldn’t a young man insist that he gets more out of Malick’s reverie if he is close to that state himself, without the theater of distraction?
In a 2010 article in The Toronto Star, Geoff Pevere analyzed the nature of being at the movies—at least in Toronto. In his research Pevere talked to the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who had taken his seventeen-year-old son to see The Social Network. They had liked the movie, but not what Egoyan described as “the way people were talking to each other, like absolutely out loud, having conversations as though there was no sense of this as an experience that needed a degree of respect or consideration, was amazing. It was as though they were watching in their living room…They were talking, they were texting each other, there were all these other sources of light in the room.”
Respect for the experience as opposed to immersion in the technology? It’s part of this argument that cinephiles—flinching from the violent action and cutting of short-attention movies—have espoused “slow cinema.” This can be many things: Andy Warhol did slow cinema, and so did Antonioni (the out-the-window shot in The Passenger might make an audience restless today). Then there were Mizoguchi, Ozu, Renoir even, Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and Theo Angelopoulos, who died in early 2012 at the age of seventy-six.
Angelopoulos was a Greek and a radical who had lived through Nazi occupation, civil war as the Communists tried to overthrow the government, the era of the junta of colonels, and then the Balkan horrors to the north. He once said that the twentieth century began and ended with Sarajevo—and there were always more people than the Archduke deserving to be warned. He made films that reflected on that history, with reference to the Greek myths, and in what he called sequence cinema—long takes, elaborate camera movements, few close-ups, and an attempt to dwell in distance and landscape. He is not to everyone’s taste but The Travelling Players (1975), Voyage to Cythera (1984), Landscape in the Mist (1988), Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), and Eternity and a Day (1998), at least, are masterworks, scarcely capable of being felt properly except on a theatrical screen. For years, Angelopoulos would not let his films be shown on VHS, but DVD and its greater fidelity tempted him. Still, The Travelling Players is close to four hours and only just over a hundred shots.
When Angelopoulos died, a friend, Mark Feeney (the author of Nixon at the Movies), e-mailed me:
He did things with film (on film?) that others hadn’t done. That’s awfully rare—and, as done by him, awfully moving, too. It isn’t just the duration and foreign-ness of his movies that worked against his reputation, I think, but their profundity. We live in an age uninterested in profundity to the point of negligence. Or should that be fear?
So many young people who say they are studying film nowadays do not see many movies projected large in theaters—in packed theaters—in flawless 35 mm prints, nitrate or acetate. Readers know how many theaters have gone from their neighborhoods. They realize that the screens have shrunk in size, while standards of projection and sound have deteriorated. What they may not know is how many of the old film companies, once they have invested in a good DVD version of a picture, believe their duty is done so that they may scrap their old prints—and even the negative.
There has always been an antagonism between film production and the task of archiving. The business is happy to wear prints out and then discard them. But technology changes the argument very quickly. In his editorial for the January 2012 Sight & Sound, Nick James reported the spread of digital projection at the expense of film prints:
January 2012 will apparently mark the point at which there will be more digital screens in the world industry than analogue, and by the end of 2012 it is estimated that 35 mm projection’s share of the global market will decline to 37 per cent. What’s more, mainstream usage of 35 mm will have vanished from the USA by the end of 2013, with Western Europe set to be all digital in the mainstream one year later.
So the argument that there is something precious in the projection of film has been lost already. But there are other consequences. In 2007, the Academy published a report, “The Digital Dilemma,” that declared all forms of digital storage and archiving were unreliable—and you know how often digital prints on television break up into a mosaic. For a moment, the archives adopted that stance, but now digital standards have been accepted even there. As Nick James makes clear, the future is open and a source of great vulnerability.
In the summer of 2002 the theatrical business in America sold 653 million tickets. By the summer of 2011 that figure was 543 million. There are alternatives: not just Criterion, but Netflix, which nearly ousted the video store, and Turner Classic Movies, which is dedicated to good prints of classic films (silents, too), with background information to interest the ordinary viewer. But Netflix is moving more and more to offering fewer films and more TV series. TCM knows it has an aging audience: there are enough people over forty-five who dislike most new movies and prefer to seek out the history of the medium. They might not know what cinephilia is, yet they are contributing to it. But as a business and a sensation—as a light hitting the masses—it was always what was happening now. And many young people believe that now is their last asset or energy. As Lewis Lapham told Truthdig, “With electronic media there is no memory, it’s always the eternal present, which is constantly dissolving and contributing to a great social anxiety.”
So video becomes antique. At nearly the same moment that video appeared, another screen came into our lives: the personal computer. At first it seemed dauntingly large and complicated. Surely it was beyond understanding—and even if it worked, wasn’t it just a glorified calculator-typewriter? When now takes over, it never falters or admits mistake; it is our implacable guilt-free passion. The novelty voted “Machine of the Year” by Time magazine in 1980 will have two billion versions of itself in the world by 2014, no matter that smartphones and computer tablets are taking over more of its functions. This is a far broader phenomenon than what we might call movies, but it has been a point of this book to see that the light and the dark, ways of looking and responding, sending or saving, are more significant than whether a few of us think this movie is better than that.
Or even whether a movie is subject to copyright, as something created by talented individuals. Most American films are still the copyright of companies, and those enterprises are indignant about piracy—the way pictures can be stolen away on the Internet, without any income for the rightful owners. Tom Rothman, co-chief executive of Fox Filmed Entertainment, says, “Our mistake was allowing this romantic word—piracy—to take hold.” But Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer have made great hay on a Pirates franchise, and all the big players will go to streaming video in a weekend when the moment is right.
Theatrical performance of movie is a sentimental stronghold, and we know it will pass away. If you look at the remaining buildings where movies still play, and at their forlorn attempt to be glamorous while asking twelve dollars or more for a ticket, it is a wonder how long the natural transmission of new movies to our television set or by the Inte
rnet has been delayed.
Some kids play video games, in intense groups, for longer than it would take to project Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany (442 minutes), or they revel over one-minute shots on YouTube. The technology has come to the aid of a culture that wearied of narrative and moral suspense a long time ago. Disillusion with narrative showed itself already in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Jerry Lewis talked to the camera and the audience. Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot ends with the aghast face of Jack Lemmon staring out at us and the whole apparatus of movie as if to say, “Do you expect me to take this seriously? Do you expect me to take ‘seriously’ seriously?” That bereft nihilism is Godardian, and only a year before Breathless opened.
Godard’s first films, fifty years old now, are full of inserts—photographs, paintings, bits and pieces of movie, posters on walls, and words inscribed on the screen, abbreviated shots. They are marvels of brusque prescience in foreseeing the untidy mosaic of levels, insets, and layers that I got at my soccer match and that kids take as commonplace in the multiplicity of screens before them—and that erode their and our need for concentration, narrative, or responsibility. Not that Godard is aroused enough now to be any comfort. In 2005, queried on his famous belief in Nicholas Ray, he confessed, “It’s not possible to see the films. You can only see them on DVD, which I don’t like very much, because the screen is too small.” Asked about film’s ability to reinvent itself, he said, “It’s over. There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed.” It sounds like another funeral.