The Big Screen (85 page)

When Angelopoulos died, a friend, Mark Feeney (the author of
Nixon at the Movies
), e-mailed me:

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:

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 Internet 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.

If you add up the broken pieces a young person sees in a day, the chaos is like the earliest years of movie, when a viewer saw so many things we would call shorts, or clips, or bites. They were not whole movies, but the debris from an explosion in the culture, where reality seemed to be scattered everywhere we looked. It is the bang that made cubism, the machine gun, and shellshock.

In the last ten years especially there has been a plethora of books and articles worrying over this scattering of attention. They range from Martin Lindstrom's
Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy,
to Evgeny Morozov's
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
. They talk about deficit disorders and alleged miracles of application, from the optimism that Twitter explains the uprising in Cairo in 2011 to anxiety over what happens next in Egypt.

In the
New York Times
in May 2011 the pediatrician Perri Klass wrote an article, “Fixated by Screens, but Seemingly Nothing Else,” that said,

The experts disagree; that is their business. So sometimes firsthand accounts are useful. Here is a sixteen-year-old, writing to the
New York Times
in 2010 in reaction to an article on “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction”:

Just a kid? The film critic Antonia Quirke (I quoted her on
Jaws
) is old enough to be that young woman's mother, and she sent me this e-mail reporting on the sudden riots that hit north London in August 2011 and that seemed to be organized by cell-phone connections:

It was John Berger who first noted that while a photograph seemed to summon presence, it also evoked absence. The base function of film and its successors is not just to join reality but to adjust to the screens that keep us from it. Watching television footage of the devastation in Japan in March 2011, I saw an endless shot of empty automobiles carried in tidy, prim reverse on the flood, backing and turning corners in a multistory parking garage. I was horrified and helpless, but I thought it was comic. I wondered if it was a scene from a Jacques Tati film. When my youngest son saw the second plane enter the World Trade Center tower on live television he asked, “What movie is that from, Dad?”

The film form has always been fascinated by the screen, and the way it converted “reality” or the prospect of it into a set (a place where some defined action would occur). In the same way, the makers of film have been challenged by the thing they call off-screen space. The thought of getting “into” the screen from our off-screen space has always been alluring, just as infants believe there must be real people behind or within the screen, while older children want to enter its flat world because the lovely, lifelike dream seems to be there and “on.” Buster Keaton played with the fancy in
Sherlock Jr.
(1924), Godard in
Les Carabiniers
(1963), and Woody Allen in
The Purple Rose of Cairo
(1985). But there are other ways of doing it: the past, the flashback, can be an interior or inset existence, so tempting but elusive. In Alf Sjöberg's
Miss Julie
(1951), the past and the present share the frame together. We feel that overlap in
Citizen Kane
, and we see it in an array of optical effects—wipes, fades, and dissolves (not common now)—that remind us of the existence of the screen. The best thing about 3-D is to say, look, it's all a trick on one screen. From the early days of sound (which was rich with off-screen suggestions), movie was drawn to another inner flatness, the mirror, as a double of its own existence and an unconscious way of saying, “Look at the show. Look at yourself. Are you there? Are you ‘on'?”

In François Truffaut's 1969 picture,
Mississippi Mermaid
, Jean-Paul Belmondo has been tricked into marriage by Catherine Deneuve, who pretends to be his mail-order bride invited to the faraway island of Réunion. He knows she's “wrong,” but she is so lovely that he falls for her, or into her—so enigmatic and yet so potent, she is a screen that slides into his life, like a blade. Then she vanishes, with the money from his tobacco plantation. She is his movie, and he wants to run it again just as most of us, when young, carry a movie's dream home in our head and start to play it again, with variants and extensions.

So he goes back from Réunion (a dot in the Indian Ocean) to France, looking for her. He has a breakdown and one day, while he is in the hospital with other patients, there she is, Deneuve, on a screen, a television screen, dancing in a nightclub. So he pursues her and confronts her, and straightaway, like an actress who had the lines ready, she confesses and tells him a rigmarole of explanation while she sits in front of her mirror and the film presents her as a double image. He doesn't need to hear it. He loves her still, so he believes her even while he can see the warning in the looking glass behind the real woman.

You could go back over the history of the movies and make an anthology of such moments, where the form of a film is saying, “Can you trust what you're seeing?” But in 1998 one picture caught the whole duplicity.
The Truman Show
(1998) was so complete an insight that if it had been the first film you ever saw you might never have needed to see another.

Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) lives in Seahaven, a hideous display of perfection, a perpetuity of advertising. The buildings are new, bright, flawless, and impersonal. The sun shines as steadily as lighting. The people are amiable; they smile. And the production didn't have to build this warning of a place, as Fritz Lang built
Metropolis
. They found it, in the designed community of Seaview, Florida, an “ideal” place to live, they say. Truman seems happy there. He is cheery with everyone, although Jim Carrey's nervy good nature never wipes away the thought that he might snap and turn into…the Grinch, Stanley Ipkiss (
The Mask
, 1994),
The Cable Guy
(1996), or worse. He has always felt unstable with repressed possibilities.