The Big Screen (87 page)

No one quite admitted that other ingredient, fantasy, and its constant struggle with the factual nature of film. As American victory hardened into empire, so the uninhibited element of fantasy fed into the American soul. It bred several dangerous fallacies: that happiness was an American right; that individuals could be free in a mass society; that American power would endure because the United States was the greatest of all nations. All those foolish principles are endangered now, and the steady process of watching a glorious but unattainable reality has warped our judgment and made us bitter. That is why the transition from movies to commercials was so disastrous and why the adoption of advertising in American television has been as damaging as the reluctance to have a welfare state that can sustain a mass society. These problems exist in much of the rest of the world, because the inspiration and the lies of Hollywood have gone far afield. But the crisis is sharpest in America, which has now moved so swiftly from confidence to its opposite.

I hope it's clear how much I love movies and was shaped by classic American and French cinema. It may be one day that a few decades of film (let's say from 1915 to the late '50s) will be looked back on as a halcyon period, like German-Austrian music from Bach to Mahler, some of which was played to sweeten the days in the concentration camps. The history of the shining light and the screen suggests we have learned to feel detached from reality, grief, and politics. So many people, from Lenin and Chaplin to Zuckerberg and Jobs, have believed that moving imagery on screens might unify and enlighten the world. Isn't it pretty to think so? The screen has also distanced us; it has made us feel powerless, helpless, and not there. The array of watching devices that have swept over “cinema” in the last thirty years will accelerate and spread, and of course they are helpful and profitable—just look at the economy they have produced. Might they also be the lineaments of a coming fascism? Don't be alarmed, it will be so much more polite or user-friendly than the clumsy version of the 1930s, but as deadening as the shopping malls of Americana, the nullity of so many of its schools, the unending madness of its advertising, and the stony indifference of technology.

This book is a love letter to a lost love, I suppose. It has the semblance of being a history, but it might be some kind of novel, called
The Moviegoer
. I am probably not American enough to diagnose this country from the inside. Yet I am no longer English enough to be an outsider. Still, I know what Don DeLillo meant in
White Noise
(1985, just before
Blue Velvet
) when he looked at “the most photographed barn in America” and said, “They are taking pictures of taking pictures.” As I near completion (December 2011),
Fear Factor
is coming back on NBC television, with contestants in a three-thousand-gallon tank of cow blood (USDA certified) trying to retrieve the severed hearts of cows with their teeth. About time. But why severed? Cut to David Foster Wallace:

Imagine what it felt like in the 1880s to see photographs and series like those taken by Eadweard Muybridge. Imagine that night in Paris in 1895 when the very slow and friendly locomotive came toward the screen and people felt fear or excitement. Remember the face of Margaret Sullavan looking into the empty mailbox in
The Shop Around the Corner
. Think of
Psycho
in 1960 and asking the movie not to do anything like the shower scene again. Imagine the man in
The Moviegoer
, the Walker Percy book, seeing what had to be William Holden and feeling that a casual movie was strolling down the street. You can still sense the marvel of having this shining version of reality there before you as a plaything and a philosophy. It was a time in which the mere act of looking and wanting to see possessed an innocence and an energy. It seemed like a way of growing up. How lucky to be alive then and there.

Who knows how much will change between this book passing from my hands to yours? You should be ready for the loss of theaters and video stores. Be open to something like Apple TV, activated by voice controls. But notice some sly “necessary” institutional control of its menu, if order is to be preserved. The technology is so potent and dynamic now that “entertainment” can run very close to social stability and political unease. Not every nation wants a “Spring.”

Be prepared for the word “movie” being replaced by “hits” or “bites”—or “viddies” (a term Anthony Burgess used in
A Clockwork Orange
in 1962). There may be astonishing, obscene, and horrific innovations—we will chase fear and longing to the end. There may even be new works of art as profound as
The Passion of Joan of Arc
(1928),
Citizen Kane
(1941),
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942),
Ugetsu Monogatari
(1953),
Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau
(1974), or
Mulholland Dr.
(2001).

That last film is typical of a natural trend toward old movie forms being appropriated. Lynch's film is not just its own story but an anthology on the “blonde in Hollywood.” For all its arresting originality, it wants to bring other movies and sad women to our mind. Moreover, cheeky kids are remaking classics all the time with impunity: on YouTube there is a short version of the Al Pacino
Scarface
. It is 1 minute and 40 seconds, and it is all the uses of “fuck” in the film. This joke went up in 2006 and six years later it has had 1.9 million hits.
Scarface
is a pretty good nasty entertainment: its marriage of violence and flash makes rascals of us all. But the short version reappraises it in so thorough a way I'm not sure I have time now for the long version. Short versions could become a cult—as well as longer versions. Another YouTube marvel is the seventy-four-second dissolving montage of Lindsay Lohan growing older: as of April 2012 it got six million hits.

Douglas Gordon's
24 Hour Psycho
(1993) may be the grandest example of interfered-with film. It is the Hitchcock classic played at two frames per second, a rate that makes a twenty-four-hour viewing. I must admit, I have only seen part of it, which is not unreasonable or impractical, though it is a mark of our new habit of watching just a fragment of things on-screen.

24 Hour Psycho
is both tedious and every bit as potent as the 1960 movie. It is
Psycho
without sound, fear, or suspense; and without those atmospheres the picture is revealed as beautiful but poignant: to see Norman and Marion trapped together in dread slowness is to weep for them. (I have also enjoyed the text of a play,
Mote—Motel
with a letter dropped out—by José Teodoro, that makes new stories out of
Psycho.
)

The deliberation of
24 Hour Psycho
allows us so much more access to time, repetition, and the mechanics of filmmaking. I believe Hitchcock would have welcomed this “invasion” and watched it endlessly, for it's a lesson in his way of working in advance. It seems like a dreamy, nearly infinite rehearsal for the film, as well as a distant, inching memory of it. It makes
Psycho
feel ancient, like the cave paintings in Werner Herzog's
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
(2010)—the perfect description for the great film archive.

You have to see it, or part of it. Did Gordon have the right to do it? I don't know, but rights are going out of fashion. He had the means and the mind, and I understand his own claim, that it “is not simply a work of appropriation. It is more like an act of affiliation.”

The appropriation doesn't have to come as a film. Am I alone in finding more pleasure in Geoff Dyer's book
Zona
than in Andrei Tarkovsky's film
Stalker
, to which the book is devoted? If I had to choose between all of Godard's work and his
Histoire(s) du Cinéma
(1988–98), I'd take the
Histoire(s).
This was an eight-hour video, shown as a film, but it comes in other forms, including a set of books. It is the piece of creative criticism Godard was born to deliver. If you want something similar, but more lyrical, there is Chris Marker's CD-ROM
Immemory
(1998 and 2008), which is an interactive labyrinth on Godard's subject. At the age of ninety-one, Marker was the least known master of film, but he was still e-mailing friends beautiful photographs of people riding on the Paris Métro that are as entrancing as the few mobile seconds from
La Jetée
.

This kind of creative anomaly with film first struck me in 2000 in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, where I saw the exhibition “Hitchcock et L' Art,” conceived by Guy Cogeval and Dominique Paini, which had premiered in Montreal. This was not just a survey of art works that had influenced Hitch, but a new Hitchcock experience. There was a darkened room with spotlights picking out objects on blood-red silk—the knives, scissors, telephones, keys, watches, and poison that figure in his films. There were sets and rooms from his world. The visitor was more than just a voyeur; he was in the screen. That is the next big thing: us in their movies. As it was, the show seemed to me as stimulating as the best films Hitchcock made.

I have even tried such games myself.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, I taught at Dartmouth. The school had a modest but very useful library of films, most of them on 16 mm. One item was
The Clock
, made by Vincente Minnelli in 1945. It's a romance, in black and white, in which a young soldier (Robert Walker) has a two-day leave in New York and meets a girl (Judy Garland) and falls for her.

The film runs ninety minutes, and the Dartmouth print of it was on two 16 mm reels of exactly the same length. So my show was a mathematical idea before it was anything else.

I asked the projectionist—a sympathetic man named Jerry Cate—to help me. In the theater where films were run for classes there was a screen wide enough to play two 16 mm images without overlap. So Jerry set up two projectors side by side but sufficiently apart. On the left-hand projector he threaded up reel one of
The Clock
, to play forward, with sound. On the right-hand projector, he loaded the second reel, with all the film on the lower, or uptake, reel, to play in reverse and without sound.

—We started the two projectors at the same time.

So the film ended as it began. The story was moved forward and played backward from its finale concurrently. The two halves met tidily in the middle. The audience yelled with glee. We did not damage the print.

The effect was ravishing: it may be the most exciting film show I have ever seen—and it meant that
The Clock
took only forty-five minutes. (For the committed film watcher, the saving in time is liberating.) You may be able to try it for yourself, though those projectors and prints are harder to find nowadays.

How was it ravishing? It woke the audience up. I don't mean that the Dartmouth students were asleep or inattentive. But this was a fusion of narrative, cinema, and technology that no one had witnessed before. Looking at the screen was miraculous again. And if that sensation ever disappears, then our whole adventure with the movies and the screen is over. Nothing will remain but us being intimidated by the stupid promises of advertisements and other lies.

Backward motion is fantastic—it is as lovely as it is uncommon, or impossible: with people running in reverse upstairs (like Danny in the snowy maze in
The Shining
); pouring coffee from a cup to the pot; bursting out of the water in a pool, arcing through the air and coming to rest on a diving board that was trembling until the person landed. You look at these things as if you had never seen film before—the exhilaration is exhausting and transporting.