The movies are a perfect site–they exist on the border between art and consumer culture. Sometimes they cross the boundaries, evincing aesthetic richness.
The opening of a door, a hand, or an eye can bring about a climax as thrilling as a crash of locomotives on the screen (Richard Dyer MacCann)
Sharp details are memorable, but they are not enough in themselves to make a movie great.
Popular movies permit us to look at, without really observing, things we can neither fully face nor entirely disavow.
What we need is a capitalist who believes in art, or an artist who believes in commerce.
The shower scene from Psycho
Janet Leigh in Psycho.
Who will ever forget the first time they saw the 45-second shower-room murder in Hitchcock’s Psycho?
About 40 minutes into the movie, when Janet Leigh stared out at us from the floor, a man sitting in front of me staggered into the aisle and vomited: testimony to the sensitive stomachs of the time, or (as several other people I know witnessed a similar incident at the Plaza that week) evidence that Paramount’s publicity department had hired a method actor for the film’s opening run?
James Stewart told Peter Bogdanovich about his craft: “What you’re doing is… you’re giving people little… little, tiny pieces of time… that they never forget.”
This is echoed by Walker Percy in his 1961 novel The Moviegoer. Some people, his narrator says, “treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise”, but “what I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
Jean-Dominique Bauby, the paralysed French writer, describes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly how he’d lie in the hospital recreating favorite scenes from Touch of Evil, Stagecoach, Moonfleet and Pierrot le fou.
James Cameron says: “You try to create one or more emotional, epiphanous moments within a film.”
Moments come in many forms – simple, complex, lyrical, violent, gentle, witty, romantic, revelatory – and, when they impress, they become as real as any other memory.
They can range from the split-second close-up of the suave spy’s missing half-finger in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps to the protracted pursuit of Cary Grant by the crop-dusting plane in North by Northwest, from the in-your-face eye-slicing in Buñuel’s first silent movie, the avant-garde Un Chien Andalou, to the puzzling sequence of the Chinese businessman’s mysterious box in the same director’s mainstream success Belle de Jour 40 years later. Like your favourite jokes, your cherished movie moments reveal something about you and, if shared, they can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, especially if one of them is the final sequence in Casablanca that features that line.
The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. The love at first sightbetween John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man, the lust at first sight between Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. The children running through the woods to see a train in Pather Panchali and finding grandmother dead on the way back. The cruelly comic soccer match in Loach’s Kes. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love in a Venetian hotel in Don’t Look Now. The slow-motion mayhem let loose in The Wild Bunch after William Holden says: “If they move, kill ’em!”
Favorite moment in Citizen Kane, where Kane’s now elderly friend Bernstein tells the reporter about an epiphany memory of seeing a girl in a white dress on the New Jersey ferry in 1896. “I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
It’s a moment about remembering a moment, and the actor Everett Sloane makes it so vivid we think we’ve seen that girl ourselves.
Of all gifts/skills, the most difficult to define is film sense.
Peckinpah and Spike Lee had it; John Sayles does not.
Cinema is, congenitally, impure–Andre Bazin
Bazin’s taste for impure cinema, for hybrids and eccentricties
Unlike Cahiers’ auteurism, Bazin pointed out the excesses of existential auteurism.
He mentioned auteurs vis a vis genre/national cinema
Auteurism as one function/force within a system of forces
Every piece of entertainment…has nightmarish accuracy as a trippled-distilled image of a collective dream, habit, or desire–James Agee
I really don’t feel that I have yet grasped the essence of cinema–Kurosawa
There can’t be art without risk. It’s like saying there’s no sex, but then expecting there to be children….F.F. Coppola
Many critics and viewers have lamented the decline of movie love in the U.S., claiming that movies qua movies are no longer prominent or relevant as they used to be, that they are an art form of the twentieth century, not of the new millennium.
And yet, movie are a unique art form, offering a unique experience.
Here are some of the reasons:
Of all art forms and mediums of entertainment, it’s movies that can offer us the delirium of excess.
Movies still represent the most mysterious and the most sensual (and erotic) art form, even when our knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes keeps growing.
Movies, even mainstream Hollywood programmers, operate on many different levels and offer us many different ways to react to them, turning the act of watching into a very open and thrilling experience.
Pauline Kael has correctly observed that, “American movies are the best proof that Americans are at their liveliest and freest, when they don’t take themselves seriously.”
Movie can be both pleasurable and dangerous, because they can affect us in many sensual, even primitive ways.
Watching a new movie, for which we had built anticipation (due to a variety of reasons), is like going on blind date, entering into a first adventure, with all the possible (or potential) fears, anxieties, terrors, and pleasures intact.
Film: Failure and Success
Unfortunately, it is easier to recognize a failure than a success.
Film Theory: Unique Art Form–What’s Distinctive, Why We Still Love Them?
Research in progress: Nov 24, 2022
Unique Medium–Indelible Moments, Images, Scenes, Lines
Great Film Moments/Scenes
The movies are a perfect site–they exist on the border between art and consumer culture. Sometimes they cross the boundaries, evincing aesthetic richness.
The opening of a door, a hand, or an eye can bring about a climax as thrilling as a crash of locomotives on the screen (Richard Dyer MacCann)
Sharp details are memorable, but they are not enough in themselves to make a movie great.
Popular movies permit us to look at, without really observing, things we can neither fully face nor entirely disavow.
What we need is a capitalist who believes in art, or an artist who believes in commerce.
The shower scene from Psycho
Janet Leigh in Psycho.
Who will ever forget the first time they saw the 45-second shower-room murder in Hitchcock’s Psycho?
About 40 minutes into the movie, when Janet Leigh stared out at us from the floor, a man sitting in front of me staggered into the aisle and vomited: testimony to the sensitive stomachs of the time, or (as several other people I know witnessed a similar incident at the Plaza that week) evidence that Paramount’s publicity department had hired a method actor for the film’s opening run?
James Stewart told Peter Bogdanovich about his craft: “What you’re doing is… you’re giving people little… little, tiny pieces of time… that they never forget.”
This is echoed by Walker Percy in his 1961 novel The Moviegoer. Some people, his narrator says, “treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise”, but “what I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
Jean-Dominique Bauby, the paralysed French writer, describes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly how he’d lie in the hospital recreating favorite scenes from Touch of Evil, Stagecoach, Moonfleet and Pierrot le fou.
James Cameron says: “You try to create one or more emotional, epiphanous moments within a film.”
Moments come in many forms – simple, complex, lyrical, violent, gentle, witty, romantic, revelatory – and, when they impress, they become as real as any other memory.
They can range from the split-second close-up of the suave spy’s missing half-finger in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps to the protracted pursuit of Cary Grant by the crop-dusting plane in North by Northwest, from the in-your-face eye-slicing in Buñuel’s first silent movie, the avant-garde Un Chien Andalou, to the puzzling sequence of the Chinese businessman’s mysterious box in the same director’s mainstream success Belle de Jour 40 years later. Like your favourite jokes, your cherished movie moments reveal something about you and, if shared, they can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, especially if one of them is the final sequence in Casablanca that features that line.
The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. The love at first sightbetween John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man, the lust at first sight between Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. The children running through the woods to see a train in Pather Panchali and finding grandmother dead on the way back. The cruelly comic soccer match in Loach’s Kes. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love in a Venetian hotel in Don’t Look Now. The slow-motion mayhem let loose in The Wild Bunch after William Holden says: “If they move, kill ’em!”
Favorite moment in Citizen Kane, where Kane’s now elderly friend Bernstein tells the reporter about an epiphany memory of seeing a girl in a white dress on the New Jersey ferry in 1896. “I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
It’s a moment about remembering a moment, and the actor Everett Sloane makes it so vivid we think we’ve seen that girl ourselves.
Of all gifts/skills, the most difficult to define is film sense.
Peckinpah and Spike Lee had it; John Sayles does not.
Cinema is, congenitally, impure–Andre Bazin
Bazin’s taste for impure cinema, for hybrids and eccentricties
Unlike Cahiers’ auteurism, Bazin pointed out the excesses of existential auteurism.
He mentioned auteurs vis a vis genre/national cinema
Auteurism as one function/force within a system of forces
Every piece of entertainment…has nightmarish accuracy as a trippled-distilled image of a collective dream, habit, or desire–James Agee
I really don’t feel that I have yet grasped the essence of cinema–Kurosawa
There can’t be art without risk. It’s like saying there’s no sex, but then expecting there to be children….F.F. Coppola
Many critics and viewers have lamented the decline of movie love in the U.S., claiming that movies qua movies are no longer prominent or relevant as they used to be, that they are an art form of the twentieth century, not of the new millennium.
And yet, movie are a unique art form, offering a unique experience.
Here are some of the reasons:
Of all art forms and mediums of entertainment, it’s movies that can offer us the delirium of excess.
Movies still represent the most mysterious and the most sensual (and erotic) art form, even when our knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes keeps growing.
Movies, even mainstream Hollywood programmers, operate on many different levels and offer us many different ways to react to them, turning the act of watching into a very open and thrilling experience.
Pauline Kael has correctly observed that, “American movies are the best proof that Americans are at their liveliest and freest, when they don’t take themselves seriously.”
Movie can be both pleasurable and dangerous, because they can affect us in many sensual, even primitive ways.
Watching a new movie, for which we had built anticipation (due to a variety of reasons), is like going on blind date, entering into a first adventure, with all the possible (or potential) fears, anxieties, terrors, and pleasures intact.
Film: Failure and Success
Unfortunately, it is easier to recognize a failure than a success.