How to Watch a Movie Read online

  Jeter is a Hall of Fame player and he has had his rewards: money, to be sure (his net worth is estimated at $180 million); the honest affection of fans; ample victory; a career with one club; and an unflawed reputation—something not common in athletics these days. But, I asked my friend, suppose the ad had been set on the campus of Columbia, with Jeter accepting the tribute of students and faculty, because he had decided to walk, would that strengthen or diminish his case for an honorary degree? Or would the process of commerce and aggrandizement in the filming begin to compromise a great university?

  Perhaps, instead, the maker of the film deserves something. Perhaps he or she graduated from the film program at Columbia?

  I pick on this mini-movie because it is wonderfully done, yet ultimately depressing, and because it supports a large part of my argument—that to watch movie properly you have to watch yourself watching.

  Am I being hard on the “fun” of this little promotion? It had two million hits in a trice on YouTube and many people felt it was grand and cheering. Why shouldn’t New Yorkers and the rest of us feel good about Derek and his modest charm? Well, if you felt uplifted when you saw the ad, nothing I say will erase that. But the stir of the Sinatra song (a testament to willfulness) and the texture of the imagery put me in mind of another exceptional piece of movie. I am thinking of the arrival by air in Nuremberg of Adolf Hitler in Leni Riefenstahl’s inspiring but despised “documentary” of 1935, Triumph of the Will. If you think that’s going too far, take a look (it’s on YouTube, too). The sunlight, the hallowed black and white, the motion, the accumulation of music and the crowd, and the strangely meek persona of these gods—the ingredients are similar. Plus this: we are watching and being carried along.

  Filmmakers like to say that newsreel and documentary are sacred or inviolable. But in so much of what we see now the sacred has been infiltrated by commercialism, propaganda, and the way history is turned into fiction.

  2

  SCREENS

  Screens are strange tools; they display and they conceal. After all, film screens are the bearers of revelation, and so we get most of our murders and our naked people on them like omelettes we cannot eat. But sometimes in life as much as in movies, a screen is the means of dainty concealment where women retreat to disrobe. In Rio Bravo, Feathers (Angie Dickinson) goes behind one to take off the tights her sheriff disapproves of. Screens are equivocal as furniture and inflammatory safeguards. And they are increasingly present in our lives. Ask yourself how many hours a day you are dealing with a screen, and remember how shocked we were to learn that our children were taking in six hours of television a day by 1960.

  If you’d seen Sullivan’s Travels in 1942, it would have involved walking to a movie screen in your neighborhood. You knew what was playing because you had passed the theater itself, the shell that held the pearly screen. You might have read advertisements in local papers, or had a film recommended by word of mouth. So you went out, and to this day the archaic business hopes that audiences are still lured by that impulse, no matter that many of us carry a screen around in our pocket and have a far more complicated sense of being “in” or “out.”

  So you went to purpose-made buildings called cinemas. They had names like Palace, Plaza, Regal, Odeon, Astoria, Lux, Imperial, Electric, Granada, and they were lustrous, seductive, romantic, comic. (Those names are full of nostalgia now—whereas if the movies were a brand-new business, the venues would have different names: the Cut, FX, Scream!, Murder, Chase, Naked, iScreen … all suggestions welcome.) The old movie houses were the most gaudy and enticing premises on the high street when I was growing up in England. Most shops were drab after the war, while the churches were reproachful. The cinema was fragrant—there was perfume in the air, though maybe that was meant to kill the germs. The place was fulsomely designed: there were Egyptian, Aztec, Moroccan, Oriental, Spanish moods, and they were as inaccurate historically as the costume romances and adventure pictures that were playing—Captain from Castille, Son of Ali Baba, The Flame and the Arrow.

  In the bigger urban theaters, in America as well, there was carpeting on the floor and the seats were upholstered. In the evenings especially, you had to be there early if you wanted to get in. About half the population went once a week. Every moviegoer of that era knew the experience of being turned away; it was a disappointment but it made the picture show more desirable. Most of the time until at least the early 1950s, the place seemed packed. Usherettes with flashlights might have found you the odd single seat, so you sat in dense rows, among strangers, united by the cigarette smoke and the palpable anticipation.

  The prize theatre in my part of south London was the Granada, in Tooting, which had grottoes and chapels fit for Moorish Spain (or a Hollywood Moorish Spain). I would have guessed that theatre held 2,000 people, and I was there often when every seat was sold. But I looked it up and the actual capacity was 3,000. So I saw the daft, bronze statue named Victor Mature and the writhing, devious Hedy Lamarr as Samson and Delilah there (and became anxious about going to the barber), with 2,999 strangers, and we were—more or less—as one. That is a hard ecstasy to abandon.

  I do not know the exact dimensions—I am estimating them from an old photograph. But I am guessing that the curtained screen at the Granada was thirty feet high by sixty feet wide, bigger than houses in the surrounding streets. From a booth high up in the back of the auditorium reels of film were projected onto this white screen using a high-power carbon arc lamp. A reel ran for ten minutes, so two 35 mm projectors stood side by side, and relied on a projectionist who saw the reel-change blobs in the top right-hand corner of the image and knew to start the second projector. It was a feat of magic, technology, and craft to run a movie smoothly and keep it in focus without a projector bulb burning out. These projectors now are scrap, and the profession of projectionist is dying away. You knew this, but you may not know the love or pride that went into it, or the rapture that gripped the crowd, whatever the film was.

  Cinema was a light show, no matter the stress on stars and stories, and that’s not so different from the technologies it yielded to. When television came along, it was a light that was turned on. You could walk down a suburban street at night and see the same steely glow of attention or worship burning in so many houses, without burning them down. Even at a cinema these days, with a fair to middling crowd, you may see downcast faces lit up by glowworm iPhones everywhere. We love the light—just think of the distress to the culture at large, let alone the individual, if the light didn’t come on. This reliance leaves us so vulnerable. The frustration in a movie theater if a film “breaks down” is one thing. But if all our computers and iPhones failed to ignite, the terror of being “down” and of an ensuing chaos is such that we may realize why so many of us have guns. (I mean Americans.)

  Audiences told themselves they were seeing stories couched in an astonishing lifelike illusion, but the technology was as profound as fiction’s magic. That truth has become more pressing as screens have become ever more active and assertive. The modern acceptance of IMAX and 3D has surpassed the way, for decades, 3D was offered by the business but dismissed by public confidence that stories counted. Yet watching Derek Jeter on YouTube in 2014 is not so different from watching Sullivan’s Travels at the Palace in 1942. The same curious and largely unexamined role of the screen obtains. Jeter is small—I said three inches by four—but kids seem captivated by smaller images still. Is it possible that they are not quite looking, but feeling “in touch”?

  When I look at YouTube I am trusting to an invisible agency. If I had to explain it to you in the way I explained movie projection, I would sound vague: I turn on my machine, my computer; I punch in YouTube, and ask for “Derek Jeter Gatorade,” and his little movie leaps into being. I might tell you or a young child, well, it’s instant electronic communication, it’s tapping into a data bank, it’s the Internet. I don’t know how it really works; that’s why I’m in trouble if it ever goes wrong. But it also means I am
cut off from the process itself. You may say I’m too old or too dumb to possess a complete explanation, but I don’t think I’m alone. And that mystery is significant. When I first went to the movies, I was entranced by the “reality” on screen. I believed there must be people behind or within the screen. My father made an airy, passable explanation of what was happening. He pointed to the window in the projection booth and the beam of light aswirl with cigarette smoke. I could trace the physical process—and I have never lost my affection for projectionists. Whenever it was possible, I loved being in the booth, seeing the cans of 35 mm film, looking at the fleshy celluloid loops in the projectors, and feeling the heat and energy of those machines.

  There is so much more absence and liberty with YouTube (or its variants). I get through to what I want (as if making a telephone call), but I don’t have to watch or attend to it. I can take a phone call, eat a slice of pizza, romance my girl (or the dog). The film is my plaything or my pet, whereas a movie was like a beast that dominated me. An old movie was a matter of size and illumination in which faces might be thirty feet high (and watching movie is a face-to-face interaction, so don’t forget the disparity of scale). The film had a life or momentum of its own. It drove on relentlessly, and I soon realized that the image could change from x to y quicker than I could close my eyes, when x might be John Sullivan in his elegant Beverly Hills home and y was something closer to the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. In all likelihood, I was in a row of occupied seats: if I was distressed (and I was often upset and in tears when I first went to movies), it was fuss and embarrassment to get up, to say excuse me to all those strangers, and try to get out of that place.

  There are other liberating limitations to Jeter on YouTube, or whatever you have selected there. When my choice comes up, it is one among so many other things the system says it can show me. So I am distracted as I start to watch. I may give up Jeter after twenty seconds and move to some of the other resources and opportunities my very basic computer can bring me. It’s churlish of me to complain, because I know the Internet is my window on the wide world. And it’s not as if I haven’t had happy or diverted hours flitting from Kim Kardashian to Susan Sontag. I don’t decry the infinity of a civilization where I can summon up Derek Jeter, the text of a story by Borges, the latest piece of hardcore pornography, the vital statistics of Sierra Leone, or that diner conversation between De Niro and Pacino in Heat. But the sheer range can be disturbing or depleting. The determining impulse in marriage, say, or falling in love, lies in meeting one person at a time. But when so many possibilities exist, then maybe marriage and love itself come to be less urgent or convincing.

  If we lament attention deficit disorder in our children, we should admit the dissolution of attention (or watching) in our own technologies. If that sounds too general, think of the agencies—from individuals and businesses to governments and ideologies—that would prefer us not to attend with too much critical concentration, but let the passing spectacle swim by without challenge.

  This is where watching cannot rest with mere sight. It waits to be converted into aesthetic judgment, moral discrimination, and a more intricate participation in society. That sounds ominous, I suppose, and part of a creeping unease at how the Internet can be a spectator sport that condones our lack of concentration and begins to deepen feelings of futility over dealing with the world. In that mood, there are film commentators who lament the loss of the large screen, the locomotive of the movie, and our amazed attention to it all. Things have been lost, but now I have to make the most challenging point—that cinema, film, movie (whatever) always had the seed of dislocation about it.

  The novice at the movies is often overwhelmed by the reality of it all. When Auguste and Louis Lumière showed pieces of film to a paying audience in Paris in December 1895, it is said that some customers ran from the salon screaming because they believed a steam engine coming gently toward the camera would break out of the screen and strike them. Were they pretending? Perhaps they were unsure. “Primitive” peoples shown close-ups of the face are sometimes fearful that decapitation has occurred. When I saw Olivier’s Henry V at the age of four, I “saw” the faces of page boys in the English camp at Agincourt on fire. It was one of the occasions on which I had to be carried away in tears. Later on, I realized I was reacting to a dissolve—the faces and the fire had been laid together. Anyone poised on the edge of a miracle is “primitive” and vulnerable to the uncertainty: is this the real thing or a trick?

  The spectacle of real shock never loses its power—those piled corpses at Dachau and their helpless abandon are testament to that, along with our creepy readiness for real disaster (so long as it stays on the screen). That first Lumière film show was a treasury of ordinary events being brought to the eyes of millions: the train entering a station; workers leaving a factory; a family having a picnic. The films made by Georges Méliès in France after 1895 are from another reality—that of imagination. They have enormous charm, still, but I don’t think they match the unconsidered naturalism of the Lumière films. Whereas Méliès had the cunning ingenuity of a stage magician who had discovered film as a new toy, the Lumières had no other plan except to prove that their machine, the cinematographe, worked.

  In 2014, the British Film Institute put together a collection of bits and pieces an audience might have seen at the movies in 1914. That was an age of fragments, shorts, snippets, jokes, mere observations, snaps, and “Look!” items. There was everything from the Perils of Pauline serial and a bit of Chaplin to scenes of the uneasy Hapsburg royal family and views of cheery soldiers marching somewhere. Pauline looked fussy and foolish. Chaplin seemed calculating and unkind. The marching soldiers were probably under orders for the film. There is no clue how close they were to the Western Front. There is no hint of war. But you don’t forget the long-suffering lean faces of the soldiers, just as the impatience of the Hapsburgs is a clue to their disastrous superiority. There are views of Egypt and the Pyramids, as ravishing as the footage Herbert Ponting shot in 1911–12 when he accompanied Captain Scott on his expedition to the South Pole. “Ravishing” does not mean simply that those compositions are beautiful—though they are a picturesque vision of Antarctica waiting meekly for man’s conquest (which was not how it turned out, as Scott and four others perished). What is most arresting is how people had never seen such things before. There is wonder, information, and relationship in seeing an emperor’s pale, pinched face, the North African desert, or the surreal devastation at Fukushima in March 2011. Do you remember the flooded multistory car park there and the automobiles reversing in the rush of water like obedient toy cars? In such cases, the horror and the beauty are closely aligned. In the Dachau footage, the obscenity of those reduced human corpses does not erase the sheer beauty of any body. The scene is one of torture and murder, but it might make Francis Bacon or Egon Schiele giddy.

  The honesty of that complicated response stemmed from the immediacy of photography, and for several decades little got in the way of that transaction. Audiences were dazzled to see the elemental life of an eskimo in Nanook of the North (1922), Robert Flaherty’s pioneering documentary, to see the mute grace of Gary Cooper in so many films, and to observe the delicate tour de force of Fred Astaire in which this very modest man was able to do such difficult things with grace and unbroken fluency.

  The awe-inspiring circumstances in which cinema was enjoyed only added to the overwhelming illusion of a reality to be beheld and participated in vicariously. It was an open and largely unexplored question how audiences were meant to reconcile that level of reality with the apparatus of fantasy. Yes, Fred could dance like that—but we couldn’t. De Niro and Pacino might chat forever over coffee, liberating our fantasy that cops and hoods are brothers from the same acting school. John Wayne could be the indomitable heroic figure in so many adventures—in the West, in the war, even in the green fields of Ireland—but we had a harder time sustaining the heroic interpretation of our own lives. We were encouraged to
make a contract in our lives in which hard times were offset by fantasy success. Wayne’s glory was our ghostly purchase, and it was only later that we learned how thoroughly he had missed war service.

  That screen contract began in the movies and became the engine of advertising. For there is a dreamed assumption in the Jeter Gatorade ad not just that Derek walks like a god on earth (he may not share that feeling—we don’t care), but that ordinary people in the Bronx will be beatified and saved by contact with him. In Triumph of the Will, when Hitler is driven in an open car from the airfield through the packed streets of Nuremberg, his car halts and a mother and child come forward from the crowd to greet him. This was meant to seem spontaneous or natural, yet plainly it was staged. Then, as the humble couple meet the Führer and step back they go from shadow into sunlight. Their radiance is real—just a mother and child on the street in the sun—but they existed then, and now, in the theater of fascism.

  Riefenstahl understood how these mechanisms worked. If that is her largest “crime” or cynicism, it’s one she could have learned from American films, where the use of light to ennoble some characters was automatic and constant. It’s a lesson in the DNA of those who made the Jeter ad, too, yet few of the audience know how to read the contrivance and the manipulation of what seems like wholesome imagery. We have been fools not to teach this way of reading in a culture in which for decades most children have spent more time watching moving imagery than reading books.

  But a change has occurred, in which the technological impediments in film have compromised our contact with reality. This subversive force cannot be omitted in any talk about how to watch a movie. Yes, the screen seems to be a window on paradise in which we are the beneficiaries. But context has been betrayed. We are not there, with the spectacle; we are in this odd, privileged position of secret onlookers. We are in a dark and an isolation which suggests our weakness for fantasy. The screen is a window, but a barrier, too, and one that consigns us to a kind of purposeless oblivion.