This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 5, 2009 - The Lens tends to be dominated by posts by Robert Hunt in which he links to other movie sites, although he sometimes has a few words of his own to impart. I've thus chosen to create my own post in response to Susan Waugh's interesting assessment of three recent film releases , as her work is already buried under a snowstorm of Hunt posts. (Still, I am sure the Lens reveres Hunt's habits as this would be a pretty lonely place without him. Even the venerable Cliff Froehlich, the instigator of the Lens site, is seldom heard from on it.)
Typical of writers, and that of course is what Susan is, the demand that film has to have a story is so strong that it seems like any other approach to the great art of film is totally disregarded. You would never hear me say, as Susan has just accused me, that a good film must start with a story. Of course, I appreciate stories, and I like many films that are based on stories and, indeed, tell original stories of their own, but in no way do I see that story is essential to the art of cinema.
We are stuck with story in film because of people like D.W. Griffith, the racist who appealed to our most base instincts and emotions and almost single-handedly created a vocabulary for film language that has been used for nearly 100 years now. I can blame other opportunists, too, such as Thomas Ince, who created the assembly-line form of storytelling and forever popularized the simple-minded approach to genre in story movies, too. Of course, Ince was a marketeer who inspired future Hollywood moguls, those rag salesmen from New York who could see an easy way to make money from the great unwashed and eventually all moved out West to do it.
By the '40s, aesthetes that soon would be labeled critics created a new industry writing about film, establishing a set of so-called values of film as art, but because they were writers, they privileged text and story over the camera and editing. I admit that when it comes to communicating via print or even just by using the written word, they have an edge on visualists and cinema purists like me. It is no wonder that for critics the written word would be essential to these values they have conjured over the years. Do you get my meaning? Do you see where it would be troublesome for the masses for someone to paint a critique on a film rather than to write it?
Why does film have to be a matter of dialogue at all? Why does film have to feature characters that people can relate to? Can't people relate to something else? Well, if you have stayed with me this long, maybe you're thinking about the answers, but let me tell you that the alternatives I refer to may be traumatic for most so-called cineastes - so traumatic that the answers will most likely be highly negative. We have all grown up on the Griffith model, and we have been pretty much denied the alternatives to such a degree that only those with no intentions of making money off of art would even bother to go there.
We are so ensconced in the tradition of story that Susan can only ask questions like, "What is more cinematic, 'Doubt' or 'The Reader' or 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'?" For Susan to honor my film theories, she can only respond with a matter of degrees, not with purity. And, of course, I love her for paying tribute to my theories at all.
Just for the record and to mutually respond to that lovely humanist film critic, Ms. Waugh, in my opinion there is no doubt that "Doubt" is in no way cinematic. It is a simple restaging of a talkative play with all of the dialogue and characters remaining completely intact. So we get closeups - big deal!
Did I like "Doubt"? I loved it, but I can recall a few staged versions of "Macbeth" that I liked, too. Still, I would not think of them as films but as plays (even in the curious case of Roman Polanski's noble effort to film his "Macbeth" some years ago). In my opinion, "The Reader" is a much finer film than "Benjamin Button."
However, in comparing those two films, the question of which one is more cinematic becomes more difficult and therefore more interesting. Although the latter film tells its story in much more cinematic ways, what I appreciate about "The Reader" is its many levels of readability. Maybe I think that way because the star-conscious "Benjamin Button" has pretty much already told its story in the hype that preceded its release in the first place. It is only in terms of color, special cinematic effects and the trendy deconstruction of story by reversing the normal direction of narrative that I find it to be the more cinematic.
I must give a plug to the Academy before I go, though. "Slumdog Millionaire" was surely the most cinematic of the nominees to choose from this year. It even reminded us of its own cinematic nature by going self-reflexive at the end and having its cast do the obvious and the originally expected Bollywood thing throughout the closing credits.
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