Movies and Pleasure II

Continuing right along, then, with:

6) Intellectual pleasure–and I don’t mean a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky. There are at least three quite distinct types of movies that can be described here. First, there are those movies that provide the pleasures of mimesis–that imitate what we think we know about “the real world” so vividly, so grittily, that after seeing them we feel “reality” has been exposed to us in a way it never had been before. Post-World War II neo-Realism is considered the great exemplar of this kind of film-making: not just the Italian version, as de Sica’s Shoeshine and Umberto D., but also Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, or Clouzot’s Wages of Fear; or in a somewhat different vein, Bresson’s Un Condamne a Mort est Echappe (A Condemned Man Escaped).

There’s also a special kind of pleasure we can get from movies that astonish us and expand our consciousness with their presentation of a world previously unknown to us. Of course documentaries sometimes tell us what we didn’t quite know before (e.g., Frederick Wiseman’s Welfare or High School), but there’s also a kind of fiction film that unfolds primarily like a sociological or anthropological treatise, to greater or lesser effect, as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Nicholas Ray’s exploration of Eskimo life in Savage Innocents, or Herzog’s Stroszek or Truffaut’s The Wild Child.

At this time in cinema history, there is for me a third, more exciting form of cinematic pleasure. This is cinema that focuses so intensely on a person, a community, a slice of life, a moment of time, that at some point in watching the film we realize that we don’t know what kind of film we’re watching or if we’re even watching what we usually think of as a film. In some of the films I’m thinking of it’s unclear whether what is unfolding before us is fiction or a sociological or anthropological documentary or some hard-to-grasp combination of both. In the magnificent Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (it earned all of $60,000 in the U.S.), a bored ambulance driver whose shift should be over tries with stubborn and finally desperate commitment to get her failing charge into a hospital emergency room in Bucharest, all of them being filled with victims of a terrible mass highway accident, and none of their personnel having any interest in what they assume to be just another self-destructive alcoholic. Halfway through the movie my companion (as Ed Koch would say) turned to me and said, “I don’t remember–is this a documentary?” We know the driver is an actress, and the victim is probably an actor, but who are all these doctors and nurses and patients, and are all these hospitals just parading their impenetrability before us or are they participating in a fiction that looks as “real” as St. Vincent’s on a bad Saturday night?

In the same way, though to quite different emotional effect, Ulrike Ottinger’s Joan of Arc of Mongolia, takes us aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, on which a film crew headed by star Delphine Seyrig–who seems to function as an intellectual and producer as much as an actress on the trip–heads to Mongolia to make a film; and after encountering various angry, threatening, or merely interested groups of Siberian peoples along the way, winds up in the midst of a tribe of hard-riding Mongolians led by a scimitar-waving Princess who, it turns out, wants to be an actress herself–or maybe she already is one, or had become on by the time the shooting finished? We can’t say, but the fascination of the trip, and its strange climactic confrontation, is endless.

I speak also of Charles Burnett’s two mesmerizing films of black life in South Central L.A., Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding. It took 30 years for him to get a commercial distributor for them, and yet, amateurish as the acting sometimes is, they take us more intensely into the lives of the people we see–actors? neighborhood hangers-on?–than almost any other American movies of this period. We can accept that they are after all fictions, and yet it’s impossible not to believe in their absolute truth.

Above all, it’s some of the products of recent Iranian cinema that I think of in this context. What unites these masterworks is the willingness of their directors to give us no easy clues as to what we are seeing. In Abbas Kiarostomi’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards (made at the age of 21), and Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot, it seems that professional actors and filmmakers are intervening in the daily lives of some isolated group of indigenous people; but how can this be? How can “real people” (or are they?) whose lives are wholly defined by their isolation, be allowing these alien city folks to move them around like chessmen on a board? The potentially devastating effect of this kind of intervention is precisely the subject of Kiarostomi’s film, which is, I believe, the greatest cinematic reflection ever on the ethical dilemmas involved in making a documentary movie about “the Other;” just as Makhmalbaf’s movie is an unparalleled account of culture clash, and Payami’s of the birth, a la Rousseau’s social contract, of political democracy.

In other, more urban and less anthropological-seeming films–Kiarostomi’s Ten or A Taste of Cherry, Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold--the director seems to have turned the camera on a person who is just a person instead of an actor (in fact the most difficult of impersonations for an actor to carry off), and filmed the passing interactions of that person with...whom, exactly? Actors? Passersby?

In any event, the great pleasure of these films is that at the obvious risk of seeming either slow or boring or alienating, they maintain an unyielding concentration on protagonists who do not exist merely to intersect with the next exciting turn of the plot screw, but who steadfastly go on doing what they are doing regardless of whether anything of fictive invention happens to them while they are doing it–or not, as is usually the case in reality. I would say that all these films must absolutely be seen, but the length of this discourse perhaps merely demonstrates my own peculiar version of “pleasure.” Considering (see below) that I once incorrectly assumed that no one could possibly be bored by Children of Paradise, there’s obviously a lot about enjoyment that I don’t know. What I do know, though, is the fascinating plurality of it.

7) Kinetic pleasure–some great examples are The Naked Spur, The French Connection, The Warriors, each of them eternally memorable, and capable of being enjoyed through many viewings. In one way this, the opposite as we might say of the kind I’ve just been describing, is obviously the cinematic pleasure, since cinematic art is specifically the art of moving pictures. And audible pictures as well. The sound of rushing water, the clink of spurs on rock, the rack of the slide in a rifle: all these sonic experiences and more make The Naked Spur a doubly wonderful 90 minutes of intense external pleasure. And the musical scores of, e.g., The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Once Upon a Time in the West, Viva Zapata!, Abel Gance's Napoleon, The Informer, The Dead Poets Society, Chariots of Fire, are almost worth the price of admission in their own right.

Yet in another way this is also the most limiting type of pleasure, not because it’s inferior in any way, but because if it gets out of hand--the very worst aspect by far of contemporary Hollywood films--it tends to overwhelm everything else in a film and so eliminate or attenuate the quite distinct pleasures of emotional connection, aesthetic contemplation, etc. That is, a movie that’s too totally plunged into the experience of kinesis--defined as fast or violent action--is poorly placed to take advantage of the many other opportunities offered by cinema as a pleasure-giving narrative form.

For a cautionary example, see the recent The Invasion. A second remake of the original and gripping Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about half-way through it turns into an extended chase film full of implausibly smashing cars, narrow escapes from foot-races that surely should have been lost, and so on and on. All the intense anxiety and fear of the original and its first remake disappear into the framework of a standard woman-in-peril movie, even more so because Nicole Kidman is far too charismatic, too iconic, to stand in for the endangered human species--compare the relatively mundane personae of Kevin McCarthy or Donald Sutherland. In the same way, as I remarked earlier, the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma is woefully inferior to its prototype, washing away in an unending wave of pointlessly frenetic activity the areas of quietude and plaisanterie that made the original so enjoyable.

8) Literary pleasure. I am not referring here only to movies that seem like visualized books-- The Age of Innocence, Sense and Sensibility, the entire Merchant/Ivory corpus, The Past Recaptured, successful or unsuccessful adaptations of Shakespeare. As well or even more so, we experience in what I am calling a literary sense any film in which the primary source of pleasure is not only visually but verbally and narratively imaginative to a heightened degree–e.g., thoughtful explorations of the way things are such as Renoir’s Grand Illusion; or satires such as his The Rules of the Game or Paddy Chayevsky’s The Americanization of Emily and Hospital (no one remembers the names of the directors of those Chayevskian films); or vividly realized explorations of other worlds such as Blade Runner, or explorations of others’ lives such as Joan Scott’s Strangers in Good Company; or cinematic operas such as Antonio das Mortes, or faithfully filmed dramas such as A Streetcar Named Desire (which I sat through twice at its world premiere, unable to tear myself away from the intensity of its desperation); or even the blank verse dialogue of Polonsky’s film noir, Force of Evil. In fact, oddly enough given his own fondness for the films of Samuel Fuller and his New Wave commitment to the non-dramatic, Jean-Luc Godard has probably been the pre-eminent cinematic provider of literary pleasure, as in Masculine-Feminine, Contempt, the first half of Weekend, Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

But above all, and more generally, the idea of literary pleasure also encompasses movies, such as, e.g., Children of Paradise, The Earrings of Madame De..., Ran (Kurosawa’s version of Lear), that convey cinematically the sweep and scope of the novel as pre-eminent narrative form. That I have often called the first of these “the best movie of all time” (as distinguished from “my favorite movie of all time,” Viva Zapata!), proves nothing about anything, not even myself, since it has so many other magnificently aesthetic and iconic (Arletty and Barrault) elements that raise it to the stars. But then a middle American colleague and her husband once asked what movie they should see when they visited New York City, and noting that Children... was being revived that week I incautiously said, “you mustn’t miss this, one of the great movies of all time.” Their comment: “we were bored to tears.” Ah well, de gustibus...

9) Finally, last but maybe not least–visceral pleasure: Basic Instinct, Halloween, Psycho, hardcore porn, the Marx Brothers. Horror, sex, slapstick comedy, sex, violence, sex. In one form or another, the most felt and the least admitted of all the pleasures: not serious. But you are a strange person indeed if you get no kind of visceral pleasure at all out of movies–what else can I say?

And now, on to my final posting here, to answer the question with which I began.