How to Watch a Movie (20 page)

But what is the achievement of these films? For doesn't documentary imply that it wants to do something with our problems?
Shoah
leaves one in no doubt about the nature of the Holocaust, but did it change minds? On the other hand,
Conspiracy
, a modest feature film made in 2001 for television
(based on actual transcripts) about the Wannsee Conference of 1943 on the final plans for disposing of Jews, written by Loring Mandel and directed by Frank Pierson, with Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Eichmann, is as clear and chilling a film about the fascist personality as any I have seen. The melancholy air of
The Fog of War
did not prevent the bumptious confidence of Donald Rumsfeld in a later Errol Morris film,
The Unknown Known
. Rumsfeld told Morris that he hated
The Fog of War
, because “that man had nothing to apologize for.” The point of
Bowling for Columbine
did not deter so many subsequent killings in the American heartland, at schools and malls, by guns, guns, guns.

Of course, documentaries are not responsible for solving the problems they address. Isn't it enough that the matters are raised? But is there a fallacy widening at our feet whereby we look at such films and neglect the many books, the scholarship, and the immense, time-consuming documentary record that such issues deserve? Can global warming be contained in ninety minutes, or does it require a scholarly lifetime? Watch enough documentaries and you feel fact slipping away through your hands like water—not “the” facts, the details of an event, but the possibility of fact. Fifty years after the death of John Kennedy, without being able to make a coherent, let alone court-ready account of the evidence, over 50 percent of Americans reckon that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone assassin.

Doubt seems more widespread and natural, though fear of doubt makes some ideologues more strident, and less governable. The larger a topic, the more diffuse or ghostly the material seems, and the more likely it is that “documentary” is simply another genre of fiction in which the filmmaker likes to assume the manner of a lawyer or a preacher (Errol
Morris and Ken Burns fit those models quite well). Then there is the passive observer, the filmmaker as surveillance functionary who believes it is improper to make a camera do more than observe, without a word of judgment. As if you did not introduce partiality every time you decide to put the camera here rather than there.

Then there is the title of the most interesting documentary of recent years:
Stories We Tell
by Sarah Polley, an actress since childhood, and director of
Away from Her
, one of the first movies to deal with dementia in a character (played by Julie Christie). Polley was born in Canada in 1979, the child of two minor actors, or so she thought. Then as she grew up she began to realize that perhaps the man she called Dad was not her biological father. The search for the truth finds the real father, and it uncovers a great deal of uncertain family history, spurred by a considerable amount of home movie—and, of course, by the late sixties and seventies, home movie was as common as movies you went out to see. What is most impressive and beautiful about
Stories We Tell
is that Polley has mixed in the home movie with footage she has arranged and shot herself, using another actress who sufficiently resembles her mother. The film is so valuable because it admits the extent to which family history is not a series of reliable biographies, the records of existence, the documents—it is a mélange of facts and memories, the real snapshots and the stories we attach to them. At last a documentary (and that's what the film business called it) had bridged the gap between the facts of life and the state of imagination or dreaming. But it left this viewer marveling that anyone would ever trust “documentary” again. It reminded me that Herzog's man who tried to live with grizzly bears (and there was such a person, Timothy Treadwell,
finally torn to pieces by a bear) was a character he could have invented. So on the sound track of that film, where Herzog's own haunted voice speaks the commentary, he is talking to himself in the most creative way.

Now, it may be assumed from this that I am saying Sarah Polley and Werner Herzog are living in a dream—which can still be a disparaging remark. But the condition of seeming lost that I have referred to is one that reminds us of an early instinct about the movies—that the experience they most resembled or mimicked was that of dream. We enter the dark and we take up a relaxed position. We see or apprehend events that are at the same time sensational yet remote. And that strange combination has to do with the circumstances of watching whereby we are helpless witnesses to momentous but inexplicable events that seem driven on (or projected) by a life of their own. We cannot stop the show, even if it begins to become menacing. We cannot quite remove ourselves, except by waking up, and we yield to the curious sense of being on a driverless locomotive—unless, sometimes, it seems to follow our fears and desires. The action of the dream may be lifelike and persuasive, but we do not grant it substance or rights of its own. Let me put it this way: it does not seem an expensive or difficult show to mount—it simply comes into being, like light at dawn, though we hardly know that this is either light or dawn. Our presence at the dream is unmistakable, even to the point that it seems designed for us. Yet it often has a fleeting air of the irrational or the absurd that stresses how far we do not know what it will be from one instant to the next. There is something like a narrative, but it has no laws or logic, and in its cutting—in its shift from one idea to another—it is almost random and spontaneous. Part of our dilemma is trying to work out whether these
shifts are arbitrary or intentional; do they mean anything, or has meaning itself been set aside?

Compare this encounter with the two other obvious narrative forms we know—the stage play and the novel—and our new status emerges. In a live theater, the play advances as ordered, and more or less we see that order and how far it depends on people as substantial as ourselves. Cry out against the progress of a play, invade the stage, and its proceedings must be interrupted or halted, as if we have grasped a companion. We are awed and intimidated by the actuality of the actors, and they have our respect. They are alive.

A book is more obedient to our moods. We can stop and start at our whim. We can go back and read one passage over and over again, to decide what it is saying. The book is our object: it sits in our lap or we throw it against the wall in frustration. And maybe then we pick it up again and renew the challenge. A book gives great responsibility to our participation and commitment: reading keeps us awake and it maintains the forward motion of the text. The very nature of the book tends to emphasize the privacy and purpose of reading. Its nature is to build introspection, the way exercise improves a muscle.

But dreaming and being at the cinema remind us of our helplessness. The illusion of life or reality is powerful and seductive, though this reality can transform itself in less than a second. We can cry out in protest but nothing happens. We are there but we are not there. We are having what may be a profound or devastating experience, but we are not there, except as minds that are left to struggle with the questions “What does this mean?” and “Is it meant for me?”

There is even this odd congruence: when we dream, the authorities say, that experience is marked by rapid eye movements. And when we watch a movie there is a stroboscopic
effect, not noticed by the conscious mind, but felt in the nervous system—a rapid, flickering in the light.

A great pleasure in dreaming—though it can be disturbing, too—is that the world of the dream (and I think we believe we are seeing it, as if a screen in our head is playing it) is unaccountable, without logic or any anxiety over lacking logic. We can say it is absurd, but it has a casual momentum that is vital to the experience. We are directed by the medium itself, even if a part of us may feel the idea of wakefulness as a corrective or a rescue. But do we want to be rescued? Some dreams are nightmares, to be sure, but the pleasure in being slid along these greased rails is beyond denying. Our powerlessness is liberating; it casts aside all those issues of belief and responsibility, or arrangements, punctuality, and explanation that are so wearying. It is a very basic form of existence, compelling and sometimes beautiful, but one that teases us a little by suggesting we don't exist. The movie business takes our money, to be sure, but then it enacts itself as if we weren't there.

Can this atmosphere from dream be a guide to film as art? Suppose that film's lifelike record is a given, so that it need not be labored after. Suppose the strenuous effort to be lifelike and realistic on screen is a waste of time, and of the medium's miracle. After all, the photograph cannot help but record appearance, and that may be a clue or a signal to the greater importance of the unseen. Suppose that the thing to require of film, or to hope for from it, is the minor significance of appearance and the revelation of inwardness. Isn't it worth noting that the two abiding preoccupations of cinema—sex and killing—have no appearance that film can use? Sex doesn't show; it may all be faked. And murder is still illegal.

For example, the laborious re-creation of the Western is a ponderous accumulation of proof when we are hoping for
mystery: the mountains of Wyoming; the snuffle of horses; the accoutrements of chaps, Stetsons, and six-guns; the gruff, laconic talk that is allegedly the discourse of the West (though journals and letters suggest a delight in elegant vocabulary and structure as might befit lonely men—
The Missouri Breaks
and the Coen brothers'
True Grit
are two Westerns that exult in the language of the late nineteenth century). Those pieces of evidence seem so banal, compared with the way two characters in
The Band Wagon
, say, may find a set that vaguely stands for New York's Central Park at night and break into dance to the tune of “Dancing in the Dark.” People seldom behave like that in Central Park at night. And they are not Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. But when it
is
those two with their refreshing indifference to the park, then the ways New Yorkers struggle through their lives melt away in the face of such bliss.

In other words, the truth twenty-four times a second is there as chaperone to the way running the frames together may promote a dream. I have tried to suggest some films in this vein that you might like to see. So why not speak about
Persona
, by Ingmar Bergman, made in 1966, a film that probes the nature of reality and our part in it as closely as any work of art I know?

It presents an actress, Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann). One night onstage (she is playing Electra) she is unable to speak her lines. There is no explanation for this. Then a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), is engaged to look after the actress in her convalescence. Alma is a chatterbox, and she deals with the actress's silence by talking to her. The convalescence takes them to a pleasant island, real enough to be Bergman's actual retreat, the island of Fårö, off the eastern coast of Sweden. There is water and sunlight and stones on the shore. But in the dream this is simply the backdrop for the increasing zeal with which Alma
talks to Elisabet. Alma puts on a one-woman show for Elisabet, who watches with a hint of amusement, along with scorn and tenderness. Alma talks about a sexual episode in her earlier life, and hardly knows whether she was victim or heroine.

Then Alma discovers in a letter that Elisabet is studying her like a character. The arrangement of the two women on this island is like a shell that breaks away to reveal several potential relationships—patient and therapist (but which is which?), actress and audience (the same question), lovers, vampires, ghosts seeking to make a whole person or find some comfort in their haunted world. There is a suggestion not that the two women become lovers, but that they are in love—of course, in 1966, even in a Swedish film, Bergman did not consider scenes like those in
Blue Is the Warmest Color
. Yet he would have love affairs himself with both actresses. He was with Bibi Andersson before
Persona
, and with Liv Ullmann afterward.

Persona
is only 83 minutes, in black-and-white, and it is not just the story of the two women but the night of their dreamings and their different possibilities. There are flashbacks; there are moments with a child, Elisabet's son; and there is the attempt to run film through a projector, as if to admit this reverie is a trick, too. There is sadism and masochism, tenderness and power-mongering. It is not an easy or cozy film, but by 1966 the possibility of difficulty was not turning film audiences to stone. It might bring them to life, if they were ready to follow the structures in film itself (as opposed to having a story to recite). If you want to know how to watch a movie,
Persona
is a film to see. For it will teach you that film is an adventure in which you are meant to see more than the things before your eyes. The things seen are not just the view; they are windows that open it up.

15

WHERE IS THE SCREEN?

S
o if you are interested enough to see
Persona
, what do you do? Well, suppose you insist on a 35 mm print of the film as shot by Sven Nykvist (a master photographer) and shown in the correct 1.33:1 aspect ratio. You are doing the right thing, but your chances depend on where you live. Suppose you live in London. The National Film Theatre will occasionally play
Persona
and they will try to get the best print available. That is their policy in every season they mount, but in recent years they have found an increasing pressure from distributors to say, We carry that film now in a digital version—it's so much easier and cheaper to store, and truly the digital image is astounding.

You can assume that Svensk Filmindustri, the company that produced the film, has a print and the negative still in its vault, and there will be others in major archival centers. If
you live away from the big cities then you may have to rent it, or buy it on DVD. There was a basic DVD, put out in 2004 by M-G-M, but while the print quality was fair, the aspect ratio was wrong. Then in 2014
Persona
was recovered and redelivered on DVD by the Criterion Collection, who got the aspect ratio right. But there's a good chance that you don't know what an aspect ratio is, and you're far from sure when you play a DVD on your home television that you're getting the frame that a director wanted. That decision affects every composition, sometimes with damaging effects. Bergman and Nykvist intended the classical Academy frame and they often fill it with faces in meticulous compositions. Morever,
Persona
begins and ends with glimpses of the two filaments in a carbon arc projector burning so intensely that the filaments merge. But that state of the medium is almost beyond reach. So here is a mass medium for which you are beginning to face the dilemma of wanting to see Velázquez's
Las Meninas
—you may have to go to Madrid, to the Prado.

Or you can see the whole film, any time you like, on You-Tube. The aspect ratio is not quite right and the image will only be a few inches by a few inches. But the quality of that image is surprisingly good. The original glow of Nykvist's work is retained. And it's all there any time. So it's far more likely that a perfect museum will exist on YouTube (or some version of it) than be a real building, helplessly limited and large, in one place. I'll go further: Bergman and Nykvist, Andersson and Ullmann, made
Persona
for movie theaters. But was that their mistake, their fussiness? Without knowing it, were they really anticipating something like YouTube yet to come? Suppose one day as you're walking along you think to yourself, I'd like to see
Persona
, and it starts to play in your head, as if instructed.
You can close your eyes and your mind will still be seeing it. Now, is that a dream?

When I found
Persona
on YouTube, I stayed with it for about ten minutes. I wanted to go through that dense opening, checking off the bodies in the morgue, the excerpt from a silent comedy, the intense little boy in spectacles who rolls over on his morgue slab and starts to read a book—it turns out to be Lermontov's
A Hero of Our Time
. I didn't see the brief shot of the erect penis. So I checked again, and I think I saw it, so briefly that I might not have known. But that had been missing in some theatrical versions. I did notice that newsreel moment when the Buddhist priest who has set fire to himself topples over. His fall; his falling. Then after ten minutes I stopped and got on with something else on a screen that had been waiting behind the YouTube screen. I think it was the text for this book. But I have gone back to
Persona
several times and taken a piece here and a piece there.

Cut: in fact, I had the YouTube
Persona
as a panel in my larger frame, and there, it happened, I also saw one of the Rob Lowe commercials for DirecTV. How can I let that cut across a contemplation of
Persona
, you wonder? Simple answer: because that is what the technology is doing all the time. Of course, I realize this commercial may be a rat at our picnic, an infection on Bergman's sacred island. The ads may fade away as quickly as most ads, but it's telling that we can be so fixed in something so perishable.

Lowe is an intriguing figure. We don't need to recount his checkered career, or the aura of scandalous incidents. Let's just say that in these DirecTV ads, he does astonishing work, unexpected, witty, and for everyman. In presenting the upright and Direct Lowe and the creepy, pathetic, noxious Lowe who only
has cable, he became a master actor. I don't think he has ever done anything better. So is the result just a cute ad? That's not enough: look closely at the series and you realize that it's
Persona
in thirty seconds; it's a chronically divided person; and the split screen that I wandered into by accident is a model of ourselves and the riddle of our movie experience. We are caught between so many screens.

I might have been shocked once if you told me that's how you watch films—but you have ways of watching I can learn from. The fragmentation of movies that video made possible is not going to end; it's already advancing and taking us back to a wealth of short films, bits and bites, that are not so different from the enormous, untidy collection of scraps of film that existed from, say, 1890 to 1915.

For me, fragmentation was once close to heresy. Of course, that was foolishness: I had long been in the habit of rereading a chapter or just a few pages from a novel I liked. In teaching film, I had regularly chosen scenes and led the class in an analysis of them, without covering the whole picture. Simply for pleasure, I found that I treasured the “Begin the Beguine” number at the end of
Broadway Melody of 1940
. Directed by Norman Taurog, that had never seemed as good as the best of the Astaire-Rogers films,
The Band Wagon
or
Silk Stockings
. But I loved how Fred and Eleanor Powell did the slinky Cole Porter number. The routine has different sections, and I enjoyed them all, but nothing matched the climax where the two of them appeared in a swanky fast tap contest dressed in white on lustrous black floors.

It was easy with a VHS and then a DVD to cue
Broadway Melody
to the right chapter and recline in “Begin the Beguine.” I did that four or five times a year perhaps. Until one day I
realized I was acting like a lazy barbarian. Didn't the whole film deserve attention? So I ran it start to finish, and got into all the laborious stuff about King Shaw (George Murphy) and the tedious storyline in which Johnny Brett (Fred) and Clare Bennett (Eleanor) couldn't quite see they were made for each other. My apologies to Mr. Taurog and to Leon Gordon, George Oppenheimer, and the
nine
other people who seem to have had a hand in the script (one of them was Preston Sturges!), but it's stupid and deserves to be overlooked. I find it hard to imagine that Fred wasn't just waiting for “Begin the Beguine” to begin.

Then I think of that Buddhist priest on fire in the act of falling, and so many other fragments that have gathered in the consciousness of modern film. There is that man in Vietnam being shot in the head on the street; the Zapruder film, twenty-two seconds or so, so clear and yet the gateway to such speculation and doubt; or Jack Ruby going up to Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station and shooting him in his black sweater; Geoff Hurst lashing the last goal into the German net in 1966; that woman who comes to life for a few seconds in Chris Marker's
La Jetée;
the planes entering the twin towers; Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”; the home movie of your child eating chocolate profiteroles; startling footage of another child playing soccer, the ball seeming as dark and heavy as a bomb, and then the belated realization that the child is you.

Some of this material is Super 8 mm, film you can neither buy nor process now, brittle celluloid that has never come off its spools and which contains a few moments from so many young lives. Or there are the miles and years of surveillance footage, a bleak, gray, unblinking stare from the upper corner of a neutral piece of ground, the approach to a secret, a space
that if we wait years some intruders may seek to creep across. And the surveillance will know, and know who they are, if there are enough people in the world of watchers to stay awake for so many bleak, gray stares.

In this filmscape or surveillance state, movies are becoming rarer—I mean movies made to tell stories or construct dreams, movies for which some people still seek advice on the process of watching and seeing. This other coverage becomes a duplicate of life. Is it trying to record every moment we have had, if only to prove that time has been a patient river coursing through us? We have only been here to measure time, so think of an eighty-year-long movie in which a person can do nothing to stop the gradual erosion of aging, despite the occasional flurries of excitement or eventfulness.

In the prologue to
Persona
, the little boy reaches out to a blurred screen on which images of his mother's face are shown, too out of focus for us to read her expression or the focused feeling she has for him. Perhaps she is dead. Perhaps she is his own child in years to come. A boy can imagine being a parent, just as an old man will try to recall his infancy. There could be so many answers that the questions collapse in exhaustion. But Bergman and many other filmmakers insisted that they could find some arresting 83 minutes that seemed like an entrance to time.
Persona
is about two women and the uneasy way they pass from being performers to watchers and back again. Of course,
Persona
is forty-nine years old, from a time when movies meant more than they do now.
Persona
gripped imaginations ready for a film that seemed capable of taking on … everything?

That little boy in
Persona
, Jörgen Lindström, was born in 1951 and he made a few other films as a child. Then he went
to work in a film laboratory. I wonder where he is now. Did he ever watch the film later, look at that scene where his hand passes over the screen of Liv Ullmann's face and wonder if he was greeting his own mother or waving farewell? The two actresses are alive as I write, but they are in their eighties now. Ingmar Bergman died in 2007—and his great film (Susan Sontag thought it was the greatest ever made) is on YouTube.

All we know of time is a blink. How could real slaves in Louisiana in 1853 foresee that one day a story on film would re-create the terrible punishments they suffered for some stern form of entertainent or enlightenment? How could they guess they would be free, or the degrees to which they are still not free? And how will the actresses in
Blue Is the Warmest Color
look back when they are as old as Bibi Andersson (born in 1935) and Liv Ullmann (born in 1938) and wonder how much it was their characters who made love, and how much themselves?

You came into this book under deceptive promises (mine) and false hopes (yours). You believed we might make decisive progress in the matter of how to watch a movie. So be it, but this was a ruse to make you look at life. The true subject of movie is seeing and being seen—just as it was with
Las Meninas
. Movie will pass as a sensation and a habit. But it has altered our status as watchers by insisting that we question ourselves about watching. If you look at our history now, it is an open question whether we will have the stamina to do that all the way.

I am fixing on
Persona
and
Las Meninas
as key works, and I could have chosen many others. But there are things in the Bergman film that ponder on the nature of film as deeply as Velázquez asks us to consider the larger room of a painting—not just a room in a Spanish palace, nor even in the Prado
where it lives, but the shifting, ongoing room in which we observe the painting, and try to discover whether we are the king and queen, misty in the mirror, watching themselves being painted, or whether the canvas Velázquez is working on is the whole picture we are seeing. And in
Persona
, we cannot escape the labyrinth of the film and its screens. We want to reach out our own hand to the image, even if all we feel is the cold glass and the awareness that our mothers and our children are already so far away that they are on the edge of the blink that constitutes “our time.” We cannot be sure that we are not one of the children in
Las Meninas
, waiting to come a little closer to us. And we must wonder whether
Persona
will last as long as the Velázquez painting done in 1656.

A little over three hundred years later, in a film called
Pierrot le Fou
, Jean-Luc Godard had a father in his bath (Jean-Paul Belmondo) smoking a cigarette and reading to his child, a little girl, from Élie Faure's
Histoire de l'Art
(but it could be a description of movies, too):

Space reigned supreme…. It was as if some tenuous radiation gliding over the surfaces imbued itself of their visible emanations, modeling them and endowing them with form, carrying elsewhere a perfume, like an echo, which would thus be dispersed like an imponderable dusk, over all the surrounding planes…. The world he lived in was sad. A degenerate king, inbred infantas, idiots, dwarfs, cripples, deformed clowns clothed as princes, whose only job was to laugh at themselves and amuse those lifeless outlaws who were trapped by etiquette, conspiracy, lies and inextricably bound to the confessional by guilt. Outside the gates, the auto-da-fé, and silence…. What about that, my little girl?

I have always found that scene touching (some of it is cut against shots of a young woman playing tennis, Belmondo at a bookstore, the night sky), yet Belmondo is on the point of leaving his child. In a short time in that story he will be dead, but Belmondo will last awhile on screen, young enough to be brave and stupid about life. If you really want to watch a film, you must be ready to recognize your own life slipping away. That takes a good deal of education. But you have to be stupid, too.