Movie musings, 1990 - special issue: 35th Anniversary 1955-1990

National Review, Nov 5, 1990 by John Simon

THE CUMAXA is a user, and we, quite rightly, don't like users. But, quite wrongly perhaps, we often love them. Some of the most beautiful women I have known were users; so, I gather from women friends, are some of the most handsome men. Are these, then, not to be loved in a world where beauty, both the skin-deep and the deep-as-a-well kind, are all too rare? Plato, I think, did us all a great disservice when, in the Symposium, he postulated a hierarchy in the realms of beauty and made the physical kind the lowest, good only for a stepping-stone.

Beauty, as any number of symbolistes and decadents kept reminding us, is not a moral concept, which is what makes it interesting; not enduring (at least when it's physical), which is what makes it tragic; and not, in its full bloom, resistible, which makes it, after all, a kind of absolute. And the movies, bless them, although equipped to deal with all kinds of beauty, are of all the arts most suited for the display of the physical sort.

But the movies, I repeat, are beautiful users. They use those who make them, they use those who frequent them, they even use themselves. In two hours or so they make you live a lifetime, laugh yourself silly, scare yourself to death, fall in love with someone unbelievably yet (as it were) palpably beautiful, understand something about the world or yourself that you didn't even know needed understanding, and think you are a better person for having seen them. If they are good, that is-which they often aren't, but that is another question.

Meanwhile, good or bad, they use you. Although pleasurably, they take something out of you emotionally, sometimes even intellectually. And they are addictive: they make you want more, and still more. They can cheat you out of the time you might have devoted to something better. And occasionally, when very beautiful, they can leave you drained. As they can also, much more often, when they are terrible. Either way, they use up a regular moviegoer's innocence, though not necessarily his naivete, but that, again, is another story.

Similarly, only even more so, they use up their makers. A novelist or dramatist, the closest thing to a filmmaker, can go on forever. Well, almost. Just think of all those playwrights and fictionists who wrote their masterpieces at the very end of their careers. Not so a filmmaker: not Renoir or Kurosawa, not Pabst or De Sica, not Hitchcock or Bunuel, not Chaplin or Bresson. Not even someone like Truffaut, who died at the early age of 52. Bergman, wise man that he is, stopped while still in possession of his full powers; even so, I wouldn't give you one Naked Night or Persona for ten Fanny and Alexanders. That is because film devours its creators as fiction and drama do not.

It is all about showing, you see. A playwright doesn't have to show all that much; words do most of his work. A novelist doesn't have to show anything. But a filmmaker has to put in all kinds of things he'd just as soon not. Suppose an important scene takes place in a restaurant, where the hero meets the heroine or two people conclude a crucial business deal. The filmmaker cannot limit himself to those specifics. He must show how the characters looked at that time, how they lifted their glasses to their lips, what and how they ate, etc. For this, the filmmaker may have to dredge up from his past anything from memories of waiters to recollections of flatware. And once recalled, they are used up: that kind of goblet, toyed with in that way, is finished for our filmmaker.

And film also uses itself up. In barely one century, what all hasn't been covered by the movies? Whole movements, such as surrealism, expressionism, absurdism, made it to the screen, also existentialism, nihilism, heaven knows what. Every type of story, plot, situation. All conceivable schools of acting and non-acting, by professionals and amateurs. And documentaries, and staged documentaries, and improvisation. There have been genres within genres-the Eastern Western, for instance, and the female buddy picture-until it seems there is nothing new under the projector.

When film was new, Konrad Lange, a famous professor of aesthetics, denounced it as a thing made by "semi-educated, aesthetically feelingless, ethically indifferent, in short, spiritually inferior people." After several strong decades, it now appears to fit that description all over again. At the just concluded 28th New York Film Festival, we saw such acts of desperation as the Bobbsey Twins of the Italian cinema, the Taviani brothers, reaching out to Tolstoy's Brother Sergius and converting it into Night Sun, a long, clattering exercise in sanctimonious mediocrity; also the sometimes stimulating French filmmaker Jacques Doillon reaching out to Dostoevsky's The Eternal Husband and making out of it something unrecognizable called A Woman's Vengeance. In it, two women claw and hack away at each other for 133 minutes, mostly in small apartments, with dialogue like rotten apples falling far from the Dostoevsky tree.