The Chris Moeller Archives

How to Watch a Movie

A captivating book is film critic David Thomson’s “How to Watch a Movie,” released a year ago. These are some choice passages for contemplation upon the film-going experience, focusing on movies I have consumed. Juicy stuff…

On Hitchcock’s Psycho, “…You can praise the film technically, as screen storytelling. But that won’t convey what has happened in the thirty minutes: we like Marion Crane and are rooting for her, but we also want to see her get some sexual delivery and satisfaction. We have become accomplices in the film (this is Hitchcock’s most cunning and intimate skill) so that we can feel for the victim and the killer at the same time. This is far more than a conventional play upon the Jekyll-and-Hyde duality in most of us. It has to do with the structure of the film as an experience, the marriage of intense actuality, and magical detachment, so that we have a truly divided self. It is the way in which information can hardly exist without being emotional. And it is why the greatest test in watching movies is to respond to the plot or the characters, while observing film process, too.”

On Daniel Day-Lewis, “It’s easy to say that (he) was outstanding in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, though that may be undercut by the certainty that he would be good in advance. To this day, however, despite the skill and dedication with which Day-Lewis made himself a version of Lincoln, I believe the still pictures from the 1860s are more moving. Day-Lewis may be more impressive, or spontaneous, as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood-- because he is the original Plainview, unhindered by questions of resemblance. One hundred and fifty years after Lincoln, it’s easy to believe the man was playing himself in life. But Plainview is fresh, insane, and dangerous. On screen, I think I prefer him (though it’s better that Plainview was not president)."

On accidental film-making,“Think of the home-movie footage Abraham Zapruder shot in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He was not skilled, his camera not refined, he had no artistic ambition. But his single-shot (486 frames) is not just the best record of what happened in those few seconds, it has been the template for explaining the event. It is chance cinema, documentary, humble, rough and ready, but maybe the most significant and reinterpreted film of the twentieth century.”

Thomson’s focused observations and theories got me thinking about the moving image and the way our ability to record moments in time have allowed us to manipulate memory. I recently visited Old Faithful and witnessed a fascinating social reality of modern times, aside from the impulse humans have to physically applaud performances by the natural world. You know where I’m going. A large number of people are watching the geyser’s eruption through the lens of a video camera, much as a cinematographer would, but it’s much smaller and it’s part of their telephone.

A less celebrated consistency than Old Faithful in the United States is the annual hot air balloon festival in Indianola, IA, which I attended last Friday evening as the balloons touched the earth and then were individually lit to reveal a beautiful tapestry of colors and light. I may have been the only person in the gathering of adult age, out of hundreds, that made no attempt to capture the images of the light display on his or her phone. Yes, I may have also been the only one without a video option on their phone, but if that was something that was important to me, I would have a video option on my phone. The eye captures the images, that’s my method, but it doesn’t play back. The obligation falls to memory.

I thought of another concept too, as a I read: We are returning to some characteristics of book-reading without even knowing it. Every time you read a book, you know precisely where you are in the story, because you hold it in your hand. You are roughly a quarter of the way, or half way through the book, whatever. I read a lot of non-fiction history and those books usually arrive in my possession with pages of notes and reference following the body of the book, so it’s not immediately clear at first glance how much is left. Notoriously, I look ahead and have the distance figured in my head at all times. I'm anal-retentive. When I’m at the picture show, though, I usually have no idea where I am in relation to the beginning and end of the movie. Certainly many Hollywood offerings are formulaic enough to give you a good idea, but I don’t usually investigate the run-time of the film before it begins, and even if I did, I’m an inconsistent judge of how much and how little of it has transpired. The most that I can recall being off in time, in my head, was when I first saw the David Mamet-directed Glengarry Glen Ross. That movie absolutely flew by. I was upended by it probably because it had the stage pacing of the play that the story was in its original form.

Now that we’re all hooked on home video, though, we’re back in book mode, in a way. Our modern display graphics show us how far into the movie we are. When I watch a movie on my dual-screen computer, and I’m fussing away at something mundane like an online puzzle on the other screen, my mouse inevitably runs over the movie-side screen, and the time elapsed bar comes up from its resting status even without me clicking on something. I always know how much time is left. And increasingly, I must know.

Back to Thomson, with a first chapter passage that passes as a synopses of sorts of our movie obsession (made clear by the first four words in the text): "It comes to this: a hundred and fifty years ago, people lived a life and referred it to books, games, and works of moral instruction. But in the time since then we have acquired this mechanism that mimics the way we attend to the world as a whole. Often enough, it supplants living, to say nothing of moral instruction. So we watch, and we watch ourselves watching.”

posted by CM @ 7:15 AM