The Big Screen (84 page)

I have put these titles in italics to make them seem comparable to movie titles. Yet their performance is at a quite different altitude, one that reminds us of the earlier sway of movies. So it's deflating to add that Clint Eastwood's
J. Edgar
(which opened on November 9, 2011) grossed $11.5 million in its first weekend. That meant a little over a million people saw the Eastwood picture. In the next three weeks, it fell off by 54, 49, and 68 percent. It was a disappointment, if not quite a flop, for Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio. But it's a lackluster film, spoiled by the customary caution that is seldom mentioned as part of Clint's public image.

The culture of the opening weekend is predicated on impatience and forgetfulness, yet franchising seems to suggest the system believes in loyalty. There are newspaper articles and Internet items that gossip over these numbers, and try to explain what they mean. But they are as irrelevant to the real progress of “the business” of screens as the daily oscillations in the Dow are to our economy. One way or another, the business maintains that its box office income is vibrant, but the number of people going to see a movie in a theater declines. Everyone knows that one day everything will stream; this is happening already, and that's why there are moves in Congress and from the MPAA to “outlaw the piracy” of new movies. Then the defenders of the Internet protest that we should not interfere with the Net's “liveliness.” By the time movies are available on your computer or your thumbnail or a chip in your head, it will be left to museums and archives to maintain a few big screens—if they can find proper prints to show.

We have come to a strange pass for the movies and their shining light if the depression of
Melancholia
is out there with a genre called “shooters.” Sadness and tragedy have a necessary place in fiction and drama; that's what
Homeland
deserved. But isn't depression antagonistic to the light itself, and close to what Lew Wasserman regarded as a “downer”? Isn't it as upsetting as watching kids—your own kids—building their kill counts? There was a time when it would have been unthinkable for Fred Astaire to sing “Never Gonna Be Depressed,” and then sink into a heap in a corner of one of those deco sets. He believed in being an entertainer. But maybe Fred's and Hollywood's reign of happiness and its stress on well-being left a hangover that taught us how far we were falling short in the American pursuit. Movies gave us a heady idea of fun, but was it an unkind education? Are we left with no better choice than having a draft, seeing the fun in
Call of Duty
, or joining in the family of Facebook?

Can't there be a difference between dread and depression? In advance of AIDS,
Alien
(1979) was a haunting metaphor of bodily betrayal, and a great show. Directed by Ridley Scott, it cost $11 million and grossed $185 million. In 2012 Scott offered
Prometheus
, which tried to recapture the fears and tropes of the original. That cost $120 million and quickly grossed twice that amount. But the profit ratio on
Alien
was 17 to 1; to match that,
Prometheus
would need to earn $2 billion. People still dream about
Alien
; they are forgetting
Prometheus
.

How many funerals have there been for the death of cinema?

The coming of sound was termination for some people.
Photoplay
magazine mocked the claim that sound had been perfected: “So is castor oil,” it said. Then the audience dropped off in the 1930s. In 1951 there was David Selznick wandering in an empty studio and crying, woe is us—we betrayed our chance, we made so few worthwhile pictures. Television seemed the obvious and natural way of watching moving imagery, including movies. Later in the 1950s, attendance fell for good and a few smart films nudged us and said, “Aren't movies stupid?” We killed Technicolor; we betrayed black and white. From 1960, for a few years, Godard was a surgeon excising every stale convention with a look of contempt and superiority. Then video was offered as an easier way of seeing more pictures. We gave up cinematography for digital. We knew that so many movies had been lost for all time, and still there were too many to see. One day in July 2007, Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman died, not together, but as if in a pact that wanted to teach us something. Yet the ghosts go on about their business, like Michael Myers in
Halloween
or the Living Dead hearing their cue. We still like to look.

In San Francisco, it is 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning (August 27, 2011). I am on the sofa, ready, in the old way; it is nearly time for the match (and a 90-minute game is like an old movie). Since about 1953, I have followed a London soccer team, Chelsea. For years I stood on the terraces in southwest London in crowds close to seventy thousand watching the Blues. It is a habit and a devotion. But here, six thousand miles away, I can watch Chelsea versus Norwich, live, as it happens (it's 3:00 p.m. in London), on high-definition color television, with a little tea and toast. This is playing on Fox Sports, and part of our cable package (which rents at about $200 a month), whereas if I were in London, I doubt I would afford a ticket to be at the stadium (at least fifty pounds). See how enabling the screen and the media are these days? And in that very game (a 3–1 victory for Chelsea), a new player, Juan Mata, made his debut and you could see—you
had
to see—the way he turned and moved, his fluent instincts, the soccer of it. Seeing something can still be as moving as watching a naked woman in Muybridge turn to the right, or waiting for the moment in Gene Kelly's “Singin' in the Rain” number when he spins and the camera soars above him. At seventy, I have found nothing to match motion and emotion running together. John Wayne walking, a child making its first movements, Juan Mata—they all do it for me. I like to watch.

But as I watch the game, I realize the screen is not just the benign illusion of Stamford Bridge, where Chelsea play. There are two constant insignias stamped on my screen, top left corner and top right, for Barclays, the bank that sponsors the Premier League, and for Fox Sports, the channel that is showing the game. Very well, I sigh, those companies have a claim of ownership, even if it seems crass to assert it at every instant. But that is not all. Periodically, in a panel that comes and goes, they warn me of other matches they are about to show. Let's be gracious; let's say that this is a useful service and not just brutal advertising and a reminder that I am not at the game.

There is more still. At the ground, for the television cameras, there is a low billboard, a constructed electronic screen, no more than four feet high, that reaches from one end of the ground to the other. It is programmed with very basic verbal messages that move and change throughout the game. In the course of the match, there were signals on behalf of Barclays, Fox, Thomas Cook (the travel company), Samsung (“Experience the future of TV”), Adidas, Singha Beer, the gear worn by Chelsea players, and even messages in Chinese characters.

The skill and intimacy of the camera coverage are better than ever. Is any documentary practice more sophisticated? In addition, the coverage can go to slow-motion, close-up angles on any controversial or dramatic play. Many sports fans admit that what you see on the TV coverage surpasses being there. And TV is vital to the crazed economics of major sports, which steadily pushes old fans from being able to go to the game. So the experience itself is in question. Where sports once existed for their own sake, they are now there to sustain television. In Britain, the attempt by Rupert Murdoch to undermine the BBC began with the campaign to get more important sporting events on his network, Sky (formed in 1990).

That seems like an archaic struggle now, just as once it was a surprise to see moviegoers playing video games in the theater lobby. But so much has changed, and so much of it for the better that sometime it feels pushy to insist on the loss. In the 1970s, teaching film at an American university, a teacher had to hire a film on 16 mm and project it for the class, stopping and starting the show for the purposes of “film study.” That depended on the school's having a projector, the teacher's knowing how to operate it, and some worthy pictures' being in distribution.

That clumsy yet exciting operation was overtaken by “video” in the late 1970s. That novelty has gone through many transitions in just over thirty years, from Betamax and videodiscs to VHS and DVD, with necessary upgrades of equipment along the way, but it is a gift for teaching. Not that the film industry showed much early awareness of this, but video also rescued the theatrical business. It appeared to the public as an obvious extension of television, just as they had once felt television was natural heir to the big screen. In the 1980s and for twenty-five years or so, video rental stores had a flood of hitherto unavailable titles. Not just the new films, not just movies that might have been denied theatrical release, but the treasury of “old movies.” For anyone from the 1950s and '60s, who sometimes waited years to see certain titles, it was a breathtaking liberty. By today, thanks to companies like Criterion, a pantheon of classics is available with variant versions, interviews with the filmmakers, and shot-by-shot analyses conducted by scholars.

This is the state of modern cinephilia, which amounts to the happy and self-contained study of the art of cinema in the way a minority studies opera, ballet, and literature. Such people do see some films on theater screens, even if it's not a movie print being projected. But most cinephiles live in apartments where shelves of DVDs and VHS tapes compete with bookshelves. In doing this book, I have frequently picked out a DVD and looked at it, often just a scene, to refresh my memory over a detail. In turn, movies have increasingly become cliplike, or the collected quotations from themselves. The total experience suffers from fragmented attention. It is not just our children who have attention-deficit “problems.” The condition, along with so much else, is in the technology. As Woody Allen is quoted in this book, that is what has taken over from Lubitsch and Preston Sturges.

There is a book called
The Death of Cinema
, by Paolo Cherchi Usai. He is senior curator at the George Eastman House archive and director of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. So you can guess where he stands. But he has some arresting facts. His book was published in 2001, and he said then that in 1999 the world had produced 1.5 billion hours of moving imagery. He predicted that 100 billion hours would be made in one year by 2025.

That footage or mileage is so overwhelming that it's absurd to think of keeping it all. Cherchi Usai feels the tsunami of technology:

Cherchi Usai is a defender of the cause—Martin Scorsese did the preface to his book—yet I find it encouraging for him to admit that there are things more important than cinema. Do you recall what Francis Coppola said introducing
Apocalypse Now
, “It
is
Vietnam”? No, not quite. Film and its followers often join in a kind of rapt myopia that says nothing is more important. Richard Brody's thorough and understanding book on Jean-Luc Godard is called
Everything Is Cinema
, as if to embrace many of Godard's runic sayings—such as “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.” (The “Everything” line was one Godard gave Brady.) I knew Ray a little in his last years, and the truth was more complicated and demanding. “Everything” is available to be served by cinema, but our ordinary everything existed long before cinema and it will thrive still when the word has been abandoned.

I also echo something Paul Schrader said as long ago as 1990:

Alas, in twenty-one years, that advice has been neglected, though Terrence Malick is one example of the liberal arts background, and more, as well as one of the finest eyes we have ever had. He translated Heidegger and taught philosophy at MIT. I know a sixteen-year-old so entranced by Malick's
The Tree of Life
that he watched it five times in a couple of months, always on his computer screen. The film was still playing in theaters where he lived, but he had no interest in seeing it there. I like that kid (he is a young man now), but I feel he and I are not quite of the same species.

Whatever one's view of
The Tree of Life
, surely its eye deserves a large screen. I loved that light and space in
Badlands
, Malick's directorial debut, though I think Malick's energy has moved fatally from narrative to introspection. Perhaps it is philosophy. My young friend might respond, Well, wouldn't you rather be alone in a gallery with a Chardin painting than have a mob of people trying to get a better view than you? Fair point. Wouldn't you rather hear Mahler on an immaculate CD, without audience distractions? No, that's going too far: I want to see and feel the heave and bustle of the orchestra. But why shouldn't a young man insist that he gets more out of Malick's reverie if he is close to that state himself, without the theater of distraction?

In a 2010 article in
The Toronto Star
, Geoff Pevere analyzed the nature of being at the movies—at least in Toronto. In his research Pevere talked to the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who had taken his seventeen-year-old son to see
The Social Network
. They had liked the movie, but not what Egoyan described as “the way people were talking to each other, like absolutely out loud, having conversations as though there was no sense of this as an experience that needed a degree of respect or consideration, was amazing. It was as though they were watching in their living room…They were talking, they were texting each other, there were all these other sources of light in the room.”

Respect for the experience as opposed to immersion in the technology? It's part of this argument that cinephiles—flinching from the violent action and cutting of short-attention movies—have espoused “slow cinema.” This can be many things: Andy Warhol did slow cinema, and so did Antonioni (the out-the-window shot in
The Passenger
might make an audience restless today). Then there were Mizoguchi, Ozu, Renoir even, Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and Theo Angelopoulos, who died in early 2012 at the age of seventy-six.

Angelopoulos was a Greek and a radical who had lived through Nazi occupation, civil war as the Communists tried to overthrow the government, the era of the junta of colonels, and then the Balkan horrors to the north. He once said that the twentieth century began and ended with Sarajevo—and there were always more people than the Archduke deserving to be warned. He made films that reflected on that history, with reference to the Greek myths, and in what he called sequence cinema—long takes, elaborate camera movements, few close-ups, and an attempt to dwell in distance and landscape. He is not to everyone's taste but
The Travelling Players
(1975),
Voyage to Cythera
(1984),
Landscape in the Mist
(1988),
Ulysses' Gaze
(1995), and
Eternity and a Day
(1998), at least, are masterworks, scarcely capable of being felt properly except on a theatrical screen. For years, Angelopoulos would not let his films be shown on VHS, but DVD and its greater fidelity tempted him. Still,
The Travelling Players
is close to four hours and only just over a hundred shots.