The Big Screen (88 page)

You also discover what a sweet, artificial thing story is. That is not a mocking of narrative, simply a revelation that story is just a series of tricks or steps, a mechanism, not too hard to guess in advance, and as systematic and serviceable as, say, a staircase—and as logical and mathematical. A story is something made and made up; it is a disguise of life, artfully and kindly done, but not life. It is lifelike. And stories are so artful, so manufactured, that they might as easily run backward or forward—Christopher Nolan did that with
Memento
(2000), but most flashbacks begin to play the same game. In short, you get the idea and the chance to see that movie is not just the illusion of reality (the fallacy of being there on the screen with its figures) but an artefact, a design, a game, a trick, an illuminated screen.

Thus the screen is as vital as the film, yet while every film is different and itself, the screen is always the same: patient, available, uncritical. It is timeless time on which the silly or suspenseful action of the clock's hands do their dance of movement and liveliness. So we laugh and cry, and hope for the ghosts to be happy. That is what we call “movie.” But the screen is truth, or knowledge, and the absence of those things. It is fate, eternity, and implacability. If you wish, it's god. And moviegoing, for decades, was people sitting in the dark, bathing in the spill of light from the screen and the possibility it afforded of a perfect or improved life. Whether it is Renée Falconetti as Joan of Arc or Judy Garland as Alice Maybery in
The Clock
, those figures are the ideals of happiness or spiritual fulfillment.

But if reverse motion is so beautiful and revelatory, doesn't that reopen your eyes to the same wonderment in forward motion? I know it's hard, because you are so used to forward motion, and it does so resemble life in cunning and artificial ways. But if you recall the age in which film was just still frames magicked into life you may appreciate that the artifice, the design and playfulness of reverse is there in forward, too. You are seeing a superb, insolent attempt to mimic, steal, and tease life. I realize that most films try hard to make you believe in the forward motion and the momentum of a story, a dream, or an experience. But none of them can escape the power of intervention in the story and its reality. That is why cutting is so important an assertion of unreality—even greater than that of music playing in the air of the desert in
Lawrence of Arabia
.

You are not watching life. You are watching a movie. And if, maybe, the movie feels better than life, then that is a vast, revolutionary possibility, and no one knows yet whether it is for good or ill, because the insinuation of dream does so much to alter or threaten our respect for life. Dissatisfaction and doubt grew in step with film's projection of happiness.

The last source of delight is the opportunity in that odd presentation of
The Clock
to see that the most profound subject in all movie is time and the way it passes, and resembles itself. “Once upon a time” we say—once upon a time there were these young women in Paris, Céline and Julie, and they used to visit a house where a film was always playing. The players never noticed them watching—it was the old voyeur advantage. And then, in time, Céline and Julie…well, I promised not to tell you what happens to them, because story does matter even if it's been happening now for nearly forty years.

In that showing of
The Clock
it was far easier to notice the abstraction of certain shots—close-up and long shot, fades and moving camera shots—because the process opened up the technology of narrative as well as the mechanics of projection. The views were no longer natural; they felt chosen; they radiated intention and their own framing capacity. Suddenly, you realized that
The Clock
, like time, was always in a circle, or a
ronde
. Everything has happened before, and will again—with tiny, vital differences that belong to us. And that is why we have to keep looking, to see our differences. And listening makes a curious, alternative existence, as real as speech and sound effects, yet as fantastic as music—lovely, impossible, lunatic, and phantom. It is like sex, and that's why there is so little need to try showing sex itself in movies. We like to watch because we love the idea of attraction, and think of it as “desire.”

But it can be dread, too.

Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman's
Persona

Janet Leigh in
Psycho
, another splash, half a second from twenty-four hours

Prologue: Let There Be Light

On Eadweard Muybridge

See E. M. Muybridge,
Complete Human and Animal Locomotion
(1979); see also Gordon Hendricks,
Eadweard Muybridge: Father of the Motion Picture
(1975), and Rebecca Solnit,
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
(2003).

Part I: The Shining Light and the Huddled Masses

A Cheap Form of Amusement

On Louis B. Mayer

See Bosley Crowther,
Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer
(1960); Charles Higham,
Merchant of Dreams: Louis B. Mayer
,
M.G.M. and the Secret Hollywood
(1993); Scott Eyman,
Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer
(2005).

On movie moguls

See Neal Gabler,
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
(1988).

On D. W. Griffith

See Richard Schickel,
D. W. Griffith
:
An American Life
(1983); Karl Brown,
Adventures with D. W. Griffith
(1973); Melvyn Stokes,
D. W. Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation:
A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time”
(2007); J. Hoberman, “First Movie in the White House,”
London Review of Books
, February 12, 2009.

On Charles Chaplin

See Charles Chaplin,
My Autobiography
(1964); Kenneth S. Lynn,
Charlie Chaplin and His Times
(1997).

On Buster Keaton

See Rudi Blesh,
Keaton
(1966); Tom Dardis,
Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down
(1979).

On Douglas Fairbanks

See Alistair Cooke,
Douglas Fairbanks
:
The Making of a Screen Character
(1940); Richard Schickel,
Douglas Fairbanks: The First Celebrity
(1976).

On Louise Brooks

See Barry Paris,
Louise Brooks
(1989); Louise Brooks,
Lulu in Hollywood
(1982); Kenneth Tynan, “Louise Brooks: The Girl in the Black Helmet,”
The New Yorker
, June 11, 1979.

The Era of Sunrise

On F. W. Murnau and
Sunrise

See Lotte Eisner,
Murnau
(1973); Lucy Fischer,
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
(1988).

On scandals

See David Yallop,
The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle
(1976); Robert Giroux,
A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of the Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor
(1990);
The Memoirs of Will Hays
(1955).

On the Academy

See Anthony Holden,
Behind the Oscar
(1993); “The Envelope Please,” in Richard Koszarski,
An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928
(1990).

On Murnau

The Cinema of Winter

On Fritz Lang

See Lotte Eisner,
Fritz Lang
(1976); Patrick McGilligan,
Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast
(1997);
Fritz Lang: His Life and Work—Photographs and Documents
, ed. Rolf Aurich, Wolfgang Jacobsen, and Cornelius Schnauber (2001).

M

In additm ion to the books referred to on Lang in the last chapter, see Stephen D. Youngkin,
The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre
(2005).

State Film—Film State

See Jay Leyda,
Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film
(1960);
Kuleshov on Film
, ed. Ron Levaco (1975);
The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939
, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (1994); Ronald Bergan,
Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict
(1999).

The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. Bolshevik in the West

See Eisenstein,
Immoral Memories
; Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman,
Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The Making and Unmaking of
Que Viva Mexico! (1970); Anthony Arthur,
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair
(2006).

On Leni Riefenstahl

See Rainer Rother,
Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius
(2002); Steven Bach,
Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
(2007).

On Melchior Lengyel and
Ninotchka

See Maurice Zolotow,
Billy Wilder in Hollywood
(1977); Ed Sikov,
On
S
unset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder
(1998); Scott Eyman,
Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise
(1993).

1930s Hollywood

See Thomas Schatz,
The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
(1988); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson,
The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960
(1985); Ethan Mordden,
The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies
(1988).

On Thalberg

See the books on Louis B. Mayer, and Mark A. Vieira,
Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince
(2009); Roland Flamini,
Thalberg: The Last Tycoon and the World of M-G-M
(1994); Gavin Lambert,
Norma Shearer: A Biography
(1990).

On King Vidor

See King Vidor,
A Tree Is a Tree: An Autobiography
(1953);
King Vidor on Film Making
(1972); Directors Guild of America (DGA) Oral History, interviewed by Nancy Dowd and David Shepard,
King Vidor
(1988); Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon,
King Vidor, American
(1988).