END OF THE AFFAIR - Quitting the movies, for now.

Writers use different voices for different tasks, and I have grown sick of my fifteen-year-old movie-reviewing voice. Time to move on. So this is my last column for a while and, though I may return to Commonweal's pages in the near future, it won't be as a film critic.

Packing up my critical equipment (prejudices in the big crate, snideness and sarcasm easily sliding into the thin manila envelope, smug knowingness just about fitting into the steamer trunk but only if I use two straps to keep it from bursting), I recall a few questions that have been asked by readers either in letters or (more intimidatingly) face to face. They deserve some answers before I depart. First, the inevitable:

* What are your favorite movies of all time?

I've seen roughly twenty-five films I consider masterpieces, but the three I keep returning to time and again are Citizen Kane, 8 1/2, and Persona. With me, the pleasure principle always rules. Every shot, every second in these three movies is packed with meaningful detail, vitality, mystery. As in a Mozart opera or a Chekhov story, there is no filler, no drop in the dramatic pressure, no marking time between highlights. In fact, there are no highlights at all, just gorgeous small moments alternating with gorgeous big ones. In an age of too many minimalists, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, and Ingmar Bergman were maximalists. Kane and 8 1/2 combine the layered realistic detail of the nineteenth-century novel with the elliptical edginess, irony, and speed of modernism. Persona is pure modernism and seems to me to bring the entire era of modernism to its climax.

These three have taught me what film can be at its highest flight. Ever since seeing them, I've kept asking myself why I should settle for anything less. That's not a reasonable question since not every movie even aspires to be a masterpiece, but once the critical incubus is implanted, it can never be silenced. Mephisto told Faust, "I am the Spirit Who Denies." Well, any critic might say, "I am the Spirit Who Demands."

I think this is why many people are irritated, even outraged by critics in the arts. What most people demand of a book, movie, painting, or musical piece is: "Relax me" or "Caress me." When a critic demands, "Enlarge me," he seems unreasonable. (However, a good critic knows enough not to expect a glossy work of entertainment to be a major work of art. Crackling entertainments such as In the Line of Fire know their own weight and destinations.)

* Did you see any films of the caliber of Kane, etc. during your tenure at Commonweal?

Yes, one: Gianni Amelio's Open Doors. It steadies my soul every time I watch it. Not far behind is Black Robe, an adventure story that roused the boy inside me, yet also a spiritual odyssey that disturbed, then expanded my adult consciousness. Its last unforgettable scene recalls the Auden lines from "As I Walked Out One Evening":

"O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbor

With your crooked heart."

Can a movie fuse James Fenimore Cooper with Georges Bernanos? This one does. (When I recommended Black Robe to a very Christian lady, I did so because I thought she would be thrilled by the movie's lucid depiction of a priest learning how to love even the "pagan savages" who had outraged his idea of civilization. But she found the movie unbearable because it contained agonies of body and spirit. For her, such pain was to be dealt with in church while movies were made in order to "make people feel good." Moments like these make a film critic feel like a second-class citizen.)

Then there is Groundhog Day, great entertainment and great minor art, the fun version of Sartre's No Exit, and a hilarious vindication of the dictum, "Character is fate."

Krzysztof Kieslowski's Colors trilogy was remarkable, but only Blue approached greatness. However, more about the redoubtable Kieslowski below.

* Did you underrate any film?

No, but I overrated Life Is Beautiful, The Matrix, and The Piano. I wanted to convey how awful they were, but my ingrained kindness betrayed me.

A more serious problem is that initial enthusiasm leads a critic (this critic, anyway) to ever so slightly overrate good movies in order to get people to see them. This is a big temptation nowadays when you know that everybody would rather stay home and watch videos. I was quite right to praise, say, The Remains of the Day or Nobody's Fool, admirable movies both, but if I made them sound as great as Open Doors or Black Robe., I shouldn't have.

* Can the art of film survive the marketplace?

Look, there is no movie marketplace. Not anymore. Of course, there is still a marketplace for "product," that is, video, cable TV programming, export overseas. But there doesn't exist any longer the tried and true agon of theatrical exhibition in which the studio trumpets the greatness of a feature film with boastful advertising and sensational previews, then launches it into big-city theaters, with small towns and the suburbs to be served shortly thereafter. Formerly, the studio may have favored its most commercially promising products over more serious movies with extra PR and the widest release patterns, but this was understandable business practice. Nowadays....

Well, let me put it this way. Movie mogul Harry Cohn used to bray, "This ain't an art, it's a business! No, it isn't even a business, it's a racket!" But nowadays movie production isn't so much a racket as a stalking horse for the real business of producing videos and cable TV rights. For instance, if you haven't seen Angela's Ashes yet, you'll be able to rent it in about six months. So why shouldn't I review it in six months for the great mass of people instead of the few millions who got to see Ashes in six or seven big cities? What good did the rave reviews of John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann (the two toughest movie critics in New York) do for the movie if the reviews, released in late December, are so far ahead of the movie's national circulation (in March)?

If Ashes had made zillions at the box office, the studio heads might have felt obligated to produce several more movies made from gritty memoirs about abysmal poverty, but they weren't about to let that happen. What Hollywood is ready to declare great art nowadays is something like American Beauty-slick, smarmy, sneering at social institutions. That's why American Beauty was released twice, each time accompanied by the best advertising and the shrewdest sort of circulation. And that's why Beauty will win many of the major Oscars this year (I'm writing three weeks before the Oscar ceremony and I predict it will win best picture, actress, original screenplay direction, and cinematography). The Oscars declare what Hollywood wants to produce in the future, not its real accomplishments of the past year. In Hollywood, despite the need to make gazillions of dollars, true capitalism doesn't rule but a desire to make financial success conform to ideological climate. That's why I think of the industry as operating within a kind of demand economy rather than within the consumer-driven marketplace where all other American businesses thrive or fail.

If a film critic really wants to be a connoisseur of his art form the way a literary critic is a connoisseur of his, he should be a video reviewer, not a reviewer of movie-house releases. Let me suit the action to the word by drawing your attention to the fact that Facets Video is now offering, on five video cassettes, all ten episodes of Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue, a greater achievement than his remarkable Colors trilogy. The entire series is the perfect refutation of the whole Hollywood ethos. What's the "high concept" here? The ten commandments. And what special effects are delivered? Merely the one special effect on the viewer that's caused by images that burn themselves into your brain, editing so skillful that it turns a series of shots into visual melody, writing and acting that create characters so real that they are as recognizable as the people who live next door to you or inside your own skin.

These are not moral fables but works of refined, elliptical realism in the tradition of Anton Chekhov's fiction and drama. There is no didacticism because, as Time's critic, Richard Corliss, put it, Kieslowski and his script collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz "were interested in examining the relevance of old laws in a Catholic country in a postmoral age." Right, but I would add that, on the basis of these films, Kieslowski seems to believe that those "old laws" hold up pretty well. But he also has a Graham Greene-like awareness of the inner contradictions of morality, as when the hero of the second commandment episode breaks that commandment in order to keep a woman from breaking the fifth commandment. In the August 15, 1997, issue of Commonweal, Joseph Cunneen examined The Decalogue in detail and, if nothing I've written here impels you to rent or buy this series, perhaps his article will. Here is what the art of film can be at its highest flight. Why do we always settle for so much less? (Details of purchase or rental can be had by calling Facets at 773-281-9075; or visiting www.facets.org.)

And now I must finish up my packing so that I will have time to practice my Austrian accent. Why Austrian? Because my editors want me to keep repeating a line made immortal when spoken by a robot with a curious Austrian accent. To wit:

"I'll be back."