Movie musings, 1990.

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.

Yet even this fiasco had something to offer that only cinema can: closeups of Beatrice Dalle's fascinating face, angelic down to the upper lip, bestial thereafter. Not worth two-and-a-quarter hours, perhaps, but still.... Otherwise, the film was so bad that even an audience of film-festival desperadoes was trickling out of it from beginning to end. Now, it's easy enough to walk out on something early on, but to do so after you have two hours of your life invested in it, you must have undergone extraordinary torture. The people who chose this and the 112minute Night Sun for the Festival must have a very highly developed taste for excruciating boredom.

When you see such movies, you despair for the future of film, to say nothing of its present. And as you look at the audiences at the Festival's special screenings-ostensibly scholars, critics, distributors, and such, but actually also many rather more peripheral types-you see a lot of characters more suited to rock concerts, disreputable discotheques, late-night subway platforms, and cockfights. Was the cinema intended for the likes of them? Or were they once wholesome human beings, gradually eroded, corroded, used up by movie going.? Certainly the questions they ask during press conferences attest to an advanced state of cerebral atrophy.

Nevertheless, I refuse to believe that this is the final and irreversible phase of cinema: infantilism and dotage joining hands across an abyss of stupefaction. There were in this very same festival (and I didn't see everything) three good films and two interesting ones. So all is not lost. But it must become possible to attend movies without a sense of deja vu, tired blood, the terminal exhaustion of an art form. Perhaps something truly new could come from the newly liberated countries behind the Iron Curtain-ex oriente lux.

And perhaps we are due for a new era in film criticism, beyond the raised or lowered thumbs of two television caricatures of film critics, beyond the perfunctory and insipid stuff we read in most newspapers and such magazines as deign to bother with movie reviews. If we could get film criticism on a par with the best in book reviewing in our reputable journals, we could perhaps experience something analogous to what happened in France after World War II, when a new wave in film criticism spawned a cinematic New Wave. To be sure, this was the rare case where the film critics themselves become the filmmakers.

There is one quality that more than any other could help revitalize the cinema: believableness. Characters in films must re-establish contact with social, economic, and political realities even where film style is non- or antirealistic. We should not have to ask questions such as: How come she has that much free time? Where does he get his money from? Why would they have been so purblind as not to see that coming.? And so on.

It may sound like rather simplistic advice, but, if heeded, it could make for major improvements. And truly persuasive critics could-maybeteach their readers to demand that much. The problem with film critics, however, is that most of them aren't really critics, merely movie buffs who managed to preserve their childhood enthusiasms intact. They like movie movies, as they call them, much more than art films, as they call genres they don't care for. Can you imagine a literary critic preferring book books? Or detective stories to literature? On the other hand, can you imagine a book critic obliged to review most of what lands on his desk, the way movie reviewers are expected-indeed want to-see everything? Granted, a movie takes much less time and effort, but is that an excuse for critical omnivorousness, particularly if it results in your reading in the papers that such-and such a film must be seen, only to have you feel, as you come out of it, the victim of highway robbery?

And now visualize, please, a bunch of grown men and women whose job it is to see movies as bad as that and worse, week in, week out. Or, more likely, day in, day out. If they weren't cretins when they started out, surely they must be feeble-minded by now.

Film criticism should be protected from our so-called critics. Movies should ideally be reviewed by persons well versed in all the arts, who, preferably, are also professional writers of something: plays, essays, poetry, fiction. True, some of the silliest film criticism I have read was signed Alberto Moravia. But then take someone, as early as 1928, writing sensibly about his enjoyment of "a touching screen love story, cast with actors who must be expressive, attractive, and agreeable, and are allowed to be vain, but never unnatural." That someone was Thomas Mann.

The trouble with an inexpensively available art form is that it is all but impervious to criticism. Asked to shell out fifty bucks or more for a play or opera, folks will consult a review or two first; but when something can be had cheap at a movie theater, or even more so at a video store, why bother? Now, if seeing films could only cost more money! But even if film going never becomes expensive, that is still no justification for cheap reviews.