How to Watch a Movie (7 page)

What do we really know about Iran and North Korea, except that they are “enemies”? This line of thought may seem remote from watching movies, but it's not, because the world is now screened for us in so many ways. And yet the questing dynamic of
Rear Window
(“I don't think I like what I'm seeing”) assists the very loaded partiality of how we are seeing. Judicious observation means watching with as little bias as possible. It deserves a far more extensive, objective news system than we have—and that limitation owes more to economy and ideology than to technology. Such a service might recall that Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden were our allies before they were our enemies. Perhaps that posture made them cunning opportunists, but much of the world judges us now in exactly those terms.

To put the matter at what may be the most testing level of all, what did the inspection process of films of the 1950s see in women? And how did it fit with the new ideas of feminism? Well, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and many others may have been adored creatures in
the fifties and into the sixties, but they were also instruments in male fantasies. Grace Kelly's character in
Rear Window
—Lisa Carol Fremont—has many cinematic assets: she is attractive, smart, brave, funny, and obedient. At the end of the movie, she is still “with” the Jimmy Stewart photographer, waiting for him to recover and return to his career of photography. They don't seem to be married.

It was part of this business in the 1950s, and still to this day, that men will pay to look at pretty women in attractive sexual situations, and in stories where being a woman seldom threatens the way men think of the world and their authority. I'm not just talking about degrees of physical nakedness and allure—though much more is still expected of actresses than actors in that respect. More significantly, it's a matter of whether women's thinking penetrates the nature of our stories. Yes, there are changes to be welcomed: films like John Cassavetes's
A Woman Under the Influence
, where the director's wife (Gena Rowlands) played a woman who was breaking down and making life “impossible” for her husband, or
Klute
, where Jane Fonda's “sexy” hooker could make a male viewer sheepish over the way that role is generally depicted. We have outstanding women directors now, but not too many—the achievement of Jane Campion (
The Piano, Top of the Lake
), Kathryn Bigelow (
The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty
), Claire Denis (
Beau Travail, White Material
), and Lynne Ramsay (
Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar
) is one of talent and persistence, but I may already be into names you don't know. The astonishing eminence and talent of Leni Riefenstahl in Germany in the 1930s should not be excluded because of her ideology (
Triumph of the Will, Olympia
). And women are still not welcomed as cinematographers, which speaks to a nearly occult fear of women doing
the crucial, secret “looking.” (Women make up 2 percent of American cinematographers.)

For every step taken toward gender liberation, the Internet has unleashed a craze for wardrobe malfunctions, boobs and butts “we” love, and archaic but intrusive pinup galleries from a dark, depressing age. Our commercials still employ iconography, attitudes, and models that sustain a mythology of sexual attractiveness or beauty being vital to our lifeblood of purchase.

We have never been happy with this state of affairs, and by the 1960s some movies had grasped that as a subject. In Michelangelo Antonioni's
Blow-Up
(1966), Thomas (David Hemmings) is a fashionable London photographer and a chronically alienated young man. He is a lord of what he surveys, a director of scenes. He can command a troupe of beautiful, numb female models to pose at his will, and he prompts one of these women into having sex, not quite with him, but with his camera. Equally, he can turn shabby and homeless and arrive in the evening at a doss house, his expensive camera wrapped in old newspaper, so that he can photograph tramps and derelicts. It is a part of his insolence that he has beauty and wretchedness on the same roll, and he is paid by Sunday magazines that will run the two types of photograph side-by-side, as confessional boasts of our contradictory culture.

But Thomas is untouched: he is not sexually aroused by the models; he has no compassion for the tramps. He may be aspiring to Christopher Isherwood's famous declaration “I am a camera,” because that mechanical neutrality might offer a way of passing through life without being hurt, involved, or responsible.

One day, Thomas finds himself in a park in southeast London. Despite the pleasant summer day, the place seems nearly
empty, except for a man and a woman in the distance who might be lovers. It's hard to tell. Thomas is intrigued, and from a safe distance, with his telephoto lens, he photographs the couple. He isolates them from the park and the surround of reality and wonders if they have a story. Though Antonioni treats the park with cool detachment, we feel the space and the greenery, we see the trees toss in the wind, and we hear the tiny sounds of nature. But Thomas picks his couple as subjects or characters. He has decided they are “photogenic” without really thinking why.

The woman in the couple (Vanessa Redgrave) sees what Thomas is doing and hurries toward him in anger and distress. She demands that he give her the roll of film, but Thomas's coldness grows with her alarm and the claim that he has invaded her privacy. He teases her into a later meeting where she offers him her body in exchange for the film. But sex means less to Thomas than film. He tricks her, sends her away, and prepares to develop the precious roll.

What follows is one of the most beautiful and intense sequences in film. It describes inanimate objects and a technical process, but it is as beguiling as watching Garbo being alone or Bogart strolling across a room. The identification, the being there, amounts to a rapture. Working in the darkroom, Thomas brings his negatives to life and begins to see not just a series of frames in time but the possibility of a story. A sensation! He makes enlargements of detail. He pins the pictures on the wall, in order, like a storyboard. And he comes to believe that the man who was with Redgrave may have been murdered. In the park, Thomas didn't notice this happen, but his camera may have taken it in and kept the information for his discovery.

You should pursue
Blow-Up
to see what happens next, but I can tell you the resolution is uncertain, as if it carries some suggestion that you can hardly trust photography, let alone what you think you see. There are so many fallacious clichés about film and photography—“A picture is worth a thousand words” and “Cinema is truth twenty-four times per second”—in that film seems to have a blunt, down-to-earth pact with reality that no verbal description can possess or surpass.

But is that so, or reliable? The claim that a picture is worth a thousand words does match the sensation we have all felt on seeing something startling beyond belief—the approach of a tsunami, Bob Beamon long-jumping 29 feet 2½ inches in Mexico City on October 18, 1968, an accelerated movie of clouds rushing across the sky to escape night, or pictures from a concentration camp. In 1943, a Polish Resistance fighter, Witold Pilecki, deliberately had himself imprisoned in Auschwitz to establish the facts about the camp. He made a hundred-page report, with photographs. He then escaped from the camp and carried the report to the Allies, but they deemed that it was exaggerated or unreliable. Then in 1945, the film director George Stevens shot 16 mm footage at the liberation of Dachau and it was later made into a documetary shown in the course of the Nuremberg Trials.

Watching and seeing are both physical (optical) and emotional (irrational). In its first sixty or so years, movie had made us all more conscious of looking: it had invested appearance with a new excitement, glamour, and erotic force. That energy is still there, but is it wearing off? This is the dilemma of the Internet—of so much to see that attention wavers or loses faith in itself. There has been a similarly jaded response to filmed stories. How often a picture begins and in just a few moments
we are saying, Oh yes, I know this one … Instead of rapt spectators of the lifelike, we have become like screenwriters or editors.

A novelty in
Blow-Up
is that a moment comes when it assesses its own suspense plot and blows it away, like the petals on a dry flower. Thomas may think of himself as a brave young detective, like L. B. Jeffries in
Rear Window
. But Antonioni is not naive enough to credit that myth. He lets us see, yes, the body was there on screen, but then it vanishes. It may be an infernal conspiracy, in which case the wrongdoers go free (like Gavin Elster, the villain in Hitchcock's
Vertigo
). Or perhaps it was all a dream, or even a mocking satire on “reality,” so that Thomas will end up playing tennis with a mime, chasing a nonexistent ball (even if the sound track starts to give us the happy “thock” of racket on ball).
Blow-Up
feints to be a mystery and concludes as a comedy in which the greatest fun comes from our childish urge to get everything sorted out.

Here is a vital point in watching a movie, or watching anything. It is heavenly to see your baby sleeping. We do it for hours on end, and then we pause and sleep because there will be tomorrow and tomorrow and maybe fifty years of it in which loving attention will hardly notice the child growing older. Or you can look at your baby and be so eager that you want to know its whole life story now—you want happiness settled and doubt expunged. I am going to suggest that as a model for watching movies and a way of fighting through their cunning diversions of story and plot while insisting on the continuity of looking. For decades, movies believed they should settle everything: some characters were dead, some were alive; these were happy, those were not. So we could go home with a tidy experience.

But this has gone on long enough now for us to become more intelligent, or to sink into the uncertainty that is inherent in watching and filming. The best mysteries are unsettled, even if that appeals to fewer people than those delighted by Sherlock Holmes's triumphant answers. Just before
Blow-Up
, in Italy, Antonioni had made an extraordinary film,
L'Eclisse
. It is about two lovers—played by Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. They are no better suited as a couple than are those two actors (though there is some chemistry). But we wonder what will become of their relationship—so many films hang on that issue. They make an arrangement to meet, and the film ends at the intersection they had agreed on. It is late afternoon, and life goes by in a multitude of ways. But the lovers do not appear. What does this mean?

So many fine, entertaining films say,
That's
what it means!—I can think of
Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Red River, The Big Heat, The Usual Suspects
(in its sneaky way),
The King's Speech
… so many of them—and I don't seek to diminish those works or their confident conclusions. But an evolving cinema and the loss of its automatic audience has led us more and more toward,
What
does this mean?, and that question requires us to carry on watching. Any film has to end, for conventional, businesslike reasons, but surely its mystery lives on in our heads. Isn't it remarkable that conclusions to
The Sopranos, The Wire
, and
True Detective
manage to be so open-ended that we regret having no more?

Think of David Cronenberg's
A History of Violence
(2005). The very title warns us of far-reaching concerns; forty years ago such a story might have been called
Return of the Past
, or
Desperate
. The hero, Tom (Viggo Mortensen), would have been driven from his quiet provincial life and his settled family
back to the big bad city and the life of crime that made him.
Out of the Past
(1947) has a similar structure. So Tom kills his crime boss brother, Richie (William Hurt). Whereupon, as the film ends, you can wonder if he returns to the hinterland—or does he take power in the crime family he has sought to deny? That question hangs open—it's usually the films we've had enough of already that get sequels, never things as pregnant as
The History of Violence
.

I'll end this discussion with an example of close attention, while suggesting that the most daring novelty in
Citizen Kane
was not its deep-focus photography, overlapping sound, or flashback structure (though those things are truly difficult). The greater challenge was in saying, Don't expect one viewing to settle this—or even several. For the mystery here is the most precious thing. Unknowability is close to where this film is leading. For 1941, that was not just daring or innovative; it was close to a denial of the entertainment medium.

So at the start of
Kane
, after the nocturnal shots of Xanadu, where Kane lives—the menageries at night, the artworks, and the “No Trespassing” sign—the movie cuts to a large close-up of lips, with a mustache above them. The mouth says, “Rosebud”; the whisper is grandiose and trembling with echoes. We see a glass ball in a man's hand containing a small house and the effect of snow. This ball slips to the floor and shatters. Through a shard of that glass we see the warped door to a room open and a nurse, a woman in white, comes in.

Welles makes our looking, or our attention, as tricky as possible. He was always inclined to conceal secrets. We never see the room in what is called a master shot, sufficient to convey basic information. Yet the implication is that the man saying “Rosebud,” the great mouth, and the glass ball are part of the
same space and action. The shots are short and mannered; the black-and-white filming is very dramatic. The sight of the nurse is distorted by the broken glass. Amid this heightened looking, some people do not quite see or realize the way “Rosebud” is uttered
before
the nurse enters the room.