Movies' Primitive, Haunting Power

The first film I remember seeing used to return to my consciousness only by way of dreams. As a young child, my nights were sometimes haunted by a recurring terror in which anxiety and fear would mix with flashes of imagery: dank corridors pulsating with undisclosed menace, firelight shimmering off of blackened walls, a sickly woman begging for aid. Attentive as I was back then, I had already learned that the stuff of dreams is often recycled bits of waking reality. Yet even my most pained reflections refused to capture the origin of these nightmares. As the passage of time weakened their hold on my imagination, they gradually receded into the forgotten past.

Imagine my shock when, through the haze of years, those phantasmal visions that plagued my sleep as a child returned to vivid life as I watched James Cameron's Aliens--apparently, I discovered, not for the first time. How many youthful nights were lost because my older sister once played this film on video when my parents were out? If anything, this silly experience has forever persuaded me of the power of images.

Years later, in high school, I was finally deemed old enough to watch certain films I had previously been denied. Looking back, though my parents knew all about protecting the youthful sensitivity of their children, I still find it odd that, by their lights, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo passed muster long before Psycho did. Without delving into the Hitchcockian perversity of the latter, it seems to me that the truths made explicit by James Stewart's detective are far more adult (and damning) than anything manifested in Anthony Perkins' homicidal cross-dresser. This is one way of stating that, even in film, kiss-kiss is every bit as serious as bang-bang.

It is stunning that even now the knowledge that certain things are make-believe does not fully immunize me against their effects. That is the force of (great) art. The hand of art can reach into our innermost souls in a way that other forms of discourse cannot. And, of course, it is this empirical realization that gives substance to the question of censorship--as all parents and legislators know. Our responsiveness to art's suasion fuses the initial connection between art, morality, and politics.

There is something undeniably primitive about my enjoyment of film, and identifying this aspect with voyeurism--as so many theorists would--just skims the surface of my psychological response. Pauline Kael has noted that all films depend upon an economy of tension and release. This, too, merely skims the surface. As with all objects of love and taste, film suffers from the impotence of description--its inability to capture the magic or mundaneness of felt experience. One problematic consequence of this primitive enjoyment is our potential resistance to "external" reasons. Herein lies one of the primary dilemmas of film criticism: communicating the perceived existence of value or merit without recourse to personal preference or feeling.

Whenever I have recommended a film in my reviews for the Spectator, it has been because I liked it and found it good. By taking note of the stylistic decisions that constitute the language of cinema, I have tried to substantiate my views as much as possible. But as the Nouvelle Vague directors famously concluded, the most effective means of criticizing a film is making a better one in turn. In lieu of this possibility, we critics must rest content with deepening our appreciation of cinema by analyzing specific films and, when the opportunity arises, steering our readers toward good movies (e.g. Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage) and away from bad ones (e.g. Tony Scott's Man on Fire).

Now that my time at Columbia College is ending and I must leave the sheltering towers of this academe for the brutal realities of Columbia GSAS, I would like to make a final set of recommendations. For weekly film criticism, one can hardly do better than read Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic, Andrew Sarris of the New York Observer, Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, and Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader.

Finally, here are a dozen masterpieces that I highly recommend: Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, George Lucas' American Graffiti, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee, Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, Carol Reed's The Third Man, G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not, Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, Billy Wilder's The Apartment, Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, and Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. If you haven't seen any of these, please do. A wonderful experience awaits.