ARTS FRANCINE STOCK CINEMA SCOPE
In its first century, film as a mass entertainment has been – and remains – a vital shaper of popular culture and, at its best, both contemplative and powerfully revealing
I
n 1924, the director of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations declared that
“only the Bible and the Koran have an indis- putably larger circulation than that of the latest film from Los Angeles”. Film as a mass entertainment was barely two decades old. Within a few years, even small towns might boast a temple of popular culture, an Odeon or Alhambra. Despite repeated rumours over the years of its demise – radio would do for it, then television – film exercises as powerful a hold as ever. The worldwide release of Avatar in December 2009 took the film immediately to the top ranking in more than 100 countries. It has to date taken a record amount at the box office, more than $2.7 billion. The early screen experience was very much a communal one. In her 1917 novel Summer Edith Wharton describes an enthusiastic audi- ence in a picture house “all kindled with the same contagious excitement”. But it may be more than spectacle that animates them. The director Terence Davies, raised a Catholic, depicted the rapt audiences of the 1940s in his masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) a film that is part memoir, part med- itation. The camera, apparently suspended just in front of the screen at the end of the projector’s beam, gazes down lovingly at the transported souls below. A report by the British Film Institute released last week indicates that 30 per cent of participants in a survey of just over 2,000 representative members of the public, not necessarily committed film fans, watched a film at least once a month in the cinema. That was just over double the number who claimed to attend church over the same period. When asked to rank film alongside literature, land- scape, sport, religion and so on – cinema emerged as the most entertaining, escapist, moving and exciting. Religion only approached cinema’s impact in terms of provoking thought – even then it was well below litera-ture, news- papers and art galleries and museums. The point of that comparison is not so much to stress the decline of religion as the com- munal purpose of film. In all kinds of ways, good and bad, cinema has educated genera- tions. Letters to papers in the 1920s from
24 | THE TABLET | 24 September 2011
young men testify to John Gilbert’s amorous technique with Greta Garbo as an early form of instruction video. Expectations of love and romance inevitably derive from the images of great screen lovers. There is a parallel form of cinema geography in which we have learnt about Arabia or Russia from David Lean or Paris from MGM musicals, which you might argue was a kind of cultural colonialism. On the other hand, there can be diplomacy by celluloid: the Japanese film Rashomonaltered international perception of the nation in 1951, when it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and went on to be lauded by American and British critics and public. Film has provided something of the con-
fessional on a national basis. The popularity of film noir in the 1940s and 1950s may well have more to do with the public airing of con- cerns about duplicity than about the likelihood of a mysterious woman walking into an inves- tigator/writer/insurance man’s office with a curious request for help and some shady past involving murder and money. Looking back, it’s not so hard to read postwar trauma and fears of fascism in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari or see the deep despair of Jean Renoir’s study of adultery and murder on the Paris-Le Havre line, La Bête Humaine. The pseudo-religious fervour whipped up by the American star-system came with rituals and a language of its own. Stylised Hollywood acting has over the years led us to think that emotions should be easily “read” – the faraway look, the righteous anger speech, the initial antagonism that yields to devotion – although these manifestations of feeling may not nat- urally occur at the rate they do on screen. Psychological complexity has, if anything, fled to the margins of independent cinema. Whether a character is good, bad or troubled with a chance of redemption is pretty much apparent in the first 10 minutes of the average mass-entertainment thriller these days. But there are films that hit us sideways. At an early screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a little boy was speedily ush- ered out of the auditorium for shouting “This is God!” repeatedly during the hallucinogenic Stargate sequence. Kubrick himself preferred to think of the film as religious in the sense of the wonder of science. “I will say that the God
‘In all kinds of ways, good and bad, cinema has educated people’: Boys watch a film outdoors in Jenin, on the West Bank. Photo: Reuters
concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional anthropomorphic image of God.” Director and writer Paul Schrader, whose screenplays have included Taxi Driver, famously identified a transcendent style in film, with particular reference to three directors from Japan, France and Denmark respectively, Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer. In different ways they each had an austere style – the opposite of Kubrick’s mindblowing effects – that trig- gered a kind of revelation. Put broadly, the audience is made to focus on small apparently humble details and from that concentration emerges illumination. The old system of pro- jection – the black between the 24 frames per second – aided that meditation. Last week Time Out New York’s film critic
David Fear declared that Steve McQueen’s new film Shame was “the closest I’ve had to a religious experience in years”, which given its subject matter (a man in the grip of sexual addiction) is particularly arresting. Cinema though has the power to move on many levels; at its best it is a formal contemplation that brings about startling revelations, sometimes days or weeks later.
But is it a medium for religion? Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ, that visceral evo- cation of the suffering of the Crucifixion took US$600 million worldwide. It attracted huge audiences – for context, slightly more than Mamma Mia! but slightly fewer than the fifth instalment of car-chase series Fast & Furious. And who knows what revelations those two films produced?
Francine Stock’s In Glorious Technicolor: a century of film and how it has shaped us is published by Chatto & Windus on 6 October.
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