Film History, Bro

This is just some warm-up rambling to get the writerly neurons firing for my day's real work: feel free to disregard. On the topic of film history and film criticism ... here's one way to do it:

"But the idea of what a movie is didn’t really happen until about 1975.  Jaws is sort of the first movie.  And not just because it’s the first blockbuster. (We could go on and on about whether that ruined everything or whatever, but who cares.)  Jaws is sort of the first movie because it’s one of the first times a movie feels like a movie, like where things are happening and you care about them and it’s executed in an interesting and effective way.  The only two examples of this before 1975 are 12 Angry Men and Inherit the Wind, with Citizen Kane as an honorable mention.  Everything else before ‘75 pretty much sucks."

The author of those lines seems unwilling really to entertain what, to me, appears an obvious notion: this is an argument about nostalgia, his nostalgia, and his own personal configuration of what "a real movie" is. People like this invariably have very narrow ideas about what film/movies/cinema should be, and thank the gods the world is a more complex and pluralist place than their own imaginations.

I've seen plenty of movies "where things are happening and you care about them and it’s executed in an interesting and effective way" from before 1975. No need to dwell on this, however, as people who think like the author are not likely to have their minds changed by me; nor will I learn a single thing from them.

But allow me to make a mischievous connection, which is that a similar kind of narrowminded nostalgia sometimes haunts a classical cinephilia wherein the constitution of an interesting mise-en-scene becomes the sine qua non of good cinema. It is what makes it possible to smirk and say that The Tree of Life is a mess (or perhaps that Redacted isn't even worth considering because it's self-evidently unpolished), but that the late films of someone like Herbert Ross evince a beautiful and underrated classical sensibility. There is a satisfying provocation one can get with this attitude; I know well the little thrill you get when you shock an "art film" person by saying, meaning, and knowing that you are willing to back-up an opinion that some piece of Hollywood genre termite art is vastly superior to a disjointedly modernist masterpiece. "You think those obvious, sub-Godardian editing strategies can hold a candle to the subtle beauties of Irving Lerner's composition in space? Well you've got another thing coming ..."

Yet cinema also should surprise us in some ways, and not always in ways that we expect. That sounds redundant, but unfortunately it isn't - because some people are quite insistent about the terms on which they're willing to let themselves be surprised.

Ultimately, however, I would get very lonely if I were resigned to watching forever only a string of blockbuster movie-movies, or even if all I ever had to watch was films made in classical Hollywood continuity style. (The latter would last me much longer, of course.) So "the movies" (like Greg DeLiso wants them to be) or the worlds of contained mise-en-scene would sooner or later bore me into submission. I need experiences like Kentucker Audley's or Giuseppe Andrew's, like the Raoul Walsh pre-Codes, like the less-loved work of Zulawski, like the material of John or James Whitney, like Travis Wilkerson's An Injury to One, like Carmelo Bene's, like Jarman's, like Nina Menkes', like late Godard, like Kluge, like Andy Sidaris' goofily violent and sexist T&A-fests, like the Cinema of Transgression (even though I truthfully don't like it), like Chytilova's, like Zazie dans le metro (and so much Malle) but also A Thousand Clowns (a film I would have dismissed haughtily, aged 20), things that cause me to reconsider things and in the process make something new, deep, or simple ... I need all these things and more still that I don't even know because I want the cinema to match, reflect, expand, and condense the whole wide world.