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For a certain kind of youth, the accumulation of taste becomes the crucible of self, the battleground on which character is formed. [...]
i just like this
It is a truism that moviegoing can become a substitute for living. Not that I regret one hour spent watching movies, then or now, since the habit persists to this day, but I would not argue either if someone wanted to maintain that chronic moviegoing often promotes a passivity before life, a detached tendency to aestheticize reality, and, I suppose, a narcissistic absorption that makes it harder to contact others. [...]
All through the sixties, Godard was fascinated with the beautiful woman who betrays (Jean Seberg in Breathless), withdraws her love (Chantal Goya in Masculin-Feminin), runs away (Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou) or is faithless (Bardot in Contempt). What makes Contempt an advance over this somewhat misogynistic obsession with the femme fatale is that here, Godard seems perfectly aware how much at fault his male character is for the loss of the woman's love.
[...] Antonioni's appetite for photographing street scenes or landscapes or objects at rest (as in the end of Eclipse) reminds one in some respects of the great Japanese director Ozu. But the difference is more revealing. Ozu takes cutaway shots -- separate inserts of a beaded-curtained hallway where the family is temporarily absent, or a lantern hanging in front of a restaurant -- and makes them into self-enclosed still lifes, restoring the world to its peaceful, static mode of objecthood. Antonioni's tendency is to start with his characters and, in the same shot, pan away from them, so that the effect is of losing sight of them, or, more pointedly, rejecting them. Unable to take quite seriously the difficulties and sickly longings of his characters, the reality of their sufferings, his camera eye seems pulled as by a magnet across the road, where he is able to do what he likes best: look at the anonymous world.
Cronaca is in fact a tragedy of social class, of a kind familiar to European audiences. A woman from a family of modest income is lifted into the upper classes by her beauty, but the sterility of that life bores her, she has no outlet for her emotions, dwells in the past, and takes (or retakes) someone from her previous milieu, an unemployed car salesman, as her lover. He, however, feels the new difference in their stations acutely. His first remark at their reunion -- ironic, admiring -- when she asks him if he finds her changed, is: "Yes. You have, I don't know -- class!" She tries to equalize their social position by offering to share her money, insisting that love alone has value, and ultimately proposing murder, which will put them on the same ethical if not financial plane; but he continues to act as if he is loving above his station. And that social distance, more than even their guilt at having contemplated a crime, may finally be what prevents them from sharing a future.
Antonioni's interest in local mores and the material divisions of the social world was obviously still strong when he made this first feature. Later it would evaporate in the face of a jet-set rootlessness: the filmmaker would take up comfortable international residence in what Georg Lukacs called "the Hotel Abyss." [...]
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There was a solitary chapel scene, ending in one of those strange short dolly shots that Bresson was so fond of, a movement of almost clumsy longing toward the priest at the altar, as though the camera itself were taking communion. Suddenly I had the impression that the film had stopped, or, rather, that time had stopped. All forward motion was arrested, and I was staring into "eternity." Now, I am not the kind of person readily given to mystical experiences, but at that moment I had a sensation of delicious temporal freedom. What I "saw" was not a presence, exactly, but a prolongation, a dilation, as though I might step into the image and walk around it at my leisure.
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[...] a Bresson composition draws inward, implodes, abstractly denies truck with daily life, cuts off all exist. In many scenes of Diary, the priest, let into a parishioner's house, encounters almost immediately a painful interview in which his own values are attacked, ridiculed, tempted. There is no room for small talk; every conversation leads directly to the heart of the matter: sin, suicide, perversity, redemption, grace.
At first I used to resist my mind's wandering during such films, thinking I was wasting the price of admission. But just as in Buddhist meditation one is instructed not to brush aside the petty or silly thoughts that rise up, since those "distractions" are precisely the material of the meditation, so I began to allow my movie-watching mind to yield more freely to daily preoccupations, cares, memories that arose from some image association. Sometimes I might be lost to a personal mental thread for several minutes before returning with full attention to the events onscreen; but when I did come back, it was with a refreshed consciousness, a deeper level of feeling. What Diary of a Country Priest taught me was that certain kinds of movies -- those with austere aesthetic means; an unhurried, deliberate pace; tonal consistency; a penchant for long shots as opposed to close-ups; an attention to backgrounds and milieu; a mature acceptance of suffering as fate -- allowed me more room for meditation. And I began to seek out other examples.
<3 agreed
In various films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, there will be a scene early on where the main characters are fiddling around in the house and someone comes by, a neighbor or the postman (the traditional Japanese domestic architecture, with its sliding shoji, is particularly good at capturing this interpenetration of inside and outside); a kimono-clad figure moves sluggishly through the darkened interior to answer, some sort of polite conversation follows; and throughout this business, one is not unpleasantly aware of an odd aural hollowness, like the mechanical thud-thud of the camera that used to characterize all films just after sound came in; and it isn't clear what the point of the scene is, except maybe to establish the ground of dailiness; and at such junctures I often start to daydream, to fantasize about a movie without any plot, just these shuttlings and patient, quiet moments that I like so much. Ah, yes, the lure of pure quotidian plotlessness for a writer like myself, who has trouble making up plots. But then I always remember that what gives these scenes their poignant edge is our knowledge that some plot is about to take hold, so that their very lack of tension engenders suspense: when will all this daily flux coalesce into a single dramatic conflict? Without the catastrophe to come, we probably would not experience so refreshingly these narrative backwaters; just as without the established, calm, spiritual ground of dailiness, we would not feel so keenly the ensuing betrayals, suicide pacts and sublimely orchestrated disenchantments.
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