Friday, September 10, 2010 — Homo Cinematis

I’ve col­lect­ed films for a long time. Long before it was pos­si­ble to keep them as com­put­er files, I was accu­mu­lat­ing video­tapes by the gross. I love films of all kinds, good and bad, and will watch all sorts of things that puz­zle my friends. Why, for instance, would any­one in 2010 want to watch Spooks Run Wild, star­ring the East End Kids, or a 1959 Swedish film about extrater­res­tri­als invad­ing Lap­p­land? Well, quite apart from the direct, child­ish plea­sure this sort of thing gives me, I can pre­tend I have more seri­ous, and pre­sum­ably laud­able reasons.

There’s an unfor­tu­nate habit among his­to­ri­ans to talk about such and such a point in time as mark­ing the begin­ning of “moder­ni­ty” ― a point fixed, accord­ing to fash­ion, any­where from the proof sheets of the Epic of Gil­gamesh to the death of Kurt Cobain ― but there are two points in time where it can be con­vinc­ing­ly argued that things did change for us quite dras­ti­cal­ly. After a mere thir­ty years of exper­i­ment, the tech­nol­o­gy of pho­tog­ra­phy became wide­ly avail­able by the ear­ly 1850s. The sober­ing real­i­ty of the Amer­i­can Civ­il War leaps out at us from the pho­tographs of Math­ew Brady, and it was­n’t any­thing like war was depict­ed by the painter Jacques Louis David.

Anoth­er dra­mat­ic change in how we expe­ri­ence the world arrived in the last decade of the 19th cen­tu­ry, when pho­tographs began to move. The ear­ly days of movies fas­ci­nate me. At first, peo­ple were con­tent mere­ly to look at any­thing that would move in front of a cam­era. Peo­ple hap­pi­ly flocked to the cin­e­mas to see a chick­en being plucked, a dog chas­ing a cat, or a man put on and take off his hat. But very, very quick­ly, the movies began to explore what Daniel Ari­jon has called “the gram­mar of the film lan­guage.” Film rapid­ly became much more than a tech­ni­cal gim­mick for record­ing the appear­ance of the world. It cre­at­ed fan­tasies, recre­at­ed the past, retold myths, sat­i­rized, eroti­cized, trau­ma­tized, and induced laugh­ter. There was noth­ing obvi­ous about this gram­mar — which, like lan­guage, con­veys incred­i­bly com­plex infor­ma­tion by means of a struc­tured code imposed on a sequen­tial phe­nom­e­non. In fact, much of it had to be mutu­al­ly, if uncon­scious­ly, agreed upon by the film-mak­er and the audi­ence. The most dif­fi­cult steps in its ear­li­est devel­op­ment, for exam­ple, were to dis­cov­er that you could tell a sto­ry by the jux­ta­po­si­tion of dif­fer­ent images, and that you could omit things from the visu­al nar­ra­tive. This process of agreed-upon omis­sion con­tin­ued as film devel­oped, which is one of the rea­sons that peo­ple have dif­fi­cul­ty watch­ing movies that were made long ago. Look at any nor­mal movie made, say, in the 1930s. A char­ac­ter will announce that he is going to vis­it some­one. There will be a shot show­ing him dial­ing a tele­phone, then request­ing a taxi, then of him get­ting into the taxi, then of the taxi going down a street, then of it arriv­ing at his des­ti­na­tion, then of the char­ac­ter ring­ing a door bell, then of his being greet­ed. This will all seem point­less and inter­minably slow to a view­er today. But, if a direc­tor in 1934 had cut the film like it would be today, the audi­ence would have been con­fused by what would seem to them an abrupt and incom­pre­hen­si­ble change of scene. Most peo­ple accus­tomed to today’s film lan­guage will com­plain that almost any film made before 1980 is “too slow.” Tech­niques of rapid-cut­ting, inter­po­lat­ed images, and non-sequen­tial nar­ra­tive that are rou­tine­ly used in any trashy action flic today were once con­fined to exper­i­men­tal “art” films dis­cussed in the Cahiers du ciné­ma.

There is noth­ing auto­mat­ic or “nat­ur­al” about any of this. Real­i­ty does not hap­pen in cross-cuts, pan shots, and jump-cut edit­ing. Curi­ous­ly, how­ev­er, the tech­niques of film-mak­ing resem­ble the way we dream. When I’m wok­en dur­ing REM state with suf­fi­cient abrupt­ness to remem­ber a part of a dream, I’m struck by it’s cin­e­mat­ic qual­i­ty. I’ve asked many oth­er peo­ple about their dreams, and many of them have remarked, when I brought up the issue, that it did seem to them that their dreams are struc­tured like movies, with cam­era angles, com­po­si­tion, close-ups and long views, and a time struc­ture that com­press­es and omits things in much the same way that movies do. Now, why would this be? I can think of two inter­est­ing, and very dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties. It’s pos­si­ble that, before they expe­ri­enced movies on a reg­u­lar basis, peo­ple did­n’t dream that way. Per­haps dreams dreamed in 1822 or 1196 were noth­ing at all like dreams are today, and they have acquired their cur­rent pat­tern from the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing films and tele­vi­sion. Alter­na­tive­ly, it’s pos­si­ble that films are sat­is­fy­ing to peo­ple because they repli­cate the struc­ture of con­scious­ness in some way, a struc­ture that is also present in dreams. Most films are, more or less, dreams of some kind. They pro­vide us with far more “alter­na­tive real­i­ty” than it would seem to be nec­es­sary mere­ly to train us for the vicis­si­tudes of life, or to allay boredom.

One of the rea­sons I watch all sorts of films is because I’m curi­ous about what kind of things peo­ple in dif­fer­ent times and places chose to day­dream about. Anoth­er is that films ― espe­cial­ly rou­tine and con­ven­tion­al films that are not meant to be “artis­tic” ― pre­serve vast amounts of infor­ma­tion about the world that might oth­er­wise be lost, and will remind us that the his­to­ry we read in book form tends to be flat and over-abstract­ed. Look­ing at ordi­nary films from around 1930 can be extreme­ly enlight­en­ing. For exam­ple, last night, I saw a 1930 Ger­man film called Die Drei von der Tankstelle. It was a musi­cal com­e­dy in which three “pals” open a gas sta­tion and fall in love with the same girl. Noth­ing could seem far­ther removed from the “Ger­many in 1930” that is wedged into my mind from read­ing books. Nor could any book give me the insights that the silent film Berlin: Die Sin­fonie der Grosstadt, made only two years ear­li­er, could. This film lyri­cal­ly showed dai­ly life in Berlin from dawn to night, fol­low­ing peo­ple at home, on the streets, at work, at play. It also made it clear to me why Hitler and the Nazis so intense­ly hat­ed that city, with it’s insou­ciant, cos­mopoli­tan life.

The Black Camel (1930) is the first Char­lie Chan movie. One is struck by the fact that the Chi­nese char­ac­ters in the movie are treat­ed with respect and dig­ni­ty, but the Japan­ese char­ac­ters are por­trayed as ludi­crous slap­stick idiots. Local eth­nic atti­tudes in Cal­i­for­nia have often found their way into Hol­ly­wood films. A gen­er­a­tion before, the Chi­nese had been intense­ly per­se­cut­ed in Cal­i­for­nia, but had, through shear dogged per­sis­tence, worked their way to respectabil­i­ty by 1930. The Japan­ese, how­ev­er, had replaced them as the butt of con­tempt and deri­sion. Twelve years lat­er, they would find them­selves in “relo­ca­tion camps,” though most of them had been out­cast eta in Japan and had devot­ed them­selves to their new coun­try. The same thing hap­pened to the Japan­ese in West­ern Cana­da. Warn­er Oland, the actor who cre­at­ed the Char­lie Chan role, was Swedish by birth! A con­sci­en­tious crafts­man, and a schol­ar who had pre­vi­ous­ly trans­lat­ed the works of Strind­berg into Eng­lish, Oland took the role very seri­ous­ly. He immersed him­self in Chi­nese cul­ture, and spoke Man­darin. A mod­ern view­er, exposed to post-mod­ern rhetoric about appro­pri­a­tion and authen­tic­i­ty, would be sur­prised to learn that Oland was as pop­u­lar in Chi­na as he was in Amer­i­ca, if not more so. The film also con­tains the charm­ing sur­prise of Béla Lugosi in a sup­port­ing role, just before his sud­den fame as Dracula.

Look­ing for things like this makes movie-watch­ing some­thing like archae­ol­o­gy, to me. Just as most peo­ple are sur­prised that archae­ol­o­gists can spend hours of back-break­ing labour to unearth a few frag­ments of pot­tery or sift through tons of soil to count the fish bones in it, they are sur­prised that my film col­lec­tion con­tains Crit­ters 2: The Main Course, Tante Pose (a 1940 Nor­we­gian com­e­dy), Hua jai tor ra nong (“The Adven­tures of Iron Pussy” in Thai), and Bom­ba the Jun­gle Boy. But frankly, they often mean more to me than the film clas­sics I’m sup­posed to be watching.

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