December 16, 2002
Gemini Papers:Bill discovers that movies move/So? says William, who then fesses up
by Bill Sylvester/William Sylvester
I. Bill Sylvester:
A young artist from Toronto, Sandor Eisenstat looks upon painting as no longer in the main stream of art, although he did enjoy the Albright-Knox's Modigliani show (presumably savoring the fragrance of the somewhat ancien régime). Eisenstat's creations are computer-driven constructs, an art that creates the aesthetics of motion.
Which means...?
He suggested that I think of his work by imagining a bus where the windshield wipers were out of synch. That reminded me of a kind of art that has been around for a long time, an example of which came to mind, one I saw some forty years ago in Columbus Indiana.
(At this point someone usually exclaims: "Indiana!" and then, "You mean, Columbus, OHIO.")
No.
Columbus believe-it-or-not INDIANA, where the Commons-Courthouse is the starting point for the City architectural tour of some 40 churches. Inside, the Commons was a Jean Tinguely artifact, "Chaos I," which is at least one story high.
There were, and I hope still are, rows of seats for people to sit down and watch the Tinguely in motion, or, if they wanted to, they could look over to the left and watch 36 TV's arranged into a square 6 by 6. And there was a sand pile for little children.
There are a lot of entries for Tinguely on the Internet, but I haven't found a picture of this particular one, partly because the entries for Columbus, Indiana, tend to list the many churches, and other art treasures there. I do remember the essential characteristics, of wheels that moved, of at least one large steel ball, the size of a basketball that was lifted up so that it would then run down in an irregular pattern through tube shaped metal net works. The entire work was one of a difference of motion.
Or if one goes to the Garden Restaurant at the Albright-Knox, you may be able to see one of the "statues" that consists of wands moving at different speeds.
But the fascination of observing two different motions underlies, I believe, almost all movies.
Even if one sets up a movie camera, turns it on, and walks away, the chances are that a lot of different motions will be recorded.
But will it be interesting?
Possibilities:
First, when the motion is blatantly obvious, as in a Cecil B. de Mille film: the galloping horses, the motions of the legs, the chariots, the wheels. That is what some people think of as typically American.
"Oh I love American movies," an English woman exclaimed to us. (Her husband did not care for visitors very much. He had fought from Dunkerque through the African campaign, and after expressing his detestation of Montgomery and his acknowledging Rommel's skill as a strategist, preferred silence.) I asked the woman what she liked in particular about American movies.
"Oh," she said: "The information."
Information? American movies?
The explanation she gave surprised me. She put her two fists together and rotated them together as if on horseback, "the Westerns, those wonderful westerns, and then Fred Astaire, how he could dance." The running of the horses, the dancing of Fred Astaire. By "information" she meant motion.
The movies move.
No doubt about it.
And when the motion is less obvious, it may be more affective. I remember in a movie with a simple plot: a black man in the south kills a sheriff by accident, and after a set of miseries, everybody winds up in a Protestant Heaven drinking grape juice.
With a plot like that, photography is everything.
And indeed there was one emotionally moving scene where everything seemed quite still as if the camera were dead on to a farm scene, the house, the light in the house.
I wondered at the time why it was so compelling, why it wasn't as boring as "Barry Lyndon" (one straight scene looking like a Constable painting after another.) And then I noticed the slow, slow motion of the windmill, and the rippling of the grass, very slight. The delicacy of the differences drew you in.
And why do the various Godfathers hold our attention. With dialogue like: "I'll make it up to you Kay," or "Make him an offer he can't refuse." (You have to know the movie to know what the sentence means. Normally an offer you can't refuse is very very low.) Why does everybody remember the scene where Al Pacino, in Sicily is walking with his fiancee?
Nothing is really said, it's all in the camera.
You see the two of them move out, down a road, and as they walk, the camera pulls back a little bit, and moves over a little to your right, so as he camera moves away, and the people come in, the sense of swelling the number is a great spectacle.
In recent months we've had two extreme examples in the Buffalo Film Seminars down at the Market Arcade that seem to use the sense of difference of motion in two basically different ways.
First, Ozu's "Tokyo Story," that takes place in Japan after the war. The grandparents of a middle class family, in cramped circumstances, go to visit their children. That is the essence of the story, which winds up with a funeral. The children really aren't quite so happy to see the parents, who cause problems and inconveniences. The parents find the trip difficult, and feel embarrassed.
What seems to drive the story straight into one's deepest feelings is the itchy, constant conflict of physical motion. The rooms are very small, there is practically no furniture, every object is crammed with some other objects. People are bending down, or going on their knees and then kneeling, or moving across the room. Extending one's arm seems to have the same effect. The small motions create a claustrophobic effect, so that the outdoors seems to be a great relief, even if people are in a bus and jogging up and down, it's a little better than a cramped room. A bigger relief: when one sees a ship moving in one direction on the water, and a bus in the town moving in another. The differences are effective because they are small.
But huge differences can be effective too, as in Peckinpah. "The Wild Bunch" begins with small differences of scorpions in deadly play, and from then on, the murdering takes over, but is shot (pun intended) at different speeds, and that difference seems to me one essential aspect of his filming.
Like it or not, Peckinpah was attuned to a fundamental fact of our responses: a sense of a difference of motion runs straight through our arts: we may in part contribute to the motion, as we move through a room toward a painting, or as our position changes the light on a statue, or as our attention influences our listening. In music, the voice you hear in a Bach fugue moves at a different rate from another voice, or in Led Zeppelin, rapidly repeated double sixths on the keyboard, while a bass thrashes steadily.
Or, as Dante imagined it in Paradise.
And as we see a spark within a flame, and as a voice within a voice is distinguished when one holds the note and another comes and goes, I saw within that light other lamps moving in a circle
more and less swift according to the measure, I believe of their internal sight.(Paradiso VIII 16-21.)
That should shut William up.
II. William Sylvester:
Bill expects William to shut up , but we are not talking, we are typing at a keyboard, and Bill has written at great length to say little.
Of course, everybody knows that movies move.
But why bring such a notion up at all?
That insight has been worked over for years, and Bill probably stole it from a now-ancient writer named Budd Schulberg who wrote a novel about the movies called "What Makes Sammy Run?"
The book became a fantastic best seller for a while, and legends seemed to cluster around the book.... that bookstores sometimes placed it in a the Build a Healthy Body section, or in one case along with items about the digestive tract.
Budd Schulberg, at some point or other, suggested a definition of the movies: Imagine an opening scene of grandiose scenery, huge mountains, and cabin down in the valley. As the camera moves in, the cabin grows, fills the screen. The door swings open, and one can see the end of a wooden table.. A nickel rolls across the table, drops, and rattles around on the floor.
Now what does that nickel mean?
BS advised us: you are making a movie.
Or as Bruce Jackson co-manager of a movie series that purports to be an intersection between the University crowd and everybody else put it quite bluntly, if you want to know what a movie is about you better go read a book.
Or as John Barth said to me, many years ago, movies compete with novels for a person's time, but no movie ever turns your head around.
Of course not.
Movies are all feeling , and in the so-called Golden Age, movies present a special world that has little to do with what people think about, and what they really do.
Instead, there is movie behavior: a train is pulling out from a station, a young woman walks fast to continue talking to the young man in the train, and she picks up speed, begins to run. The same clips of action with different women and different trains were strung together, one after another, for a TV program. The result was a single, unified jogging scene, with minor switches of actresses and dialogues,the effect you might get from TV itself, if you shift channels rapidly, and all the car chases become one.
In real life, no woman would be that dumb, no train that slow.
True enough, the train is moving
True enough, the woman is moving.
According to Bill, that makes it a movie..
There is also movie psychology.
Does Jimmy Stewart feel that his life was wasted? A heavenly insight lets him see what would have happened if the evil banker had won out: Jimmy would never have been married and his wife would have wound up as a librarian, frightened, skinny, and wearing glasses sort of Watson's vision of Rosalind Franklin.
Movie psychology 101 assumed that NOT having been married is unhealthy for women, but then marriage never brings a woman closer to a man than twin beds.
Sex was off screen, understood, and in society generally was referred to in a strange kind of Aesopian language: She is a very worldly woman, aka, what a bunny, a word which gradually emerged thanks to Playboy and Hugh Heffner. Toward the end of the war kiss me once and kiss me twice divided people into we know what that means and oh she sings so sweetly.
After the war, society became split between the decoders of what language really means, and the simple minded literalists. For some, irony, the New Criticism and Adlai Stevenson were heroic losers.. For others, Perry Como and a just one of the folks version of Eisenhower got sold as heroic winners.
Only in movies do all the good people mean well, and the bad don't, and ultimately people are what they do by their own efforts, so there is a vaguely right wing or conservative tone to the Hollywood movie.
But then there is an equally bland left tone to the Cannes movies, where the influence of others or society tend to be more significant. But these differences are so slight that they are scarcely noticeable and can be found only by intense ideologues who wish to prove some sort of conspiracy theory.
The European movie supposedly invented sex: if you can consider Hedy Lamar in "Ecstacy" sexy; a little flash of her bathing was in fact scarcely more than a booby trap for the adolescent. "Belle de Jour" has some now fashionable s and m, supposedly a dream sequence, but by the time you've mulled over the notion that it wasn't real your attention may have been snared by some discrepancies between what the characters are saying and the subtitles. a pretty woman or words to that effect in the English was clearly: un chatiment perdu a lost punishment, and hand was in French cicatrice, or scar.
The greater realism of the Foreign film reduces to a breaking of a few taboos: don't steal bicycles, but Daddy and Son are weeping together, hand in hand in "The Bicycle Thief." The Beast in "Beauty and the Beast" winds up as a pitiable sweet old fellow after all, and the poor raped virgin is blessed by Heaven and water flows from barren ground.
Bill is right in one sense, but he seems unaware of the deadly consequences.
It is true that movies throw books away, and make a split between mind and head. (Can you imagine an ad: You've seen the movie, now read the script! )
But with such damage to society!
How can one avoid it?
I have come to realize that movies may be the source of our current solipsism, and I must confess that when I saw the final scene of "The Virgin Spring," with the dry crumbling earth slowly filling with water, at the moment, the screen filled with the flowing changing earth and water, I was overcome by sourceless, strange feelings, as I was likewise when I saw the loose face and helplessness of the Beast in the "Beauty and the Beast" of Cocteau.
I was helpless.
Amazed by an unexpected intensity, I found my disapproval of the industry momentarily suspended.