Can Movies Think?

Kent Jones

1. See James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).

In a sense, Stanley Cavell asked the same question of the comedies of remarriage to which he paid such exquisite homage in Pursuits of Happiness (1981). For Cavell, these films about conversation converse with one another in turn and with their most devoted viewers, and open avenues of thought and feeling about the possibilities of harmony and disharmony, sometimes creative, between people in love. They may not be epics like the works mentioned above, but Cavell sees within them a similar abundance and variety, and in their filigreed pursuits the same ardent caress of mystery and the limits of experience.

This rare convergence of American philosophical pragmatism with the cinema offers an appealing alternative to the essentialism that has plagued film criticism. One sees such essentialism in David Thomson’s contention that there is such a thing as a philosophy of the cinema, inscribed within its production and exemplified in certain passages in Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Altman, Jean Renoir and Jacques Rivette, or in the famous camera movement out the window and into the courtyard that closes Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). In other words, moments in which light and movement are allowed to speak for themselves and bestow their innate grace on the comparatively paltry human affairs transpiring within or beneath them. Of course, Thomson is describing something quite real, a glorious strain in filmmaking, but he goes wrong when he characterises it as the essence of cinema, in a polemic disguised as a declaration of moral enlightenment. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s New York Times op-ed piece written shortly after the death of Ingmar Bergman is a more honest variation of the same idea, the origins of which can be found in Luc Moullet’s dismissal of Akira Kurosawa back in the ‘50s. Moullet, Thomson and, to a certain extent, Rosenbaum reject the manipulations of film language in favour of the patient, de-dramatised gaze of the documentary-based camera eye. The filmmakers who build their films around the cinema’s capacity to record existence in progress, as opposed to the ones who continue to fabricate new intrigues, possess a higher moral truth. They are focused not just on the drama of human affairs, but on the mysteries of light, air, earth, sky, time and space which contains it.

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2. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume II (University of California Press, 2004), p. vii.

This confusion between simple description and moral accounting, between making art and finding ultimate truth with a camera, a microphone and an editing machine, is an old story in filmmaking and criticism, but it continues to be told, again and again. At this point, I have to wonder why. The appeal of systematic rather than case-by-case exploration is obviously great, as great as the lure of enlightenment in the realm of art and outside of organised religion. However, I find it troubling to read rejections of religious and political dogma from critics who simultaneously espouse aesthetic dogma. I have a feeling that serious film criticism is afraid to hoist up the anchor of moral essentialism for fear of drifting off into the shallow waters of connoisseurship. I suppose that moral essentialism offers a guarantee of seriousness.

Bazin once claimed that the evolutionary progress of cinema had occurred at an accelerated rate. Artistically speaking, he was right, but the acceleration did not occur in the realm of its appreciation, still dogged by questions of origins and essences. One clearly sees this in the characterisations of Jean-Luc Godard and Serge Daney as secular saints (Colin MacCabe, in his biography of Godard, used this term to describe his subject, modified with the adjective ‘Lacanian’; Daney, in his final book Postcards from the Cinema, used the term to describe himself, albeit with a rather unsettling irony); in Godard’s touching yet hopelessly sentimental judgment  (in Histoire(s) du cinéma) of the cinema’s refusal to recognise its documentary foundations at a crucial historical moment, resulting in its failure to film the camps; or in Daney’s equally touching and equally sentimental assertion that we are all ‘guilty’ in the light of the projector but guilt-free in the television’s glow. These are supposedly advanced notions of cinema and its relationship to history and morality, but why? It seems to me that they are something else altogether: grand, interrelated metaphorical formulations from two great artists, both of whom have their flagrantly unreasonable sides, as do most great artists. Along with Rivette’s famous condemnation of the tracking shot in Kapò (1959), they offer moral accountings as stringent and punitive as a sermon by Jonathan Edwards.

I think that serious criticism needs to wriggle out of this moral stranglehold. We are guilty or innocent as individuals rather than units within a sponge-like body politic, in whatever light, and I seriously doubt that round-the-clock screenings of filmed documentary evidence of the gas chambers would have brought about their earlier demise. Does cinema really need to retain a sense of original sin in order to achieve moral gravity? We need to trust in our own intellects rather than in systems of thought, to stop thinking in terms of moral-aesthetic hierarchies, and to start letting Mizoguchi talk to Kurosawa, and letting Zodiac talk to His Girl Friday (1940). This kind of pluralistic approach to film criticism is one of the side benefits of the blogosphere, in which, under ideal circumstances, informality often leads to a looser approach to aesthetics.

In short, I think we need to stop thinking so much about this thing called ‘cinema’, and start letting movies think for themselves.