Slow day on the blogging front, mate?

I can remember back in the Fifties going to Saturday matinees especially designed for kids. (I know, I don’t look a day over 25, but you’re just not that good at guessing ages.) You’d get a couple of horror movies (the Fifties were the golden age of B monster flicks), cartoons, a newsreel, selected shorts, the manager chasing the more recalcitrant types in a circle up the stairs to the balcony from the lobby and back again, the endless string of dopey audience comments flung at the screen that solely reflected the body-function school of humor so popular with the average ten-year-old, scarfing down popcorn and ice cream bonbons and Good & Plenty (what a great product name). I can remember paying a quarter for all this entertainment, plus the costs of the comestibles. I’ve written before about going to the movies with my parents, and going whenever you felt like it and arriving mid-movie, staying through the double feature until you got to the point, “I think this is where we came in.” There was always a television back home, and there were movies on television, but in those days going to the movies was one of the things one simply did on a regular basis. TV was going to kill theatre-going, of course, but it didn’t. Changed it, but didn’t kill it.

In high school, I still went to the movies, although the Sixties may be one of the worst periods of filmmaking ever, at least in the American mainstream. Hollywood was bankrupting itself making big, bloated pictures no one wanted to see, or big, bloated pictures that at least teenagers didn’t want to see. Thankfully, there was James Bond, so at least there was one big, bloated picture every couple of years that I was actually dying to see, and did.

Through all of this, television went about its business. When I was growing up, there was the Million Dollar Movie on WOR channel 9. They would play the same film twice each night, and then all day on Saturday. “If you missed all or part of tonight’s film,” they’d say during the final credits, you could catch up during the next showing (although who would be listening if they had missed all of the film is hard to imagine, so maybe I’m remembering it wrong). Their theme music was the Tara theme from GWTW, and they played King Kong so often (at least every three months or so, not to mention Kongie’s offspring like Son and Mighty Joe W), that when I finally saw GWTW, I was surprised to hear them using the King Kong theme music. (GWTW was never shown on TV; lots of the jewels in various crowns were for theatrical play only, even long after their original release.) There were also the Early Show, and the Late Show, movies in the afternoon and late at night, not to mention the Late Late Show, Creature Features and the like. Movie studios dumped what they considered their otherwise valueless product (i.e., old or B movies) onto television, took the money and ran (to the creation of big, bloated pictures no one wanted to see). In a pre-cable age of maybe half a dozen available television stations, it would be hard for anyone my age to have grown up not seeing a lot of old movies. They were unavoidable. They were also riddled with commercials, cut to fit time slots, panned and scanned if they were widescreen, viewed always in black and white since we didn’t get our first color TV until the Sixties, and generally about the worst way imaginable to attempt to appreciate a motion picture.

When I was in college, I began to expand my movie-going. First of all, there wasn’t all that much to do in the frigid northlands, but somebody was always screening some kind of film somewhere. They were cheap dates, and they were good movies. And they were literally on screens, instead of on television sets. There is a vast difference in the experience of watching a movie in a movie theatre and at home. Movie theatres have audiences, and that makes one difference (the contagion of humor, the collective gasp during a thriller, the shouting out of body-function jokes). The size of the screen makes an enormous difference too; no matter how big your TV is, even today, it’s not the size of a gigantimogamous Cinerama screen wrapped all around you showing 2001: A Space Odyssey (or, okay, Ice Station Zebra). The experience is different, even with normal-ratio pictures. TV is one medium, film is an altogether different medium. Go consult your McLuhan if you don’t already understand this.

In college I began to see foreign films (there weren’t many of them on the old Million Dollar Movie). I began to see the real classics of Hollywood cinema as they were meant to be seen, or at least as they had originally been seen, on big screens with big audiences. At some point I found myself taking a Film Appreciation course (a real brain stretcher if there ever was one) and having a professor not only roll out the old warhorses (from Busby Berkeley to Les Enfants du paradis) but explain them in their contexts. On top of all of it, in my senior year for some bizarre reason I got to put together my own film festival, comprising films I really liked, films I really wanted to see, and films that the %$#@*& distributors substituted for films I really liked or really wanted to see; then again, who knew that The D.I. would be that big a crowd pleaser? On the other hand, I had certainly expected that King Kong vs. Godzilla would be a sell-out (we had to schedule a last-minute extra screening). And I’ve never forgotten that urge, while sitting behind a girl who cried all the way through Camelot, to hit her over the head with a meat cleaver: talk about saps! You don’t get that at home (thank God).

The 70s, when I arrived in NYC, was a classic age of cinema. There was an exciting generation of new filmmakers on the scene creating great work, and of course Manhattan was chockablock with revival and art houses. By now I was, without being annoying about it, a cinephile. I knew and understood the classics, and revisited them regularly. I followed the new people coming along, the Scorceses and Lucases and Spielbergs. I read (and edited) film books. I joined MOMA and, when I was single with nothing better to do on a Tuesday through Thursday night, I stopped by on my way home and saw whatever movie they happened to be screening (new films from Inner Mongolia, Blaxpoitation classics, whatever). I went to 24-hour samurai film festivals. When I first got married we practically lived at Theatre 80 St. Marks, which showed classic Hollywood double features not only of the Casablanca/Maltese Falcon variety, but even more of the Andy Hardy Meets Debutante and Little Nellie Kelly variety. HBO and its ilk also came along around that time, showing uncut films on TV, for a price, if you were willing to wait a while.

Through all of this, my trivia skills increased dramatically, but that’s another subject altogether.

In 1980, I bought my first VCR. It was also my first Betamax. I was an early adapter, but I knew when Kate was born that I wouldn’t be leaving the house much for a decade or so, and time-shifted entertainment sounded like a very good idea. Before long, the rental tape came along (mostly in VHS, alas), ushering in a serious revolution in film, the effects of which we are now suffering through today. The ability to watch films at home was very quickly embraced by the American public, and it didn’t take long for home video sales to match, and often outstrip, theatrical revenues. DVDs made this even more a reality. The thing about home video, though, as that market has matured, is that the material available has gone deep. It didn’t take long to run up copies of every movie released recently, and then the marketers saw that they could sell oldies as well. Classic Hollywood. Silents. Foreign films. Often the packages were enhanced with extras: a film professor in a box, in many cases. While mainstream theatrical films have become more bloated – short-term bursts of empty calorie “events” that only occasionally shock and/or awe – almost the entire world history of cinema is now available to us for home viewing. Twenty bucks a month of Netflix can turn almost anyone into a walking encyclopedia of film (and a potentially suitable trivia opponent for yours truly).

The question is, what are you doing about this? And I don’t just mean you-know-who (because I know you, you spalpeen: you probably actually liked the Dukes of Hazzard movie). I mean you in general, you with the ability to watch any film ever made at any time. What an awesome ability. What a waste if you don’t take advantage of it.

I offer a premise that film is an art form. This is not a particularly unorthodox assertion. Plenty of people agree. Granted, film is also often merely entertainment, but that doesn’t remove its artistic potential. Novels are similar. Some are an expression of the highest art. Most are, at best, attempts at entertainment through story-telling. Often (usually?) the ones of the highest art also entertain through story-telling. The same is true of movies. Some are art, most are not. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the ones that don’t aspire to anything more than entertainment, but if that’s what you limit yourself to, and if you limit yourself to it on a timeline of contemporaneity, you are cutting yourself off from a whole world of art, and I offer another premise that art is so important that you should spend a lifetime seeking it out wherever you can. Or creating it, if possible, but so few of us have that capability to create true art, although we can learn a lot about art by attempting to create true versions of it. I’ve learned a lot about Monet by learning to take photographs, for instance. Additionally, one can get an awful lot from films that, while not masterpieces of art, are nonetheless masterpieces of entertainment. If, in the quest for art, one only finds temporary satisfaction (as compared to the ineffable eternal satisfaction/dissatisfaction of art), that is not a bad thing. You’ll enjoy yourself. And maybe even learn a little something about the world around you.

You have access to almost every film ever made. This is not unlike having access to every painting ever painted. What are you doing about it? Have you ever watched a silent movie? Ever studied a little of the Charlie Chaplin Essanay shorts? Watched Valentino or Barrymore or Keaton with no sound except a piano or an orchestra keeping up with the emotional tone of the picture? Ever watch that baby carriage come down the steps in Potemkin? Have you watched Busby Berkeley paint abstract dance machines in black and white? Have you watched Fred Astaire or Bill Robinson or Gene Kelly transcend gravity? Heard Judy Garland sing anything that wasn’t in “Oz”? William Powell shake a martini to a foxtrot? Made the cinematic acquaintance of Jean Renoir or Federico Fellini? Tried to understand the “new” (read postmodern) cinema of Alain Resnais teamed with Alain Robbe-Grillet? Ever studied why Marlon Brando or James Dean or Marilyn Monroe are cultural icons? Watched every W. C. Fields or Marx Brothers film and tried to rank them? Ever uttered a sigh of relief when Rhett Butler went out the door for the last time? Had your breath taken away by the first shot of the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach or the last shot of Ethan in The Searchers? Ever agreed with Orson Welles after watching Kane that a movie studio really is the best set of electric trains a boy could possess?

Or, do you only watch movies that came out within the last six months? Believe that black and white is passé? That silents are unwatchable? That if it’s old, or foreign, it’s not worth the bother? Are you limiting your scope to sequels and remakes and cinematizations of television shows and comic books? Are you shrinking your mind when you are best positioned to be expanding it?

At best, you should seek cinema in movie houses, where it is what it is in all its glory. But given the vast library available at home and the few instances of revival houses nowadays, the second-best of DVDs of classics is still preferable to keeping up with the complete output of Rob Schneider, or any output of Rob Schneider. Not seeking out these films is analogous to not reading. It’s not that your education suffers (although it does); your brain suffers. Your intellect is a puppy that needs to be taken out for a walk once in a while. Keep it indoors all day, never let it off the leash, never give it free rein, convince yourself that art of any sort is not to your benefit… You’ve as good as put the puppy of your brain to sleep.

So, I suggest you find yourself a list of the top 100 movies of all time (Ebert has one on his website) and watch all of them and see what you think. It’ll take about 200 hours. Not much, really. Then, with your brain newly polished, you might attack some of those great books you’ve been sneering at because you can’t see the point of literature because your English teachers have been crouching behind the difficulties of their careers by showing you a made-for-television movie of Pride and Prejudice instead of making you read the book. As if reading Austen is hard, or not fun, or about the plot. If your teachers could make you realize that reading Austen is not hard, that it is fun, and that it isn’t about the plot, then they’d be doing their jobs. Don’t get me started on that.

Here’s my suggestion for tonight. An easy one, already mentioned. Citizen Kane. Inevitably on most Top Ten lists, and thought of by many as the most fun of any great film ever made. It’s even in English. As you watch it, think about how the story is being told. Think about the photography. Think about the politics of media moguls getting too big for their britches.

Think about Rosebud…