What does it mean to see a film? To me, these types of questions are much more interesting and fruitful than the more widely posed ""Does all cinema count as art?"" As I see it, the point of talking and thinking about art is not to make art an an elite club to which the contents of the Louvre, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, ""Madame Bovary"" and ""Citizen Kane"" belong but ""Hot Tub Time Machine,"" R. Kelly, Lady Gaga and Jackson Pollock do not.
The desire to distinguish between works of art and entertainment-minded objects is born of an impulse that I have simply never understood, though I have long assumed it has something to do with a latent aversion to democracy, strange as that may sound. Honestly, what's more democratic than the aesthetic strategy of the widely reviled Andy Warhol, producing works that anybody with $15 of disposable income can exhibit in their living room? And yet Warhol is commonly discussed as either an entertainer or entrepreneur first and as an artist second.
In short, I hold that every movie is a work of art and generally deserves to be intellectually engaged as such. Other film critics tend to write about some pretty dreadful flicks, and the reviews that result are, at best, cleverly articulated pans. On one hand, this gives reviewers ample opportunity to flex their writerly prowess, and I certainly can't fault them for that—hell, I read 'em and chuckle just as others do. But this phenomenon effectively implies that there's a definite line between art and trash, between films worth contemplating and films that are mere sources of mindless entertainment. This distinction was reactionary and problematic when it was first asserted by critics like The New Yorker's Pauline Kael in the 1960s, and it's just as reactionary and problematic when upheld today.
Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of films suck; I just try to avoid seeing and writing about them. If I've made a habit of only reviewing films that strike me as being more or less good, it's because, for me, the measure of a film's quality is its ability to inspire thoughtful responses that are stimulating in their own right. Thus, the critic is little more than a viewer who translates her response to a film into something worth sharing with others. Humorous as a snarky pan might be, one seldom gets the sense that the writer is dissecting the film and actively trying to find its hidden ideas, interesting techniques or broader function in an image-obsessed culture like the U.S.
Returning to the questions I raised at the beginning of this column, I think we're much better off asking ""What is cinema today?"" than ""What is good cinema?"" Though DVD technology already seems to be well on its way to obsolescence (what up Blu-Ray), I'm not convinced that we ever really got to the bottom of how it revolutionized the cinematic experience.
Recently I was chatting with a friend who actually worries about this sort of stuff like I do, and we agreed that the ability to pause a movie and walk away from it for however long made watching a film a much more readerly activity. Just as one can set down a novel to go fix a sandwich, I can pause a movie and return to it whenever. I can insert as many intermissions into a viewing as I want, which is particularly handy when tackling behemoths like Chantal Akerman's three-and-a-half hour masterpiece ""Jeanne Dielman."" These are practical innovations with serious aesthetic consequences.
But at what point does this kind of film-watching become something else? At what point do such impromptu intermissions invalidate a viewing? At what point does it become half-honest to say that you've truly seen a film? One thing's for certain: Watching movies on DVD in your living room is a wildly different activity than watching them on 35mm in a dark room full of strangers, though perhaps that's stating the obvious. The effects of these differences are fine material for thinking and discoursing, yet I'm not convinced that we ever began to have this conversation in earnest. Here's hoping we don't do the same disservice to Blu-Ray when and if it becomes the only show in town.
Do you think movies like ""Anchorman"" and ""Final Destination 3"" deserve more cinematic merit? Complain to Dan at dasullivan@wisc.edu.
