Open your eyes
As a college student who’d come home in the summer with the goal of screening 100 movies, I arrived back on campus one year and asked a film professor what a match cut was, prompting him to stare at me and mumble something I later learned to be untrue.
Which got me thinking about how movies are such a presence in the lives of most of us, and yet so rarely do we consider cinematic vocabulary, techniques, the modes of creation that, when they work, blend together so subtly that we usually fail to notice those particular ingredients. And yet, how intoxicating they can be when we do.
If you’ve read books about film, you’ve probably read one by David Thomson. He is what you might consider the Greil Marcus of film lit, minus the purple prose. He’s your everyman guide to cinema, Beatrice to the exploring Dante, only wading through films isn’t walking through hell, and Thomson is more sage buddy than muse-like sage.
Thomson’s new volume, “How to Watch a Movie,” purports — from its title, at least — to be a tutorial in watching a film such that we see its component parts. The deployment of a special lens, the various kinds of dissolves, wipes; the methodologies of crane shots, the impact of filters, the nuances of soundtracks.
In other words, here is a guide for you to sit down with, say, “Citizen Kane” — a picture that comes up regularly in the text — and move something that you’ve only ever noticed subconsciously into the forefront of your mind. The instances and functions of cameraman Gregg Toland’s deep-focus techniques, for instance. At which point, the moviewatching part-timer and the movie junkie alike can go, “Aha! Swoon! So that is why that sequence is so effective. Brilliant, genius,” etc.
There is some of that. It comes and goes, which is both to the book’s credit and at the same time something that undercuts it. Look: A book that is all about how you might watch a movie is going to be very dry, yes? Ever read Eisenstein’s writings on film? Excellent, informative, but gulch dry, Russian-style.
So Thomson gives us passages of breaking down the game tape, to use a sports analogy. This happens here, this happens there, note how Hitchcock doesn’t move the camera at all, watch as Murnau can’t stop running around with his, and now you will never see that particular film the same way again. And you won’t. Provided you are the kind of person who is a Criterion collection buff, or a fan of German Expressionism.
But that’s where things get a trifle problematic. For if you fit any bill like that, a book like this might not be of great service to you, because it’s no more informative, as far as nuts and bolts go, than you yourself probably already are in your own head. And if you’re someone whose idea of cinema is binge watching (and note how that term has achieved prominence recently) stacks of DVDs, you’re probably not into the brand of measured screening that Thomson espouses here.
Fair play, of course. Thomson surely knew as much, so that sets large portions of this book a-wanderin’. We have tangents galore, musings, recommendations for films you’ve probably not seen but must see (there is no cinephile who can refrain from unsolicited recommendation-making), and neat arguments, too, that take some courage to make.
Such as: Thomson’s advocacy for Leni Riefenstahl as an artist. Underscore that last word. As a maker of film, at the level of film, at the use and management of the techniques of film. It is nice to see her work reclaimed and for someone to move away from the normal two or three fat-bottomed brushstrokes — i.e., she was a Nazi auteur, Nazi Nazi Nazi — and get into greater complexities.
If you wish to hate her work, that’s cool, but either way we can all learn something about how she’d frame a crowd shot and what we learn about how she’d do so can help us better appreciate the techniques we might see in a work of warm-flowing humanity like Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game.”
Welles and Hitchcock dominate the book, and when Thomson returns home from the diversions, we get some of his best writing, like in his section on the cutting — of the celluloid variety — in “Psycho.” He makes the excellent point that a cut in movies is also a binding up; not of images, but of thoughts, associations, with our minds filling in gaps, seeing, as it were, in those spaces where the movie itself blinks.
That’s good film writing, heady but practical, that will serve you well whether you’re spending an hour in some Disney forest or trailing after Harry Lime in the sewers of Vienna, or even watching a Gatorade commercial at the end of the college football half. The ever-roving eye equipped with its own kind of mental foreknowledge. Can’t hurt to watch a film with those.