Screen shots
To be a cinephile — as opposed to simply a fan of movies — is to be an addict of a kind, continually swooning, always in a state of delirium that only the luminous images of cinema seem capable of inducing. Or so Scott Esposito, in his collection of essays on cinema, “The Doubles,” would like us to feel, if not believe.
“I adore the purity of film,” Esposito writes in his introduction, “but I am a writer. I must have ideas outside of things. It is in my blood. And, to be honest, I enjoy a little philosophy. I want to explain what I find in films, to show you how they have lived with me, to give voice to their implicit theories, to transform their visual texture into precise words. I love doing this. But there’s always that little voice insisting I should leave these cinematic ideas bound up in their images. I should let them be.”
Esposito naturally isn’t going to let those images be, and his opening chapter lays out why, even though literature is now an also-ran compared with the power and reach of cinema, he is a “born writer” and will duly attempt to transform those “visual textures” into essays. Too often in this collection, they are less than precise and sometimes quite overheated — a “little philosophy” is usually a very dangerous thing for any critical enterprise.
Esposito’s judgments are cogent — in his introduction, he contrasts writing and filmmaking, the nexus of his enterprise, with verve and some insight:
“Film’s inventions stay with us in a way that literature’s do not. Literature’s effect comes more subversively. It is the slow rewiring of a brain. We routinely read a book for a dozen or more hours, and this long interaction gradually penetrates to the corners of our mind. Our thoughts become altered, and we emerge from books changed people. Whereas film assaults us in 90-minute bursts, like an incident that stabs our memories.”
“Literature versus film,” Esposito concludes, is “the slow drip that seeps throughout identity versus the decisive moment that brands the mind.” This nicely captures the differing experience of two potentially overwhelming aesthetics, and illustrates why we now mostly inhabit an “image planet” (as the critic Geoffrey O’Brien described the movies) as opposed to a word planet.
The problem with “The Doubles” is one of tone more than anything else. An air of excitable, discursive, undergraduate enthusiasm mars Esposito’s writing, occasionally winning but often irritating. The opening chapter tackles a single shot from Errol Morris’ “A Brief History of Time” that quickly goes off the rails in a welter of gosh-gee-whiz standalone sentences about physics and Borges, barely scratching the surface of the film itself.
In his essay on “A Clockwork Orange,” Esposito is so keen for the reader to feel his deep shock during his first viewing of Kubrick’s “ultraviolence” that he airdrops every leftover exclamation point from Tom Wolfe’s oeuvre into the text. He also has the slightly pompous habit of inserting far too many stand-alone quotes from writers and filmmakers into the text, their context often cloudy, leaving bon mots marooned between paragraphs.
But in Esposito’s calmer moments, his engagement with film yields intriguing ideas. Writing about Aleksandr Sokurov’s brilliant “Russian Ark” (2003), a film shot in one continuous 96-minute take in the Hermitage Museum, Esposito gets at the heart of the film’s ability to turn cinema into theater not by means of filming a play, but by making a play become a film: “Somewhere in this mad endeavor Sokurov endowed film with something it never expected to have: the aura of the original.”
When Esposito quotes Walter Benjamin on the aura of a work of art here, it’s appropriate and meaningful, and the essay satisfyingly plumbs the tension between theater and film that Sokurov masterfully exploits.
And when Esposito aligns the personal and the critical with a cooler eye, his lyrical flights become appealing, as with the end of his essay about Lou Ye’s “Suzhou River” (2000) and cinematic love stories, where his own love story mirrors his love of cinema: “Films have always nourished she and I. Our third date ... we began to swim within the images of our collective dreams. An uncountable number of dates later, let’s call it one-hundred-and one, Lou’s unreality became another story we shared. And now, as I recount those days, we are still here in love, still looking, still doubled in images, still in possession of each other’s memories, imagination, these forms as multiple as the water.”
The passion that animates “The Doubles” is palpable on every page, and if in some chapters it results in over-thetop palpitations, well, perhaps that’s the price a writer pays when in the grip of the fever dream that is the movies.
Gregory Crosby is a poet and the author of the collection “Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion,” to be published in 2018. Email: books@sfchronicle.com