Can We Ever Completely Understand Cinema…?

Or do we discover it anew with each film we see?

(Screen Capture from Distant Voices, Still Lives Writer-Director Terence Davies, Cinematography William Diver & Patrick Duval.)

There are those who know. There are those who question.

There are those who have nailed down everything. They take it easy as they speak. They know their stuff—movies and movie-making—have them wrapped up neatly, no doubts, no cracks, no mischief, no mystery.

Then there are others who never settle but accept that for every certainty they encounter, and any they might dare embrace, there will soon enough come a heresy to challenge it…

Akira Kurosawa, on accepting his Honorary Award at the Academy Awards at the age of 89 (not before time) said, “I don't feel that I understand cinema yet.’ Imagine! The master who gives us Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, whose canon ranges from Forbidden Fortress to Dersu Uzala, who mesmerizes us with Kagemusha, with Ran etc., etc., etc., announces that even after decades of indescribably astounding filmmaking he finds himself nowhere near to comprehending the nature of his art.

Many, mortals by comparison, fail to get even that far—as far as the realization there might be something to explore. They keep within the confines of production, of technology, of financing, marketing or distribution. Involved with filmmaking in one way or another, they nevertheless watch and understand movies as business people and consumers, bringing minimal curiosity into their viewing.

Others, versed in the language of the screen, seasoned in its craft, may prove the opposite. They watch and understand not as consumers but as analysts or critics, in the process oblivious to the emotion, the wonder, the horror, the devilment, the heart and humanity (or otherwise) that flows from the screen.

Both groups miss out…

Then there are those among filmmakers and film watchers who are by contrast fascinated by cinema’s vast, endlessly varied, unpredictable terrain.

They know they don’t know, that in order to know, which they never will, they must continue their journey with film throughout their lives, a voyage of viewing, feeling, thinking, of actively engaging with movies, watching and making them, of taking the emotional blows they deliver, their visceral machinations, their opening of the heart or their witness to that organ’s tragic shutting down, of thrilling to the language of image and sound, of composition and mise-en-scène, of color, line and other visual elements (what I call ikones), of storytelling on the planarity of the screen, and on the vibrant theatre of the imagination this conjures on the screen of the mind—the interior drama that as much as what we witness within a movie’s frames, possesses us.

Watching the crop of recent and current movies, the impossibility of ever entirely grasping cinema, its borders unbounded, its quintessence indefinable has more than ever become apparent to me. Perhaps I might even edge a touch closer to understanding Kurosawa’s state of perpetual learning....

The piercing youthful trauma of Close with its unassuming world and poetry of the everyday riven by tragedy, the widescreen philippic and merciless staging of Triangle of Sadness, the Bressonian minimalism of Saint Omer, austere, decisive, utterly captivating, the flamboyant visual dynamism of Elvis, the final, existentially devastating shot of Pinocchio, EO’s transformation of the uninflected visual discourse of Au Hazard Balthazar into Skolimowski’s new inflected wonders, the precise progression and juxtaposition of image and moment in Aftersun with its ultimate unleashing of emotion, the dazzling articulation of narrative point of view in Decision to Leave, the humanist camera and deft metafiction of No Bears, the muted, simple, effortless majesty of The Quiet Girl, the unremitting claustrophobia—both of space and narrative—in Vortex, the hyper-dynamism and wrenching drama of Athena, a veteran’s consummate mastery of material and tone displayed by the auto-fictive Steven Fableman—from one film to another, I have found myself rediscovering cinema again and again…

This serves to remind me: the screen capture I chose for this article points to an experience I had many years ago. I’d come out of university and by tubing and sprinting between London cinemas (movie-theaters here in the US)—The Electric in Portobello Rd, The Gate in Notting Hill Gate, The Everyman in Hampstead, The Academy in Oxford Street, The NFT on the South Bank—I was absorbing three movies a day, taking in the canvases of Mizoguchi, Renoir, Ophuls, Hitchcock, Fellini, Visconti, Hawks, Fassbinder, Kubrick, Von Stroheim, Lang, Capra, Peckinpah, Chabrol, Bertolucci, Rivette, Antonioni, Ferreri and whoever else I could discover.

Even so, as I worked more and more in production in the BBC studios on multi-camera dramas, I found myself accepting a different mindset—that of three, four, or five huge video cameras on their massive mounts peering into the sets and at the actors in them. Here, staged action was covered by this cumbersome machinery of recording. This was filmed theatre, one-dimensional coverage that dulled my sense of the journey of images that forms a film.  

It was Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives and especially this slo-mo overhead angle, its formal precision, its functional elegance, its devastating emotion, its visual and human poetry,  that one day was to free me from that insidious prison. The sterile video studios dissolved, their proscenium arch mentality draining away as decades of BBC TV video drama were exposed to me as one sad dead end of misconception.

The life and language of the movies I had found by dashing across London from one screen to the next, the emotions and amazement I had experienced, were back.

Cinema had returned!

These revelations have continued since. As they do for those of us who don’t profess to know all there is to know about film. The filmmaker of each good movie we watch, we realize, has got there—to new understanding—before us. We catch up for a moment perhaps, then move on to others whose cinematic grasp proves once again to be ahead of ours—as surely as those filmmakers themselves discover on encountering great work from their peers…

Such is the illimitable genius of cinema, a cosmos of screen and soul to render our understanding of it ever incomplete. We may content ourselves nevertheless that in its never-ending revelations there lies immeasurable reward. 

Peter Markham  February 2023