Julian, commenting on my previous post, in which I quoted the film-maker Werner Herzog describing film as "the art of illiterates," wrote:
Movies the art of illiterates? Well, I suppose the same could be said
about music. A more interesting dichotomy is how a story is told in
novel and in film. As a friend pointed out to me recently, unlike a
novel, good filmmaking can’t tell you what a character is thinking or
feeling. In that way, it’s like poetry—calling on the reader/viewer to
interpret and imagine. You love poetry, which makes your lack of
enthusiasm for movies strange. But perhaps no weirder than my lack of
enthusiasm for poetry and love of cinema.
Good points, all.
I suppose what it really comes down to is there are just not enough hours in the
day, and that I want to devote the time I have to what I, without
reservation, love: books and music. (I'm told that for some people days contain twenty-four hours. Mine seem to have six or eight at best.)
Music, certainly in the case of instrumental music (with the exception of a
couple of odd limit cases), tells no story at all, and has no message.
That few of us would agree on the story or message of, say, Thelonious
Monk's Brilliant Corners even if we thought we had discerned such things, makes it clear that any message, any story, we find in a piece of music is only what we walked in with. Thus, comparing music with film or the novel, it's not that different art-forms tell stories differently. It's that some art-forms—music, some kinds of painting, some kinds of poetry—tell no story, have no message at all. I would call these forms not illiterate, but superliterate.
As I believe that stories are peripheral to art even in forms like the novel that do employ them, and that
"the message" is not just peripheral, but often militates against art succeeding, I view dispensing with story and message as a good thing.
(Aside: Where do young people get the idea that the most important thing to do when experiencing a work of art is to attempt to locate a message that the artist has artfully (and apparently for no reason) concealed? And why, when they think they've located it, do they always tell you about it in sentences that take the form: "What Borges / Joyce / Ozu is trying to say is . . . ?")
Film, Julian says, because it can't tell us directly what characters think or feel, forces readers to interpret and imagine. That's certainly true of the best films (also of the best novels), and the best in any art-form are the ones by which the form should be judged. The problem is, however, that placing the best to one side, all too many films, far from leaving it to the reader to put the pieces together, are quite dictatorial with regard to what readers are allowed to imagine. (This one, for example.) I think, in fact, that a character's face screwed up in agony is if anything less subtle than symbols which, deciphered from a page, spell out agony. And don't get me started on film music, or the easy nostalgia that, ever since The Big Chill
, film makers have called up by inserting this or that golden oldie into the sound track.
Again, though, film, and every other genre, should be judged by its best exemplars, not its worst or even its so-so, but I fear that hammering-the-viewer-over-the-head lack of subtlety is now the norm in film-making. Other than Kore'eda—and he had to struggle to get his last masterpiece released outside of Japan—who now is making movies that don't hammer viewers over the head?
I don't keep up with film much, so that's a sincere, non-rhetorical, question. There probably are film-makers out there doing just that. Please let me know who they are. (Rohmer is, I believe, still working, but wasn't his last film a departure from his usual subtle approach?)
—David
