|
|
|
|
It is time now to point out that mastery of technique, though necessary to good filmmaking, will not in itself make a good film. A good film is not a bag of cinematic devices but the embodiment, through cinematic devices, of a vision, an underlying theme. What is this theme or vision? It is a filmmaker’s perception of some aspect of existence that he or she thinks is worthy of our interest. Normally, this perception involves characters and a plot. Though recent American films, relying heavily on color, rock music in surround sound, quick cutting, and the wide screen, have tended to emphasize the emotional experience and deemphasize narrative, still most of the best cinema is concerned with what people do, that is, with character and plot. Character is what people are, plot is what happens, but the line between character and plot fades, for what people are is in large measure what they do, and what is done is in large measure the result of what people are. Character and plot, then, finally are inseparable; in a good film, everything hangs together. The great comic actor Harold Lloyd said that he had idea men who suggested numerous bits of comic business, and then he chose “the ones that [he] thought would be most appropriate to the particular film we were doing.” The operative words are “most appropriate.” A very funny bit of business might not be appropriate—might somehow not seem to fit—in a particular film because it was not in harmony with the underlying theme or vision or idea, the “clothes rack” (Lloyd’s term) on which the funny bits (the clothes) were hung. In The Freshman (1925), Lloyd said, the underlying idea or theme was the student’s enormous desire for popularity, and everything in the film had to further this theme. Consider the comments of Truffaut on the themes of The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim (1962), and on the disastrous lack of a theme in Shoot the Piano Player (1960):
In 400 Blows, I was guided by the desire to portray a child as honestly as possible, and to invest his actions with a moral significance. Similarly with Jules and Jim, my desire to keep the film from seeming either pornographic, indelicate, or conventional guided me. The trouble with Shoot the Piano Player was that I was able to do anything—that the subject itself didn’t impose its own form....As it stands, there are some nice bits in the film, but it can’t be said: this is the best work on this particular theme. There isn’t any theme. (It does not follow, of course, that the artist is fully aware of the theme from the start. Antonioni mentions that “it often happens that I experience fragmentary feelings before the experiences themselves take hold.” But if they do not finally take hold, the film will probably arouse the response that Truffaut mentions in his comments on Shoot the Piano Player.) And so we come back to the idea of a vision or, in a less exalted word, a theme. Some critics, we recall, have argued that the concept of theme is meaningless: A film is only a detailed presentation of certain imaginary people in imaginary situations, not a statement about an aspect of life. Susan Sontag, in a challenging essay in Against Interpretation (1966), argues that our tendency to seek a meaning in what we perceive is a manifestation of a desire to control the work of art by reducing its rich particulars to manageable categories. But Sontag’s view itself is reductive. If we read in a newspaper about a marriage or a business failure or a baseball game, we take it only as a particular happening of some interest, and we do not assume that it implies much if anything beyond itself. It tells of something that has happened, but it does not tell what ought to happen or what usually happens; that is, it does not imply anything about the ways of people in general. When, however, we read a novel, or see on the stage or screen a happening, we inevitably feel—if only because we are asked to give the event an hour or more of our attention—that it is offered to us as noteworthy, an example not of what happened (it didn’t happen; it’s fictional) but an example of what happens. The characters in the fictional work are (like the characters in newspaper items) individuals, not mere abstractions, but (unlike those in newspaper items) they are significant individuals, in some measure revealing to us a whole class of people or a way of life. An artist gives us a representation that can be thought about. Sometimes we sense that a film has an arguable thesis. Stanley Kubrick, for example, has said that A Clockwork Orange “warns against the new psychedelic fascism—the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug-oriented conditioning of human beings by other human beings—which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.” A filmmaker, however, need not argue a thesis that is subject to verification (for example, that the older generation seeks to repress the younger generation); it is enough if he or she sees in the human experience something worth our contemplation (for example, the conflict between generations) and embodies it in a film. A theme can usually be named by an abstract noun or phrase (the quest for happiness, the difficulty of achieving self-knowledge, the fragility of love), and though we recognize that any such formula is not the whole life, it is nonetheless important. Adequately embodied in a film (or in any other kind of art) this exploration of experience alters our experience of life, including our experience of ourselves. Let Truffaut have the last word on this topic: I also believe that every film must contain some degree of “planned violence” upon its audience. In a good film, people must be made to see something that they don’t want to see: they must be made to approve of someone of whom they had disapproved, they must be forced to look where they had refused to look.
|