The Cinema
I worked in the film industry for 27 years and now I cannot watch a movie. My favorite movie is a movie I cannot watch. Movies now seem too literal, too linear, too authoritarian in their plot lines. It's not that time is an arrow (plots can still be non-linear); it's that the machinery is just too obvious. I know other people don't feel this way; they think that movies can create empathy for others and help us escape from reality. That's good for them.
I think the best movies are the ones we create for ourselves, in the sense described by Roland Barthes, including those bizarre ones we create in our half sleep. So I do watch clips from films but, otherwise, I have gone back to books, which allow more freedom to create the movies in my head. I know I'm not the only one who thinks this.
The movies that had the most effect on me back in the day were those I saw in my Twenties. I think it's the same for most people. Sure, I was blown away seeing Star Wars, Bladerunner, Apocalypse Now and Gladiator for the first time, but the directors I remember best were Antonioni, Fellini, Bertolucci, Buñuel, Resnais, Kurosawa, Miyazaki, and so on - directors most people have never heard of. I think it was their romantic yet whimsical dream sense, so missing in the Hollywood films I mentioned, as if the only thing that really matters is love, and love is more difficult to find in this life than finding trouble. When I've gone back to look at the films I liked the most, they failed to capture the emotions I had experienced previously, because we are not the same people we were in the past.
With movies today, I feel chained to a one-way narrative in which I do not feature. There seems to be no way to spin the plot off into alternate realities. This is why cinema is a 20th century technology and art that has stuck around into the 21st century, but its best days are over. If the late Sixties was a revolution in content, now it's the form itself that is obsolete. Tinkering with chronology or point of view, or overdoing the special fx, as so many films (and books) do these days, just seems old fashioned and even a bit hysterical.
The best examples of the dream sense genre for me are Amélie and My Neighbor Totoro. There, I feel like a participant who has been invited in, possibly to be a matchmaker or as a guest. These are films that break the constraints of realism and they celebrate lovers and childhood respectively. But I cannot watch them again in case things turn out differently. The past really does stay in the past.
Do books do a better job capturing the dream sense? Yes, but that's mainly because I can drop in and out of them as I please, unlike a movie where I have to stay put for 90 minutes. Even books are formulaic. I don't mind being rushed headlong to a climax if there is a payoff, but I do resent the tendency even among the best writers to place our hero or heroes in terrible danger before the rescue. Contrived melodrama is annoying. Equally, I find the meandering non-linear narratives of modern novelists also annoying. The best book I enjoy these days is wandering around in Wikipedia, and maybe YouTube, creating my own story. That's freedom.
Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. [Final passage in "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, Trans. Stephen Heath (1977)]”
