A is for Art part I: “I think we’re just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that”

Theatrical poster for The Royal Tenenbaums

The moving picture has been around for over 100 years, and has been a part of the pop consciousness for almost as long. From the earliest days of nickelodeons, movies have been part of mass entertainment.

The earliest American film that can really be considered a work of art is most likely D.W. Griffith‘s Birth of a Nation. There are several other works produced during the first five decades of filmmaking, some of them (such as Leni Riefenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will) just as incendiary as Griffith’s film.

There are of course, more: Chaplin‘s The Great Dictator, Ford‘s Stagecoach, Lean‘s Brief Encounter, and Kurosawa‘s Rashômon, among others.

Even with all these avowed classic films, the medium was essentially scoffed at; the only awards came from the industry itself, and films were not critiqued for their merit so much as they were criticized for their content.

That all changed thanks to Cahiers du cinéma. Founded in 1951, this magazine fundamentally altered the way that film was viewed. For the first time, criticism of film became about the form as much as about the content. Essentially, films came to be viewed as objects as well as stories, similar to the fine arts.

The magazine is also responsible for advancing the auteur theory. The short version of the theory is that directors are the ones who put their personal stamp on the film, and because of it, nearly every classic film was reevaluated and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Lean were recognized for the quality of their oeuvre. This theory still persists today; modern filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, and the Coen Brothers are considered auteurs.

Of course, Cahiers du cinéma is also responsible for introducing a bunch of fancy French words into the language of film so that obnoxious film students could let the entire world know how pretentious they are, so it wasn’t a total triumph.

Now, of course, only the stodgiest denier of reality will argue that at least some film is not Art. For over half a century now, the film medium has been seen as an arena of skilled craftsmen. Without the radical reinvention of film criticism engineered by Cahiers du cinéma, however, film’s ascendence to capital-A Art may never have happened.

We Didn’t Miss It. This Is It.

When I was sixteen and seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and twenty, when I was learning how to be who I’d eventually become, I think it was safe to say that I was an idiot. Like the time I destroyed my wheel hitting a curb on the way to see Primus, then rolled the car back in the jack. Then the show sucked.

That said, all those nights of going to shows with my friends and hanging out at the Gypsy until it closed followed by coffee all night at Denny’s, then slogging through school the next day, they were great. I remember what those nights felt like. I thought I had problems then; I didn’t. And now all that’s left is a stylized, romanticized set of memories that are better than the actual times could possibly have been. I had friends, I had dreams, and I had forever in front of me. Same as I have now, minus the responsibilities.

Sometimes I get wistful for those times. I remember thinking how big everything was, how much the things I was doing mattered, how grown up I was. But I wasn’t. I was a child. I’m safer now, and happier, and smarter, and a whole host of other things. Including more cynical.

But sometimes I am reminded of who I was then. How much fun it was not to know what I thought I knew. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist reminds me of that. Driving around all night chasing down a dream.

It makes me feel that. And that’s a wonderful thing.

I Got a Line on You, Babe

theatrical poster

Burn After Reading is the Coen brothers‘ first movie since No Country for Old Men, which everyone decided was the movie to honor for the brothers’ career of nearly unbroken awesomeness.

(Nearly unbroken, rather than just unbroken, because of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.)

As one might expect if one has followed their careers at all, they didn’t exactly get full of themselves. Instead, they made a weird, awkward, blackly hilarious movie starring a bunch of great actors. That’s as opposed to their other style, the weird, awkward, dramatic movies starring a bunch of great actors.

Burn After Reading is not a great movie. It is, in fact, a very very good movie. It’s light, it’s funny, it has unexpected moments, and it’s good to see great actors actually appear to be having fun.

With lesser talent, this movie would have devolved into an insoluble mess. However, the brothers enlisted J.K. Simmons to play the director of the CIA in a couple of scenes. Without these scenes, the movie would seem incompetent. With them, it proves that they did what they did on purpose and expected the audience to follow along.

I appreciate that sort of faith in the audience. I appreciate that sort of storytelling. I appreciate this movie, and the Coen brothers.

See Me Change

In a past life, I was part of the French New Wave. I did it all: wrote for Cahiers du cinéma, worked out ideas with Truffaut on The 400 Blows and Godard on Breathless. I even introduced Jean-Pierre Melville to Japanese culture, which inspired him to make Le Samourai. I knew Brigitte Bardot and reveled in the arts of the jump cut and mise en scène.  I’ve always wanted to be an auteur.

And in a past life, you were…?