S P L I N T E R E D | L I G H T

In January of 1945 the great film critic and Pulitzer prize winning novelist James Agee (pictured at left) wrote a summary of  the previous year’s films in which he lamented that the medium was ‘sick unto death.’ Almost every major film maker gets high praise from Agee for some aspect of their picture. And the art of cinema itself gets high praise. “I can think of very few movies,” Agee writes, “which fail to show that somebody who has worked on them, in front of the camera or in any one of the many places behind it, has real life or energy or intensity or intelligence or talent.” But the gist, nevertheless, was that the technical proficiency and momentary brilliance did not salvage the underlying vapidity he saw in film. In other words every picture is perfectly made and yet, at the end of its runtime, forgettable, unmoving. While I haven’t seen many of the titles he cites as examples, and film is still chugging along with its split personality as a business and art form, I certainly know what he means. A majority of the films I watch leave me with no concrete criticisms to offer on the technicalities, while simultaneously I have no honest praise of the picture as a whole.

Agee writes, “You have only to compare the best of last year’s films with the best that have been made or in your conception could be made . . . to know that those who make or care for moving pictures have great reason to be angry, for all that is frustrated, and still greater reason to be humble, for all that is fallen short of.” This is just as true today as it was in 1944. When one thinks of the capabilities of the genre and compares them to whatever opened last weekend the divide can produce despair. If we seriously consider films art, which they are, we need to demand of them more than just 2 hours of entertainment. We need to demand Casablancas, and Apocalypse Nows, Annie Halls, and Magnolias. The percentage of films that achieve goodness (not even greatness) is disturbingly small. This is worth noting because, if it persists, we begin to lower our standard of good to include those films about which there is nothing really bad or good to say. Films would then become good simply by not being bad. If these blah films continue to garner good reviews, it doesn’t necessarily mean film is dying, but it certainly makes it an impotent art.

So why do so many films completely fail to move us despite their many qualities? One reason, Agee argues, is that the medium is restrained by the limits of ‘middle-class twentieth-century genteelism.’ Pictures inside these limits are to Agee “a tame and pretty image, highly varnished, sensitively lighted, and exhibited behind immaculate glass, the window at once of a shrine and a box-office.” What he is saying is that these films are museum pieces–without a range of emotion they lack any real heart-beat. This was Agee’s critique of the homogenized and saccharine Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 40s. We may have broken out of this genteelism a little in the filmic revolution of the late 60s and early 70s but we have inherited a different kind of ghetto as a result.

First of all, Agee did not simply mean that he wanted more sex and violence in his pictures. He simply desired to see more honesty, more genuine characters living in a world that he recognized. After all he spent years living with sharecroppers during the depression in order to write their stories in his classic of literary non-fiction Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. When Hollywood could not provide him with this kind of reality he turned to documentaries and foreign films, made on location often with non-professional actors. An increase of the grittier elements in life may have been necessary to achieve realism, but it is not sufficient, as many now seem to think. Our new ‘middle-class’ film ghetto is a direct outgrowth from the increase. We see it in the cornucopia of popular action, comedy, and horror films that refuse to think and revel in sex and violence even if only at the PG-13 level. So we can now watch characters’ most intimate and horrific deeds–and the art form can certainly make good use of these new freedoms–but simultaneously it has been given one more curtain that can hang in front of truth.

What does it take, then, to say a film was good and mean it wholly? What are we searching for in films? I think Agee tells us when he says in a review (devoid of the reviewed film’s name and simply titled ‘A Great Film’), “Many things in the film itself move me to tears–and in none of them do I feel that I have been deceived, or cynically seduced or manipulated, as one usually has to feel about movies. . . . All these devices are artful, or if you like artificial, but on one seeing, anyhow, not one seemed dishonest aesthetically or morally.” This is indeed what we want. To laugh, and cry, and gasp, and yearn, and rage, in short to feel–not because of a plot formula that will not fail to produce the desired emotion, but because of the honest humanity of what we see before us. Emotions that have not been worked for are sentimentality–as Jeremy Begbie says, it is experiencing Easter without waiting till the third day. Films are not truly great when their directors are masters of audience manipulation or where every set up is perfectly lighted, but when their humanity is true, gripping, unforgettable.

With staggering perception Agee writes, “We are learning better and better all the time, for instance, how to make films beautifully, elegantly, patiently, perfectly–so long as nobody  severely questions the nature of the beauty, the quality of the elegance, the focus and result of the patience, and the meaning and value of the perfection.” To severely question the nature, quality, focus, result, meaning, and value of a film’s qualities is the responsibility of the critic. It is only by doing this meticulously that we can learn to discern which films abuse technique to prey on our emotions, and which film’s qualities belie an inner iciness. The Greeks had two words for good, kalos, meaning good in form or beautiful, and agathos meaning good in nature or virtuous. For a film to be good in the holistic sense, both must be present.

Agee closes his essay almost hopelessly by doubting it will ever be possible to salvage the art form in America. I have no idea whether he would consider it salvaged or not, but I have certainly seen films made after 1944 whose craft forces me to forget craftsmanship and participate in their art. To, as John Gardner writes, “test human values, not for the purpose of preaching or peddling a particular ideology, but in a truly honest and open-minded effort to find out what best promotes human fulfillment.” These are the films I truly consider ‘good.’ As long as they are present the cinema may be sick, but it is not dying.