Four Years of Cinema

I'm not sure if François Truffaut said "If you love life, you go to the movies" or "If you go to the movies, you love life," but in either case, the formulation is wrong. Love of life (the physical, experiential being of everyday living) does not necessarily correlate to love of cinema (that pale, flickering light on a rectangle in the dark) or vice versa.

Over my four years at Columbia, I've seen almost 800 films, primarily in theaters. During that same time, I've written about 65 pieces of film criticism in Spectator, some 50,000 words. I cite these statistics not to indulge in the heroism of my feat, but to illustrate what has consumed my college days. I speak in such uncertain terms because I'm not sure if the strange love affair with cinema I've grappled with since I was 15 has led me anywhere except back to more movies. My cinephilia may just be a sad tautology.

Having been under the spell of Herman Melville for the past semester in one of the greatest classes that I've taken at Columbia, I have become obsessed with Melville's great themes: whether or not there is an order beyond the pasteboard mask of our own material world; whether or not communication always carries the dangerous possibility of total miscommunication; and whether or not the greatest art works will at best be totally misunderstood, and at worst totally ignored.

If I remain an unwavering empiricist in regard to the physical word, I am an idealist when it comes to cinema. I want the Plato's cave of cinema--those flickering shadows on a screen--to reveal the invisible forms of a world beyond, which may or may not be our own. Unlike Melville's fiction, most cinema, even of the avant-garde strain, does not address metaphysics in any profound way. Yet the greatest films, such as my own favorite, Robert Bresson's 1974 Lancelot du Lac, are moving not only because of the extreme, transcendent greatness of their varying styles, but also because of the purity of their extra-cinematic visions. For me, the greatest works of cinema are beautiful not only because of what lies on screen, but also because of the frightening beauty of the indescribable beyond that they suggest.

So why should I be obsessed with cinema and not with the higher order it might reveal? My critical hero Andrew Sarris may have already answered this concern with his criterion of "interior meaning" as the final level of cinematic greatness: "[Interior meaning] is ambiguous in any literary sense because part of it is imbedded in the stuff of cinema and cannot be rendered in non-cinematic terms." Form (style) is inextricably linked to form (in the Platonic sense).

Still, my mind is troubled when I think of how films, from the most esoteric to the most popular, are perceived by most people. Although the point is debatable, I maintain that cinema is the most misunderstood of all art forms. To some degree the problem is directly linked to the fact that, unlike poetry or classical music or maybe even the novel, cinema remains a popular art, meaning that cinematic form remains invisible beneath the commercial and entertainment needs of story, acting, etc. But the basic ignorance or blindness to the stylistic choices that govern cinematic greatness (composition, camera movement, and editing, to name a few) is troubling when one imagines the fate of potential masterpieces in culture at large. How can the great works of the massive popular art known as cinema be distinguished when most moviegoers have scarcely an idea of how to truly see a film?

That thought leads me to my final concern: that true masterpieces of cinema will only be perceived by people like me who are obsessed with the art form. I don't think this is self-inflation (although it may be), but it is troubling because such masterpieces, by virtue of their cinematic greatness, can reveal truths which lie beyond the realm of motion pictures. Sadly, only cinephiles will be privy to those truths. (I use the word "truth" loosely but in utter seriousness.)

I guess this all-consuming fear of the Moby-Dicks of cinema passing through theaters unnoticed or totally misunderstood is only a magnification of the personal anxieties I've already outlined above, but I think that this fear should give more people pause. Should the fate of the masterpieces of the great art form of the past century rest largely with people who are obsessed with cinema to such an extreme degree? Should the most public of all great arts actually become the most private at its highest levels of achievement?

Still, if I put these worries aside, cinematic glories remain. Instead of citing all of the older masterpieces that I've seen in my Columbia days, I would rather give praise to newfound greatness--that is, the greatest films of the decade thus far. They are Arnaud Desplechin's Esther Kahn, Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, and Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark. It should be noted that the latter two, amazingly beautiful and startlingly accomplished in style, are also among the most metaphysically profound films I know. So at the very least, my own doubts about cinema are not part of any grander worry about the decline of cinema into worthlessness over time. In other words, I still fervently disagree with Louis Lumière's estimation of his own creation: "The cinema is an invention without a future."

Patrick Ciccone is a Columbia College senior majoring in Comparative Literature and Society. He was Film Editor on Spectator's 124th and 125th Managing Boards.