My very favorite person to see movies with is my friend Mike Davies, the man behind the nom de plume behind the blog The Ascetic Sensualists. He is, first of all, an uncommonly intelligent, articulate, and perceptive fellow. More importantly, he’s one of the few people I know who I can always count on to want to talk about whatever we’ve just seen, which to me is an utterly crucial part of the moviegoing experience. What follows is the first part of an excerpt from an e-mail correspondence we began shortly after he moved away from Pittsburgh, continuing a conversation we’d started many months earlier. As it happens one of the interviews referenced in my final e-mail netted me a job and I moved east myself not long afterward. This exchange of letters, therefore, can be seen as a snapshot portrait of my cinephiliac state of mind on the cusp of a great change in my circumstances, and in that spirit I’m glad to be able to post it here now during this transitional period in the life of this blog. Part two will be posted at Mike’s place in the very near future. (Update: and here it is!) Please enjoy!
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From: Mike
To: Andy
Date: November 5, 2010
I’ve been thinking about my movie watching tendencies and how they might differ from yours, and I have a question for you: have you left anything unwatched just because you know that you’ll enjoy it? There are several movies right now I’m hesitant to watch because afterwards they’ll be over, and I enjoy the feeling of saving them for a special occasion when I need a great entertainment or artistic experience that I can count on to be new and good. For example, North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004), Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005), and Raising Arizona (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1987). After I see Raising Arizona I will have seen all the great Coen brothers movies that currently exist. It will be a somewhat melancholy feeling, like you get after reading the whole Lord of the Rings series or every Raymond Chandler novel. I can think of a dozen major movies from the “New Hollywood” period that fit this description; in fact, I just watched one this week, Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975). It did not disappoint, and I already feel like it’s been part of my consciousness for a decade. One thing about Dog Day Afternoon, though: the opening credits are utterly essential. They tell you the time, the place, the mood of everybody involved. There’s a great melancholy Elton John song over the opening credits which I had never heard before, and then no music in the rest of the film.
What do you think? Is your list basically television shows like “Season Two of ‘Parks and Recreation’, that sort of thing?
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From: Andy
To: Mike
Date: November 12, 2010
The fact that I don’t do this is related to the reason why I’ve seen so many movies: if I am genuinely interested in seeing a film, I watch it as soon as I can to satisfy my curiosity about what it is. Now, there’s a whole canon of directors whose work I enjoy, but who aren’t priorities for me. Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Malle, and Eric Rohmer are all on this list: I know that I’m almost certain to enjoy anything they’ve directed, but I also know there’s a limit to just how much pleasure I’m likely to take in any given one of their films. And there are films that I inexplicably dread seeing, even though I know I’ll probably love them: I always have to force myself to sit down and watch a Yasujirô Ozu film, for instance, even though I don’t believe I’ve disliked a single one I’ve seen. But no, I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally avoided or put off seeing a film I truly wanted to see. I am compelled to be a cinephile — it isn’t a choice — and what you’re describing requires control.
You have heard me talk many times about how I eventually want to be someone who watches fewer movies. If you read the previous paragraph as being about wine instead of about film, maybe you will understand what I mean by this: I am describing myself as someone who can’t have a cellar because I’d be too afraid of breaking down and drinking my whole collection over the course of one lost weekend. This is, of course, an imperfect analogy: movies don’t age, so there’s nothing lost by watching them sooner rather than later. Or is it an imperfect analogy? Do you save movies for any old rainy day? Or are you waiting for a “right moment”?
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From: Mike
To: Andy
Date: November 18, 2010
I don’t know, some of the less adventurous Hitchcock films are lost on me. To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955) incurred my “revulsion at decadence” reaction that I’ve told you about, like after Ocean’s Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) and The Promise (Chen Kaige, 2005). “This story is way too minor/derivative/half-baked to deserve this caliber of scenery, or cast, or all the work done on the lighting, or the CGI, or the world-class editor who worked on this instead of something else.”
Rohmer would be in the Ozu category for me. I know the film will seem longer than it is, but then I’ll feel so energized and connected to the world afterwards. Also Hal Hartley — his films and Rohmer’s just have so many words in them, it’s exhausting.
I generally feel like I need to pace my intake of really good movies, leaving enough space between them to appreciate them. Two weeks after seeing Dog Day Afternoon — that’s enough time, now I can watch Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958). So I don’t worry about the temptation to watch everything at once. In fact, I have what’s probably a pessimistic idea of the finite supply of really good things to watch. As if one day I will find myself having nothing left to watch that is both, a) well-known enough so that I can find other people’s opinions about it and, b) guaranteed to be enjoyable, or at least interesting. So, as you suggest, the idea of watching, say, four Orson Welles movies in one weekend would be an unacceptable squandering of what they have to offer, so it is something I am afraid of doing.
I might take it to the opposite extreme, though. The “right moment” to watch something I’ve been looking forward to rarely comes. As you know, I’ve owned a few dozen VHS tapes for the past decade or so, and probably never watched more than two a month until I was about to move away and had the excuse of needing to get rid of them. And the ones that I knew I’d enjoy, like Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988) and Dogma (Kevin Smith, 1999), always got put on the back burner while I watched La Lectrice (Michel Deville, 1988), or Camille Claudel (Bruno Nuytten, 1988), or Gotham (Lloyd Fonvielle, 1988) starring Tommy Lee Jones and Virginia Madsen. Maybe “waiting for a special occasion when I can treat myself to it” is not the right approach to something like Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997). It might backfire and be particularly disappointing because of all the anticipation, e.g. In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009), To Be Or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942).
Now, you are someone who has probably seen all of whatever finite list of essential movies I could conjure up, and it may only be things like The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Wim Wenders, 1972), La Nuit de Varennes (Ettore Scola, 1982), and George Cukor’s version of David Copperfield (1935) that keep you from having seen all of the New York Times’s “Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made” (that may be an exaggeration). So do you find yourself wondering if there might not be any truly exciting film experiences left? Does anyone?
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From: Andy
To: Mike
Date: December 10, 2010
To answer the questions you pose in your last paragraph first, I don’t worry about that myself. In fact, now that I’ve seen most of the “essential” cinema, it’s become much easier for me to slow down and leave myself the space to appreciate things, which really is vital, and to revisit films that I watched “too quickly” and spend some time figuring out what I did or did not like about them. My favorite Buzz, Buzz post was written in this spirit.
Another benefit of making some headway into the canon is that I finally have the confidence to spend the majority of my moviewatching time on films I want to see, because I’m no longer worried that the Greatest Film I’ve Never Seen is lurking in the darkness among the films I think I should watch, waiting to disrupt my entire “worldview of cinema.” If it was, I’d have heard of it by now. There is a “greatest” film I’ve never seen, no doubt, but there’s no longer cause for alarm or capital letters. This awareness is, incidentally, an embryonic form of the most important attribute that I think a film critic can have: total confidence in the value and validity of his or her firsthand impressions of a film’s worth, which often expresses itself in the form of an emphasis on unknown or less-respected films or directors. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Pascual Espiritu (aka Aquarello), and Michael Sicinski all have it. As do, of course, many of the all-time greats, such as Manny Farber, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Dave Kehr. But it’s pretty rare.
I’d like to talk more about this “revulsion at decadence” reaction of yours, because I think it’s interesting. When you dismiss something as “too minor/derivative/half-baked to deserve this caliber of scenery,” etc., you’re conceding that something about the film is really outstanding, yes? Couldn’t “something outstanding” be considered reason enough for a film to exist? Because a film like . . . I don’t know, Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007) is just a waste of money. Which is different, right? Or is it? And this reaction, does it have just as much to do with the circumstances surrounding the film as it does with the film itself? Say Film X triggers you “revulsion at decadence” reaction in part because your favorite editor worked on it, and thus it constituted a “waste” of her time. But say you read a magazine article a year or two later in which she describes her experience working on Film X as a turning point in her professional and creative life — she made some sort of discovery, say, or perfected a technique while cutting the film. Would that alter your perception of the film’s value?
Click here to read Part Two.
