A paradoxical introduction to the following entry[1] about the film I have recently finished writing

I have spent far, far too much time watching films I don’t really enjoy. When I was living in London, I’d glance through Time Out (or indeed, City Limits, may it rest in peace) and think, ‘Ooh, a Kurosawa retrospective,’ or, ‘A new film by Ousmane Sembène. That looks interesting’.

It has taken me almost twenty years to realise that I don’t particularly like films. There are particular films that I like[2] . It’s the medium that does nothing for me.

I can spend two hours watching a bad play and learn something (when plays work well it’s hard to see cogs and wires). But a bad film feels like a wasted evening.

Just after Macbeth is informed of Lady Macbeth’s death he delivers his famous soliloquy (‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow….’) which ends with the following lines:

… Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

He’s talking about human life, of course. That brief reign of light between darkness and darkness. He’s also talking about his own short and brutal career on the political stage. But he is an actor on a literal stage, too. And the lines make this explicit. Macbeth, that giant of a man, exists only as a piece of play-acting. He appears for a brief time in a circle of light before our eyes, then the light dies and he ceases to exist.

If the play is performed well, you cannot hear the lines without realising that all of these meanings coalesce, and that Macbeth is talking about all of us.

We only exist in any meaningful sense as long as there is light, as long as someone is watching us and taking notice of what we say. We are all playing some kind of role. We are all acting a part that feels as if it was written by someone else. And when the light goes out, then everything we call the world simply vanishes.

Plays are all about pretending. That this woman is Hedda Gabler. That we are in fact on the coast of Illyria. That this is the year 1592.

On one level, it’s like being a child again. Playacting for grown-ups. On a deeper level, plays resonate because we are watching a dramatisation of something we do every day of our lives.

We act out different roles all the time. Think of the person you are when you are with your partner, your mother, your children, your friends, your colleagues. Even when we are talking to ourselves, we are doing just that, talking to ourselves. If we are honest, we playact as much inside our own heads as we do when we are giving a speech at a wedding.

We are constantly choosing our words, calculating the effect we will have on others. Or, more often, realising that other see us in a way we appear to have no control over.

Good plays understand this. The Alchemist, The Country Wife, The Importance of Being Earnest, Waiting for Godot, Angels in America… they are all about the way human beings perform in the presence of other human beings. To make money, to get someone into bed, to cover their tracks, to save their souls, to pass the time…

Plays, in short, are metaphorical. You have to put some effort in. You have to suspend your disbelief and interpret what you’re seeing. And that effort is condensed version of something you have to do every day of your life in order to understand and work with other human beings.

Novels are metaphorical, too. Black symbols on paper that you have to turn into a farmyard in Wessex, a Parisian drawing room, the deck of the Pequod.

The same goes for paintings. Even the most doggedly anti-representational abstraction must be translated into something more than areas of colour if it is to come alive[3].

But film is literal. It demands no effort from us. Our job is simply to sit back, open our eyes and point our heads in the right direction.

However much film tries to be quirky, or mysterious, or symbolic, however much it tries to lay bare it’s own mechanism[4], it always looks like a filmed record or real events which happened somewhere at some time in the past (badly made films just look like a record of people trying to make a film).

Films can move us, they can overawe us, they can terrify us or disturb us, or make us laugh, but they never involve us in the way that plays and novels and paintings do.

It’s all there in the ambiguity of the word ‘screen’. A blank area onto which pictures are protected. A membrane that prevents anything moving though it.

Films require nothing of us, except that we be consumers. And though we might leave the cinema understanding more about gun-running in Chicago, or the opium trade, or how to rob a bank, we never leave with the sensation that the film has understood us[5].

Anyway… I’ve spent the last year or so writing this film…

[1]See Coming Down the Mountain.
[2]When Harry met Sally, Fanny and Alexander, Magnolia, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Some Like it Hot, Clueless…
[3]Indeed, much of the voltage generated by the paintings of Barnett Newman or Agnes Martin or Sol LeWitt comes precisely from the way they fight our almost irrepressible urge to see ‘into’ them.
[4]As in The Blair Witch Project, for example, or Richard Linklater’s aggressively lo-tech Tape.
[5]By ‘us’, of course, I mean ‘me’. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘me’. And by ‘people’ I mean ‘me’. It’s just grammatically simpler to pretend that I’m talking on behalf of the entire human race. And given that most of the human race is going to disagree with pretty everything in this entry, I might as well give up persuasion and go for grandiose hectoring.