Neg Sparkle #8
“Neg sparkle" is a kind of film damage manifesting as twinkling constellations on the image. This column is about a different kind of film damage, the mental havoc wrought by overindulgence in cinema, though I hold out the possibility that a human being so afflicted may be in some ways better than the normal kind.
“I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.” Federico Fellini.
“I’m a big fat liar.” Also Federico Fellini.
The late Buck Henry credited Fellini, in interviews, with spouting “all sorts of lies and nonsense that he can’t possibly believe,” but it might be amusing to take him at his word. Is cinema a new form of life? It might explain much.
If this is true, are the characters in films living, breathing people? We SEE them breathe, move, and blink, even when they’re supposed to be dead: check out Scatman Crothers’ flickering eyelid JUST at the moment the arch-perfectionist crash-zooms in on his supposed corpse in The Shining. But we know they’re played by actors (or some form of animation, sometimes synchronized to an actor’s voice. We know Scatman Crothers went on acting for several years after his character, Dick Halloran, was axed to death. But we also know that Dick Halloran continues to show the Torrence family around the Overlook Hotel decades after Scatman Crothers died from pneumonia and lung cancer. So who was granted immortality?
But movie characters borrow their life from the words on the page and the bodies and voices and talent of the actors embodying them. Does the camera steal the soul, as some Native Americans are alleged to have believed? If so, the motion picture camera allows the soul to stretch its legs in its prison. But wouldn’t any sentient being become terribly bored, forced to play out the same role, ad infinitum? Jeremy Brett, typecast as Sherlock Holmes and suffering from manic depression, threw himself on the pavement of Baker Street and begged the shade of Sherlock to release him from bondage. Still, I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if you were trapped in Ordinary People or something. Who watches that anymore?
The Shining, then, is a fortuitous film to have started with (I haven’t planned any of this) since it depicts a building full of ghosts perpetually reenacting moments of their lives from the 1920s. From time to time, new spirits are recruited from the living through some kind of unseen casting process, but once they’ve been scooped up, they’ve always been there. The film could be a metaphor for any film, a self-contained unit of characters doomed to enact dramatic moments, on a loop, forever, ‘n’ ever, ever.
Still, one would expect that, out of sheer desperation or exuberance, occasionally a character would depart from the script, change a line reading here, a reaction shot there. And we do have testimony that this sometimes happens.
The premier of Double Indemnity. Billy Wilder was a worried man. He’d already recut the film after a disastrous preview (ironically enough, cutting out the scene of ghosts at the morgue). But he felt that in a crucial scene when Fred MacMurray is unexpectedly visited by Edward G. Robinson while waiting for Barbara Stanwyck (who mustn’t be seen by Robinson!) he should have directed MacMurray to anxiously look towards the door. But he forgot, and they had no shots where the actor so much as glanced in that direction.
Convinced the tension of the scene would be lost if MacMurray didn’t look, Wilder went to the synagogue and prayed. And, at the premiere, as he later related to Volker Schloendorff (on film), MacMurray obligingly DID look towards the door.
Spooky. But spookier still, in no screening I’ve attended does MacMurray look doorwards. He only did it the once, to please Wilder. But the scene retains that needed tension.
But maybe not. I’m not a candidate from Room 237 yet. Maybe we should think of individual characters as alive, but individual films. We all have our favorites, don’t we, just like with our children. Yes we do. Stop shaking your heads. They latch on to us like parasites. And, as we grow, the film seems to change with us, acquiring new depths and resonances, or sometimes exposing a shallowness or staleness not apparent before. Films are said by some (not me) to date, despite the fact that supposedly they don’t change at all.
When we view a beloved film, we’re taking something from it, but is it taking something from us, too? Ninety minutes or so of our lives, certainly. Our attention, our emotions. This is how it feeds. Like the ancient gods, movies exist by taking up our time and devotion. Otherwise they’re just reels of celluloid, videotapes, or a lot of 1s and 0s. I might be at my most alive when watching a film (a shameful admission) but it’s at its most alive while being watched, and we exist in a perverse relationship of voyeur and exhibitionist.
But there is a third, more ominous possibility. Cinema as life form. Not the characters in the films, or the individual films, but cinema as a whole. A single vast organism made up of seemingly independent units, like a coral. If the great barrier reef is, as of this writing, the largest life form on earth, cinema could be even larger as it exists in a universe of its own. Not the MCU, but something vaster, less stupid. As the postmodernists would have it, all our cultural creations coexist in the same vast mental space, so that Sherlock Holmes might investigate the murder of Dick Halloran and accuse the Overlook Hotel of being an accessory before the fact.
Cinema, in fact, certainly exhibits many more of the attributes of life than anything that’s not life. Life, but not as we know it. A strange and alarming form. It is ever-expanding. New cells, or “films” are accreted every year. More actors die, to live on only within the cinemascape. More audiences are sucked in, giving up their lives and adoration. It grows, it consumes, a vast, multi-narrative genre hybrid, swallowing all in its path. What happens when it’s bigger than the universe that spawned it?
by David Cairns