Favorite Favorites

To cap off the Practice of Theory series, I’d like to put my money where my mouth is and talk about a few of my favorite films and why they’re my favorite.  The last thing you ever want to do is ask a film student what his or her favorite film is.  I heard a joke once, that the answer will either be ‘it depends on the genre’ or ‘Citizen Kane’.  So rather than mention a few films and tell you why I like each of them, I’ll lay out a few things that I like to see in films, and then list a few that exemplify them. 

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As a filmmaker, I really love movies about movies, perhaps in the same way that a doctor might love Patch Adams or Awakening...or Robin Williams.  Films about film are self-reflexive, which means that they comment on their own creation and reflect on their own existence - they are meta-cinematic.  Film history and film production is a fascinating subject for a film, because it is often peopled with artful, if not artistic, characters and infamous events.  Some of my favorites are Fellini’s 8 ½, Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, and Altman’s The Player.  These films take a self-deprecating, even cynical look at artistic creation, and at the less than idealistic motives that drive the film industry. 

Also, I like films that make you think, or that even confuse you.  And I also like highly stylized films -films that use technical elements (lighting, camera, color, sound, location, etc) to achieve an effect or create a certain look.  The directors I’m thinking of here are Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Sorrentino.  A film like 2001 or Stalker or Il Divo (which are by these three directors, respectively) has a distinctive style.  Style is crafted through precise choices, to project a certain feel, or to express something about the theme, story, characters, or ethics.  These films are both stunning to watch and fascinating to think about. 

I like films that simply tell a good story, regardless of how much the camera moves, or whether the colors are stylized.  Films that I could watch over and over for the story as well as the aesthetics are October Sky, Gran Torino, Cold Mountain, Ocean’s 11, Imitation of Life, Blade Runner, Say Anything, Meet the Parents, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Raising Arizona, Shawshank Redemption, High Fidelity, and Benny and Joon.  They’re special to me for their ability to tell a damn good story, to make me laugh, or make me feel something deeply.  These are all fairly mainstream films that probably won’t show up in too many film theory text books or be taught in many Film Aesthetics classrooms, unfortunately.  But when someone asks me my favorite film, it is often one of these that first comes to mind.       

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Epilogue

[written in June...]

I write this all on the night before my Film Aesthetics final exam [with heavy revisions two months after the fact, now that I am finally posting this].  Tomorrow I will have three hours to write an essay answering one question.  I’ll have to show that I understand something about Film Aesthetics and can articulate my own opinions amid those of the theorists and critics.  Feeling pretty nervous tonight, I can say with absolute certainty that both film theory and film practice will be intertwined in my own future projects, and I know that what I’ve begun this year will be the start of a lifetime effort to the answer that eternal question, What is Film?   

Practice of Theory: Part III

One thing I've learned is that all schools of film theory come down to three simple statements.  A theorist says either: (1) Films are _____________; (2) Films should ______________; or (3) Films can ____________.   (I'll spend more time exploring the first of these, and then briefly touch on the other two.) 

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Films are...

Theories of the first statement (“Films are”) are those most properly called ‘theory’.  These theories attempt to describe the essence of Cinema.  What is this Thing that we call a film?   How do we define it - not on a narrative level or a technical level - but on a fundamental level.  Can we find a definition that transcends genre, film history, or style?

Writers like Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze write about the ontology of film – what film is, essentially.  This is an unanswerable question in my opinion, because it's like trying to staple water to a tree.  Any attempt to pin it down, to say film is this and not that, will be far too reductive and limiting.  And any attempt to conceive of film more broadly will be too general to be even useful.  (Here, I am paraphrasing V.F. Perkins’s sentiments about film theory in his book Film as Film, 1993.)

We can enumerate certain qualities of the film medium, something that theorist Rudolf Arnheim did, to illustrate how film fundamentally differs from reality.  Now it's pretty obvious that films are not the same as real life - anyone who's seen a Disney film can testify to this!  But if we see how film *on its fundamental, philosophical level* is different from reality as we experience it, this opens up some interesting avenues for debate.  It also brings us closer to understanding what film actually is. 

Here's a summary of what Arnheim says about these differences in his book Film as Art (1928). . . .

Film records something that is three-dimensional in the real world, and projects it onto a screen in two dimensions.

Film compresses the depth of the actual thing being photographed; it changes the relative size of an objet from how it would look when viewed in real life. 

When we watch a film we use the senses of sight and sound, whereas in real life we use all five senses.

In a film, light and color are often perceived differently than in real life, and in the case of black and white films, the difference from reality is pretty obvious (unless you live in the movie Pleasantville). 

Newer technology is challenging some of these atributes.  3D, high-definition, surround sound, and CGI are just a few of the advances that (paradoxically) can make a film more life-like, but can also make it more cinematic. (A curious argument has even been made that black & white films are more life-like than color films). 

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Writing about what film is does not often have obvious application to film production, or to critiquing the achievements of an individual film.  However, it is a foundational area of film theory and criticism, because often the more practical theories of film are based on assumptions about Film’s ontology.

For my own opinion, I tend to agree more with Perkins, who explores this issue very deeply in his work.  I will attempt to lay out a very rough definition that explains my view.  

Films are. . . . .  

Nope, can't do it.  I can’t think of a positive statement without a question creeping up which would have to qualify that statement.  Most prominently among these questions is, what do we even mean when we say ‘film’?   

Do we mean the flat image on the screen in the theatre?  Do we mean the *idea* of the film that the viewer has in mind while she is watching it?  Do we mean the production process that goes into making a film?  Do we mean the exchange between the viewer’s mind and what’s on the screen? Or even, do we mean the reel of several thousand meters of film inside of a canister that gets loaded into a projector?  "What is cinema?" is the question that eludes answers but that provokes the search for answers.  (What Is Cinema? is also the title of Andre Bazin’s seminal two-volume work on film.)

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Films should....  & Films can....

The second statement (‘Films should ________’) would indicate a prescriptive film theory.  The third (‘Films can ________’) indicates a descriptive film theory.  This is an important distinction. 

Some theorists think filmmakers should create their work according to certain principles and desired effects that 'the cinema' is best suited for.  Other theorists, by contrast, seek to describe what films are good at doing, while leaving room for the often vast differences between individual films.  

For film in general, I certainly ascribe more to a descriptive theory; however, for my own pursuits in filmmaking, I would like to eventually put on paper a more prescriptive theory, one that would take into account my own moral and ethical aims as an artist.  This is another topic for another article though.  Besides, I'm starting to get my fill of theory anyway...