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MAKING TIME STAND STILL WITH MOVIES - Mick LaSalle, SF Chronicle, October 17, 2004
Years ago, I was home from college. It was 4 in the morning, and I was coming through the door of my parents' house, back from a noisy New Year's Eve party and suddenly into a house completely silent except for the ringing in my ears. I went into the kitchen and got out the milk and the Entenmann's crumb cake, and to amuse myself I put the portable TV on the kitchen table and turned it on, low.
On Channel 9 (WOR), a black-and-white musical was on. Here I'd just left a party, and what do you know? On the other side of this 12-inch screen they were having a party, too, "a gala night on the esplanade." People were out having fun, and there was Fred Astaire, trying to talk Ginger Rogers into dancing with him. Music played, life swirled around them. And as I watched, the two celebrations -- the one I'd just left and "The Gay Divorcee" onscreen -- fused in my mind, and I began to feel as if I were watching the same party, that the people in the movie were celebrating New Year's Day 1982, only they didn't know it.
In this moment it was as if I were seeing a spectacle of life renewing, or evidence of time being an illusion. This 1934 party never stopped. This party still went on. And gradually, watching it -- in between the screaming commercials for Crazy Eddie electronics and Wilson's House of Suede -- I felt encircled in warmth: These people in the movie didn't quite know what specifically in the future they were celebrating, but they did know they were celebrating themselves and us, and they were doing so with lots of generosity.
To my mind, they were celebrating the ephemerality of the moment and the defeat of death, combined. They were celebrating the now-and-then contradiction of movies, which is the heart of cinema. Time stops. It doesn't stop. It's the most mundane thing to describe, the most familiar thing to witness, but it's the one aspect of movies I've never quite been able to completely wrap my mind around, the one thing that always feels like a miracle: The present-tense immediacy of the past.
A month after the Silent Film Festival, I can still think of specific close-ups from specific films that were staggering, not in their beauty, but in their vividness, their capturing of seemingly unconquerable vitality. When you look at a 60- or a 70- or an 80-year-old movie, life fills the screen picture -- but death is the frame.
It's possible that the generation being born now will take this all for granted. We feel no strangeness in reading a 100-year-old book, even in a 100- year-old edition, so maybe they'll feel no strangeness -- or even recognition of the absence of strangeness -- in being entertained by the dead. Yet movies are so immediate that that's hard to imagine.
Certainly, some future viewers will inevitably reflect on the wonder of all that energy stilled by time. Or in an idol moment, they will at least register a simple clinical fascination at seeing someone bound up the stairs, the picture of health, who has spent the past 50 years in the grave.
In the beginning, movies were a present-tense thing, or they at least seemed to be. They were put in the theaters and shown within weeks of being made, and by the time they finished at the third-run houses, they were gone, presumably forever. There was no TV, no repertory scene, no home video.
When Valentino died in 1926, while "Son of the Sheik" was in theaters, audiences marveled at being able to still see Valentino. A decade later, after Jean Harlow died in 1937, critics still found it necessary to assure readers that it didn't feel creepy or eerie to see her in "Saratoga," a posthumous release.
Only after TV arrived did death suddenly become no obstacle to a thriving film career. Humphrey Bogart may have been a big star up until his death in 1957, but it was screenings of his films on TV in the 1960s that turned him into a cultural deity.
By then people had gotten used to seeing movies as past-tense experiences. Repertory houses blossomed. In the great repertory years of the 1970s, there were stars who were dead, and stars who weren't dead, and you always knew who was who. I specifically can recall watching Garbo's films in repertory houses in New York, aware that the actress herself was only a couple of miles away. This awareness was part of the experience of her movies, not a big part, and not even a part I can fully define. But knowing she was around gave the experience an extra glow, perhaps a false sense of continuity between the film's world and ours. At the very least, seeing living people in old movies gave us a nice sense of life dealing justly with beloved figures such as Astaire and Rogers or William Powell and Myrna Loy. Their world and the co- stars around them may have been rapidly slipping into poignancy, but they, at least, were here.
That same holiday week in 1982, I watched the musical "Flying Down to Rio" (1933), and I wondered if any of those braless pre-Code showgirls, cavorting on top of biplanes, were watching themselves on TV at this moment. Where were they now? In 2004, that question has a pretty uniform answer.
I realize I'm throwing around the word "dead" a lot, a great unspoken when it comes to movies -- when it comes to everything, actually -- but the awareness of death, or at least the ephemerality of life, is part of the experience of all the arts. If you see a brilliant piece of theater, such as the San Francisco Opera's transcendent recent production of "The Cunning Little Vixen," you can't help but be aware of all the human endeavor going into making this moment glorious, a moment that vanishes into thin air. Poetry is an attempt to preserve emotion. In a different way, so is painting and sculpture.
What makes movies so different is that actors become part of the artifact that's preserved, and as time goes on and the oldest movies become even older, that difference is revealing itself as something profound. Time is the great heartache and mystery of life. To watch movies and to be in movies is to partake of that mystery.
Years ago, I was home from college. It was 4 in the morning, and I was coming through the door of my parents' house, back from a noisy New Year's Eve party and suddenly into a house completely silent except for the ringing in my ears. I went into the kitchen and got out the milk and the Entenmann's crumb cake, and to amuse myself I put the portable TV on the kitchen table and turned it on, low.
On Channel 9 (WOR), a black-and-white musical was on. Here I'd just left a party, and what do you know? On the other side of this 12-inch screen they were having a party, too, "a gala night on the esplanade." People were out having fun, and there was Fred Astaire, trying to talk Ginger Rogers into dancing with him. Music played, life swirled around them. And as I watched, the two celebrations -- the one I'd just left and "The Gay Divorcee" onscreen -- fused in my mind, and I began to feel as if I were watching the same party, that the people in the movie were celebrating New Year's Day 1982, only they didn't know it.
In this moment it was as if I were seeing a spectacle of life renewing, or evidence of time being an illusion. This 1934 party never stopped. This party still went on. And gradually, watching it -- in between the screaming commercials for Crazy Eddie electronics and Wilson's House of Suede -- I felt encircled in warmth: These people in the movie didn't quite know what specifically in the future they were celebrating, but they did know they were celebrating themselves and us, and they were doing so with lots of generosity.
To my mind, they were celebrating the ephemerality of the moment and the defeat of death, combined. They were celebrating the now-and-then contradiction of movies, which is the heart of cinema. Time stops. It doesn't stop. It's the most mundane thing to describe, the most familiar thing to witness, but it's the one aspect of movies I've never quite been able to completely wrap my mind around, the one thing that always feels like a miracle: The present-tense immediacy of the past.
A month after the Silent Film Festival, I can still think of specific close-ups from specific films that were staggering, not in their beauty, but in their vividness, their capturing of seemingly unconquerable vitality. When you look at a 60- or a 70- or an 80-year-old movie, life fills the screen picture -- but death is the frame.
It's possible that the generation being born now will take this all for granted. We feel no strangeness in reading a 100-year-old book, even in a 100- year-old edition, so maybe they'll feel no strangeness -- or even recognition of the absence of strangeness -- in being entertained by the dead. Yet movies are so immediate that that's hard to imagine.
Certainly, some future viewers will inevitably reflect on the wonder of all that energy stilled by time. Or in an idol moment, they will at least register a simple clinical fascination at seeing someone bound up the stairs, the picture of health, who has spent the past 50 years in the grave.
In the beginning, movies were a present-tense thing, or they at least seemed to be. They were put in the theaters and shown within weeks of being made, and by the time they finished at the third-run houses, they were gone, presumably forever. There was no TV, no repertory scene, no home video.
When Valentino died in 1926, while "Son of the Sheik" was in theaters, audiences marveled at being able to still see Valentino. A decade later, after Jean Harlow died in 1937, critics still found it necessary to assure readers that it didn't feel creepy or eerie to see her in "Saratoga," a posthumous release.
Only after TV arrived did death suddenly become no obstacle to a thriving film career. Humphrey Bogart may have been a big star up until his death in 1957, but it was screenings of his films on TV in the 1960s that turned him into a cultural deity.
By then people had gotten used to seeing movies as past-tense experiences. Repertory houses blossomed. In the great repertory years of the 1970s, there were stars who were dead, and stars who weren't dead, and you always knew who was who. I specifically can recall watching Garbo's films in repertory houses in New York, aware that the actress herself was only a couple of miles away. This awareness was part of the experience of her movies, not a big part, and not even a part I can fully define. But knowing she was around gave the experience an extra glow, perhaps a false sense of continuity between the film's world and ours. At the very least, seeing living people in old movies gave us a nice sense of life dealing justly with beloved figures such as Astaire and Rogers or William Powell and Myrna Loy. Their world and the co- stars around them may have been rapidly slipping into poignancy, but they, at least, were here.
That same holiday week in 1982, I watched the musical "Flying Down to Rio" (1933), and I wondered if any of those braless pre-Code showgirls, cavorting on top of biplanes, were watching themselves on TV at this moment. Where were they now? In 2004, that question has a pretty uniform answer.
I realize I'm throwing around the word "dead" a lot, a great unspoken when it comes to movies -- when it comes to everything, actually -- but the awareness of death, or at least the ephemerality of life, is part of the experience of all the arts. If you see a brilliant piece of theater, such as the San Francisco Opera's transcendent recent production of "The Cunning Little Vixen," you can't help but be aware of all the human endeavor going into making this moment glorious, a moment that vanishes into thin air. Poetry is an attempt to preserve emotion. In a different way, so is painting and sculpture.
What makes movies so different is that actors become part of the artifact that's preserved, and as time goes on and the oldest movies become even older, that difference is revealing itself as something profound. Time is the great heartache and mystery of life. To watch movies and to be in movies is to partake of that mystery.
