On December 28, 1895, at the Grand Cafe on Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, the Lumière brothers screened their first film. Since then, cinema has entered our everyday life.
Today different directors speak differently of their art. Some say that cinema is in a rut; some assert its potential to influence the audience. There is a grain of truth in both views. A film must contain something that may influence the audience, and these days it’s hard to predict what this may be. On the other hand, whatever it may be, the audience must be prepared to receive their gospel.
I’m reading Miller’s Big Sur in Russian, so I cannot quote the passage about the real and the imaginary, but I’ll try to summarise his thought. Our life, he writes, is a dream. We move from one phase of this dream to another, from the dream of sleep to the dream of awakening, from the dream of life to the dream of death. He means, simply, that we aren’t always aware of what is happening, of the boundary between certainty and uncertainty. But the ultimate beauty of the dream is in its transforming force. Every object, animate or inanimate, the entire world, has got an aura, which becomes fluid in the dream and can transform itself.
Cinema is a dream. Moreover, it is a play, and, as everyone would agree, it aims at constructing its own space with its rules and agents. And here is where we sometimes stumble. I don’t quite like it when in Russia, for instance, some people are trying to invent a new word to describe an actor’s performance. Simply, where in English there are two words, game and play, which are used differently and sometimes strictly in a collocation, in Russian we’ve only got one word, igra. Whether you’re speaking of a sexual foreplay, or political games, or children games, or an actor’s playing, you’re using the word igra. And some people want to put in a divide between woeful life and beautiful art – as if the two can really be separated. At worst, they say that acting fools people.
It does. I read recently that a certain lady had stopped her romancing with Anthony Hopkins because in her mind he was strongly identified with Hannibal Lecter. And there are scores of women who think that a certain actor is just as sexually wild in life as he is on screen. But Hopkins is not Lecter, and a heartthrob can be a very modest man. So, the actors are playing, and, if this gives enough consolation to anyone, they fool themselves just as they fool us. In real life, they are nice and gentle parents, and on screen they kill in cold blood. Indeed, it looks like they use their talent against us. In truth, they give us an image of life that we’re craving for – like in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Or they make us see something we’d rather not look at. Or they try and show us a new dimension to life, which otherwise may have consisted of four walls of our room.
The world is a dark cinema hall, says Jean-Luc Godard in Notre Musique, and cinema is the ‘light’ that shines upon it from the screen. Cinema manipulates with the imaginary objects, but only imaginary is certain; reality is uncertain.
And so we’re living a dream. We’re living it in real time, if one agrees with Henry Miller, and we’re living it, when we watch films. Admittedly, as techniques and resources improved, the dream has become longer and brighter. The very first films shown at the Grand Cafe in Paris were only about 90 sec long. These days they can last as long as 4 hours, or even more.
The point is not that someone on both sides of the screen is constantly pulling our leg. If we think that art only reflects life, then we’re being fooled when we listen to the music, and when we read books, and when we look at the paintings. All that is a dream. But we need its transforming power to learn about ourselves, to see our aura being modified, if only slightly or very gradually.
More on the Lumière brothers films – here.
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