FILM:In two new books, the critic David Thomson explores the history and influence of cinema, while David Denby assesses its future in a digital world

The Big Screen: The Story of Movies and What They Did to Us, By David Thomson, Allen Lane, 608pp, £25

Do the Movies Have a Future, By David Denby, Simon & Schuster, 347pp, £16.87

In the beginning, movies were made into a business by European refugees, Jewish, mostly. Men such as Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn, William Fox; all of whom came from a tradition of oral storytelling, sentimental narrative theatre and broad comedy. But it was DW Griffith, born in Kentucky in 1875, who was arguably the first great artist of the cinema. It was he who first saw the potential of the great new democratic medium. He showed that the camera’s possibilities could be varied and made subtle with angle. He realised the power of the close-up to express emotion and invented techniques of crosscutting that persist to this day.

But for Griffith, the power of the story was everything. (Years later, Billy Wilder would say that there were only three things that mattered in cinema: story, story and story.) And while he utilised real landscape and natural light, he understood that the greatest landscape of all is the human face. Natural light and the world behind the eyes were perhaps Griffith’s richest gifts to the cinema. He understood that a new universal language had been created, and that the “star” was born;the star who engendered the belief that we can change who we are by escaping anonymity.

Among the first of these were Chaplin and Keaton. Keaton suggested mystery in stillness while conveying a complex universe, a blank canvas on to which the audience could project a myriad of often conflicted emotions. Chaplin, on the other hand, strove to make us feel, and to move us by ingratiating himself. Keaton understood that emotional connection is an illusion and that the relationship between the viewer and the viewed is essentially voyeuristic. In the film Pandora’s Box, David Thomson writes, “with its still damp glow as if Lulu had just had sex, she stares out at us with those unknowable eyes issuing a challenge to our furtive voyeurism”.

There is a fragment of footage of George Bernard Shaw from 1937, in which the irascible old gent’s address to the TV camera in the garden of his house in Ayot St Lawrence perfectly sums up this complex relationship. “All of you out there can see me, but I cannot see you,” he states, with something approaching wonder. Yet through the mysterious alchemy of film we are transported to the future or the past, and escape the cares of the present, for the price of a ticket, in an experience to be shared with strangers. Drawn to the light in the dark, and the flickering shadows, like the poor prisoners in Plato’s cave, believing the illusion is real, we want to escape . . . escape from ourselves.

The roots of cinema are in oral storytelling and later in literature, such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1492), possibly the greatest novel ever written, in which Cervantes intuited many of the cinematic techniques of storytelling: the quest, the journey of the hero, the obstacle to be overcome (all from the oral tradition), the flashback, the road movie, the mismatched buddies, the unreliable narrator, and the confusion of fantasy and reality. Later on there would be Shakespeare, Hardy, Dickens and Chekhov. To read Chekhov’s stage directions is to anticipate Jean Renoir, writes Thomson. Just as technology brought fire, the wheel, the plough, the quill, the printing press, the typewriter and the computer, it finally gave life to the still image, the photograph.

Caves of dreams

Eadweard Muybridge came to photography sometime in the 1860s. It was the beginning of an era, stretching to the first World War, of the most profound social and technological change. It saw the invention of electricity, the motor car, the airplane; it saw votes for women and the birth of psychoanalysis. The result was change at an unprecedented rate, and the growing awareness that people might be a mass or force. This newly excited and overwhelmed force of people had a deep need to understand their strange and brave new world. First through photography, and then later via the moving image, it came to wonder-making life; not the real world, of course, but a faux real world which profoundly altered real world attitudes to everything from history and politics to personal morality. People saw themselves reflected through the miracle of motion.

Magic, technology and the moving image created a new sense of what it meant to be alive, and made sense of a crazy, capsized world. Muybridge was the inventor of film motion and the liberator of the still image. In 1877, Leland Stanford, a banker, became involved in a bet as to whether a galloping horse always had one foot on the ground. He enlisted the help of Muybridge, who devised a series of cameras that had mechanical shutters activated by strings, tripped by the movement of the horse’s legs; and so space and time were recorded in still pictures taken at split-second intervals. He then invented a machine called a zoopraxiscope, through which these images were shown sequentially on a cylindrical drum. When these stills were viewed through a small hole, and the drum was rotated, the horse appeared to be in motion; seconds of time, in mid-air.

One cannot help but think back to the caves of Chauvet in the south of France, where, more than 32,000 years ago, humans had drawn and painted hundreds of animals, including horse, deer and rhino. “The beginnings of the modern human soul,” as Werner Herzog calls it. Perhaps this was the dawn of cinema, protocinema daubed with the hand of the first auteur. Surely the imagination of our ancestors must have created the illusion of real motion on the flame-lit walls of those caves.

Beginning as dream, we have allowed movies to become a replacement for reality, which is for Thomson the fundamental paradox at the heart of his book. The single light in the darkness and the collective experience has now become a myriad of screens, some of which are smaller than a hand, causing us to feel powerless and helpless. There are so many screens now to occupy us beyond the dark cave of the picture house where we, as one, collectively surrender to a refracted, secondhand reality. Now the act of viewing is a solitary one.

Have we moved from a visual society, where meaning is interpreted through image, to a visible society, where surveillance cameras catch our every move? Are we seduced now by images that offer no meaning and demand no empathy? We switch our TV screens on and off, we alter images with Photoshop, YouTube encourages us to watch bits and clips, the debris from the explosion of a culture. It is a culture that has become atomised, fragmented – a McLuhanesque reality, where the image has no meaning beyond itself and the easy multiplicity of screens is a metaphor for our own isolation and alienation.

Thomson looks back wistfully to a time that will probably never come again, the panchromatic black and white printed on nitrate stock, the canvas of Fred and Ginger, Von Sternberg, Dietrich, Tolland and Wells, proposing it as one of the finest inventions the US has ever come up with. Those pictures take place on sets that feel “like hardened cellophane”. Fred’s smile acknowledges the earliest impulse of the medium – “Yes. Look at me, I’m moving” – the same excitement that gripped Muybridge with his zoopraxiscope.

It’s obvious that Thomson loves movies, with his aesthetic inspired by classic American and French cinema. The Big Screen is his letter to a lost love. He imagines what it felt like to see Muybridge’s first photographs, or the night in Paris when the train rushed from the screen at a terrified but excited audience. We think of all the images we ourselves remember (in cinema we remember what we see rather than what we hear): the peacock floating through the snow in Amarcord; William Holden dead in the pool in Sunset Boulevard; Brando screaming “Stella!”. Our lives would be the poorer without the countless images we hold dear from the caves of dreams.

If the movies have a future, it’ll be thanks in no small measure to David Thomson. His love and passion for film shines out from the pages of his beautifully written book, an encyclopedic and sometimes wistful journey through cinema history.

Time for a new wave

David Denby’s Do the Movies Have a Future? is a cri de coeur against the dying of the cinematic light. Denby bemoans the way that big-budget Hollywood films have been defoliated of character, and psychology, “like a huge fancy clock displaying gears and wheels, yet somehow failing to tell the time”. He identifies the relentless emphasis on action, which produces sensation and spectacle at the expense of emotional and psychological engagement.

Some years ago I took my daughter to see Moulin Rouge, and as we waited for the film to begin I tried to explain to her the power of editing, and how it effects our responses to film on a subconscious level – not an easy concept to explain to an 11-year-old. As the film progressed I heard her counting in the dark “1,2,3,4 . . . 5, 6,7 . . .”. She explained: “I’m counting the editing, Dad.” By the end of the film, when the heroine expires, we feel little or no emotion because of the fast-paced editing. Denby addresses the disintegration of film language in big films, and how it weakens or eliminates emotional response. Movies such as Transformers that earn billions of dollars at the box office worldwide lay waste to film as an art form. In recent years, children have been playing video games and reading comic books, so Disney buys the rights to the Marvel comics for €4 billion.

Time Warner own DC Comics and so initiate their audiences from seven or eight-years old and hold them with franchises, sequels and tie-ins for 15 to 20 years.

This is not a passing phase, it is the reality of a business that doesn’t just cater to its audience, but consciously develops it, so that they can sell to it. How then, asks Denby, can they ever develop a taste for narrative, character, irony, wit or drama? Will they be so addicted to sensation that anything without extreme action seems lifeless and boring? He disdains the conglomerate aesthetic that feeds on cliche, rejecting anything too individual or complex. As the critic Molly Haskin has noted, “Hollywood entertainment for adults is an oxymoron.”

I recently showed some of my acting students in New York Dog Day Afternoon (1972), a film I remember as being emotionally gripping and intense. Most of them related only sporadically, finding the emotional relationship dull and the editing slow.

What I realised then was how profoundly young audiences have been influenced by the style and pace of contemporary video games and television. It is hard to believe that for the first 100 years of its existence, cinema was made for adults. Like Thomson, Denby hankers after the blessed mental state of movie going; both solitary and social.

He confronts the demise of the legitimate film critic steeped in social, historic and moral coherence. For quite some time the big conglomerates have been trying to marginalise legitimate critics in any way they can.

Critics alert us to the aesthetic, moral and ideological value of a new group of filmmakers; the Italian neo-realism of the 1940s, and the 1970s generation of new American filmmakers, for example. The rise of digital technology allows small budget films to be made, but Denby longs for an American equivalent of the glory days of the French New Wave – and is faintly optimistic.

In just 100 years cinema has evolved from the still image to motion, from the silents to the talkies, to the advent of television and now the digital revolution. My own conviction is that we will always attempt to make sense of our world through story, and how we tell stories will change in tandem with technology to find new forms and expressions of our deepest selves.