
My second-choice dream of becoming a film critic also stalled. The last and only film review I
wrote was of, coincidentally enough, Last Tango in Paris. It was printed in the Canberra Times under my
maiden name because I was a public servant then and there were rules about not
taking outside work. I only wrote the
review because the regular reviewer went on holiday, and he didn’t take kindly to
my callow jokes about wishing he didn’t come back. The closest I came then to writing on film
was publishing my novel Schemetime
about an Australian filmmaker who goes to Hollywood. Though it’s my personal favourite, not
many share my enthusiasm and it didn’t
sell many copies. I started a collection
of essays on Hollywood but only finished two of them. From this late perspective, it does seem that
my love affair with the movies was doomed from the start.
I don’t get out to films much now, largely because my
partner isn’t as keen on them. There’s
the expense and also the inconvenient screening times. We both grew up in an era when movies ran
continuously, mornings, afternoons and nights. You could enter a cinema at any time and stay as long as you liked, so
if you missed the beginning of a film you could catch up on it after the reel
had finished and started up again for the next screening, though you’d probably
have to sit through the second feature.
God knows what that did to our narrative expectations (there may be a
thesis in that) but what it clearly did do is facilitate attendance. Maybe the cinemas could resume the
practice. It might save them money and
prevent so many of them from closing.
Sadly, two of the cinemas closest to us have shut down. There’s some excellent theatres further afield
but distance is a disincentive. What we
have been doing, though, is availing ourselves of the DVD collection at our
local library. And though the range is
commendable I’ve stumbled on yet another obstacle.
I’ve known for a while that my hearing isn’t what it should
be, but until now it’s never been bad enough for me to resort to a hearing aid. They’re expensive and except for the ones my
daughter uses, which are stratospherically so, I’ve never come across anyone
wearing them who’s happy with the experience. They
buzz, are too loud etc, etc. So why go
to the expense, I’ve periodically asked myself.
But resorting to DVDs, despite the excellent range, has forced me to
revisit the issue. The reason being that,
though it’s variable, on many of them the sound can be truly awful. Or maybe it’s me. Whatever the cause, I’ve got used to watching
without hearing much, and for all the annoyance, it’s made me more attentive,
more observant of the medium’s fundamentals. I’m more receptive to the actors’ movements
and gestures and, while aware that I’m missing out on nuance in the dialogue, I
find that I can follow the drift of the story pretty much without it. The music I can hear well enough but music in any case, with its purpose to facilitate the creation of
atmosphere and mood and alert you to trouble ahead, is subservient to everything else in film. Or should be.
I’m much more aware of how the camera moves and the shots are set up; in
short, what cineastes in their most lyrical moments call the language of film -
how it actually works. I attend to the
lighting, to the pace of the editing, to the choice of colours if there are
any, the tones if black and white.
The purists, of course, have always claimed that silence was
the essence of the art. Montage,
jump-cuts, fade ins and fade outs, fades to black and so forth were the stock
in trade of filmmakers, as they are today.
It’s interesting to speculate moreover on just how much a century and
more of exposure to these techniques have influenced other art forms,
literature for one, though such an enormous subject should be saved for another
day. The point to make here is that
silence in this context is not the same as wordlessness – there were words in
silent films only we didn’t hear them spoken, they were spelled out for us on
the screen. Nor were they were without
musical accompaniment, if the accompanist was right there in the theatre
instead of recorded on a sound stage.
As far as DVDs go, I’ve found the sound on the English
productions better than on the American, which is interesting and must have an
explanation but I haven’t yet unearthed it.
Two American ones in which I found the sound particularly bad were 1973’s The Way We
Were and the much later Capote, released in 2005 and for which the late and
sorely missed Philip Seymour Hoffman won his Oscar. Hoffman was such an inspired actor that he
managed to make the offensive, morally compromised Truman Capote with the
world’s most grating voice (that did come through but not with the sense of what he said) wholly
sympathetic, and I was able to follow the development of his character and the
devastating effect his involvement with the convicted murderer Perry Smith had
on him just by charting the alterations in perception and mood registered on
Hoffman’s face. It helped too that I’d
read the Gerald Clarke biography.
I first watched The Way We Were the year it came out, in a
cinema in Adelaide where I bawled my eyes out so much I could hardly see the
ending for the tears. Seeing it again
after all this time I recognise it as an unmistakenly Hollywood offering just by
the slick production values. The
sets, for example, though correct for the period, are too pretty, and there was
no way that director Sidney Pollack was going to let Barbra Streisand really
look like a poor 1930s student radical.
In other words, it is all too glamourous. That said, it’s the kind of film that could
only have been produced in a very short period in Hollywood’s history, towards the
end of the Vietnam war to the advent of Reagan’s presidency. (Reagan, you
recall, made his name in a string of schmaltzy Hollywood products before, for our
pain, going into politics.) This was the
moment when communists could actually be portrayed sympathetically, and it was The Way We Were's dissection of class, ethnicity and cold war hysteria that moved me so in
that Adelaide cinema, and notwithstanding the gloss and the poor sound on the DVD, it’s
moved me again.