Vogue 100: Iris Murdoch On The Cinema
BY VOGUE
17 MAY 2016
I was told at school that the cinema resembles the Cave in the Republic of Plato: a dark hole into which one retires in order to escape from reality and be entertained by shadows. Perhaps for that reason, and feeling too that shadows have their place, I used to expect films to resemble dreams, and was disappointed. I make the assumption that the art of the cinema is visual, and that its task is to delight and enlarge the imagination by the creation of visual images. How should a film achieve this? I speak, of course, as an outsider with strong prejudices and no expertise.
The film is, for better or worse, the medium which can most exactly reproduce the moment-to-moment vagaries of the human consciousness. It is in fact the most natural image for the consciousness, which Locke, for want of this example, likened to a magic-lantern show. The film presents an animated visual picture, observed from a certain point of view and experienced in a non-reversible order. From a painting we can stand back, with a novel we can pause and ponder, but a film is as near to us as our own self-awareness, and comes over us with the inevitability of time itself. One result of this is that the film can be the most profoundly boring and demoralizing of all art forms. What can compare with the feeling of blunted dreariness with which one leaves a bad film, especially if one has been unwise enough to visit it in the afternoon?
A good story will always benefit a film, though a weak one will not necessarily ruin it. The Magnificent Ambersons is admirable in spite of its story, but what makes Seven Samurai mythological in the memory is that in addition to its other merits it is a great archetypal tale. Now what can the movie camera do which nothing else can do, and what should it therefore busy itself doing? It can present to us human drama and feeling in the form of momentary awareness. A film should not attempt objectivity; it should not be "as if we were there ourselves" (why are most travel films so depressing?). It should resemble, not a vague detached awareness of things going forward, but a tense heightened awareness, such as we have in dreams or moments of emotional vision. After all, this is a form of Art. Therefore, objects in films ought never to look normal, since objects do not do this in ordinary life in our moments of most acute observation. A film should show us a strange and startling world, disintegrated and distorted, and full of dramatically significant objects. Compare the surrealist painter, who attempts by curious juxtapositions to revive our jaded awareness of our surroundings.
I am tempted to say that the cinema is an art of indoors. Few outdoor shots linger in my memory except as reminders of other landscapes; and perhaps the most totally depressing, as well as one of the most common types of cinema-going experience is to be presented with a sunny field of waving corn to the accompaniment of mediocre music. There is, however, one natural object with which the cinema is supremely concerned, and that is the human body, and more especially that "most interesting surface," the human face. Here we can find tragedy and comedy made minutely concrete in the movement of a muscle, and human character on display at the point where spirit and matter are most intensely fused. If cinema could do nothing but present faces it would have enough material to be a major art.
It follows from all this that I admire Cocteau and Orson Welles: that frankly dream-like quality of the former, the everyday grotesque quality of the latter. The conversations in the dark house in The Magnificent Ambersons, for instance, overwhelmingly create an image of despair which is at the same time a delight to remember, a piece of intensified consciousness transformed into the material of art. These scenes also illustrate a careful combining of vision and sound. (I do not go so far as to lament the disappearance of the silent film; but how often the addition of sound merely makes for facile story-telling, and how rarely it is treated seriously as an aspect of the image.)
Such a grotesque intensity of presentation need not, of course, be alarming; it can also be funny, as we see from the films of Chaplin, and from The Italian Straw Hat, which is perhaps the funniest film ever made.
It follows, too, that I like emotion minutely expressed. What a commentary on the dramas of love would be possible here! Yet films too rarely deal with love. The love scene in which tensions, ambiguities, calculations and hopes appear in minute signs - this is not often to be found. Examples that occur to me are the touching scene in the café in Brief Encounter, where the doctor begs the girl to see him again, and the scene in the conservatory in Le jour se lève. I don't think there are many others. Add to this the screen tendency to prefer vacuous regular faces to irregular and interesting ones. For a serious treatment of the face we turn to Japan, where perhaps the cinema is aided by a dramatic tradition which interested itself in facial expression. Even in the surely not impossibly difficult task of presenting the magic of feminine beauty the cinema has not often succeeded, and for all their undeniable charms I would exchange the whole pack of Italian gamines for the memory of Lee Miller in Le Sang d'un Poète.
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