About films

There is no doubt that I have seen more films than I have read books.

I can account for about 750 films I have seen (yes, sadly I have attempted to list them), but there are countless more I have forgotten, so I must have watched well in excess of 1000 - a sobering thought.
It’s obvious why films consumed outnumber books: it’s much easier to watch a film than it is to read a book and it takes far less time. It usually requires no effort and is quite passive. Film watching is generally both undemanding and engrossing. In fact I find that at some level I enjoy most films I watch, or maybe that’s also because I’m fairly discriminating in choosing what to view.

The cinema is described in French as the Seventh Art; I’m not quite sure what the first six are, but it is quite appropriate as it is a distinctive medium in its own right.
The moving picture with sound is actually the art form which best gives an imitation of real life, hence its accessibility and immense popularity.
But of course films are not like real life at all, they are usually far more structured and have a soundtrack. That structuring often becomes more apparent as time goes by, some old films, though still compelling, seem quite stilted and artificial; indeed they appear to be the works of imagination and fiction that they really are. The shots that make up a good film are each carefully chosen to tell a story. Narrative is hugely important in films and those without it tend to be quite boring. Even if some arty critics may rave about them, feature films without a story are a disappointing affair.

Films are made to be seen in the cinema. There is something special about sitting in the large darkened room as part of an audience, usually discovering a work together for the first time. The image on the big silver screen and the loud sound usually mean, unless someone is rustling pop-corn next to you, that there is nothing to distract you from total involvement. It doesn’t matter how big your TV is, the desert scenes in “Lawrence of Arabia” are just not going to have the same impact in your living room.

And yet I must admit that I have probably seen only half of my notional thousand plus films actually in a cinema. They come round on TV and we buy or rent them on DVD these days.
Watching a film this way on the TV set is good for your cultural knowledge, as indeed is listening to a work of classical music on a CD rather than in a concert hall, or knowing a picture from an art-book rather than a gallery; but like them it is not quite the same and a somewhat diminished experience.

Over the last few years, not least because of the increasing availability of classic films on cheap DVDs I have nonetheless become interested in filling in the gaps in my cinematic knowledge and also revisiting films only half paid attention to when previously seen on the TV . Though here too, recent opportunities to see old favourites such as Fritz Lang’s “M” or the Marx Brothers’ “Night at the opera” on a proper screen at the Cinematek have revealed a new intensity to me. However, many of the acknowledged greats of the history of film can rarely be seen on the full screen now and were originally shown in cinemas long before I started to go to them.

Which gives me an opportunity to digress.
I cannot with hand on heart remember what the first film was I went to see at the cinema. I would have to ask my parents, though I suspect that Walt Disney cartoons would be a strong contender.
In Ilkley, the town where I spent most of my childhood, there were two cinemas: the Grove, reputed to be slightly more up-market, and the Essoldo. The Grove was pulled down to make way for a car-park, the Essoldo, after a period as a bingo hall, was demolished to make room for a supermarket. They were typical of their period: large theatres with stalls and a balcony (the worst place to sit was the stalls below the balcony edge, as you could be bombarded with discarded ice-cream tubs). They had fancy red curtains which were raised to reveal the screen.
I can still just remember when you used to get a B film and an A film, or at least an A film with shorts before it. Then there was the unseemly rush at the end to get out while the credits rolled so as to avoid having to stand for the national anthem. It was a sport and if you hadn’t quite made it to the back you still stopped and stood stock -still facing the screen as the drum roll came before the first chord. My parents used to deposit my brother and me at the Essoldo on Saturdays for a full afternoon of children’s special performance, with Tom and Jerry’s, films including child actors sponsored by the British Youth Film Foundation (or something like that) and Norman Wisdom’s which even then seemed ancient. It seemed like a real treat to us, but I now realize that it was a god-sent opportunity for my parents to be free of the kids for a few hours.
Later when we all went to the cinema together my family’s cult film was the start-studded American comedy “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” the script of which we had down pat from repeated viewing so it became the source of many catch-phrases.

Going to the cinema, unlike some other activities, is something I’ve never stopped doing throughout my life, admittedly with varying frequency. Clara sometimes says I’m not a keen cinema goer, but the truth is I like my entertainment live and tend to regard cinema as second best. I go to more concerts and theatre performances than films at the cinema: the present score ths year is 13 films to 18 live events; but I think that’s still quite a few films. My attitude is that since a film is an unchanging fixed artefact, it’s not urgent to see it and if I miss it at the cinema I can still see it later on TV, though I realize to lesser effect than in the cinema. I also don’t like to sit inside a dark room on a light summer evening so I tend to go more in the winter or when it’s wet. But when I do go to the cinema I definitely enjoy it.

Before the feature film, there used to be shorts and newsreels: believe it or not I remember, when I first arrived in Belgium, seeing a really naff Belgavox with the King on an official visit to the Congo watching semi-naked African tribal dancers. But now of course you only get trailers and adverts which you have to put up with if you want to get in early enough to have a decent seat that won’t give you neck-ache from having your nose up against the screen. While I’m a real sucker for the trailers which do indeed get me to go to see films I might otherwise not have considered, I tend to loathe the adverts, which, if you go with any frequency, you’ve almost certainly seen before, and appear to concentrate on pedalling fantasies no one could possibly believe about motor cars and alcoholic beverages. So it is something of a relief when the film actually starts.

In choosing what to go to see at the cinema, apart from being inspired or put off by trailers, I read reviews and listen to what friends think of what they’ve seen recently. I tend to choose a film on the basis of its director rather than who’s starring in it and have a penchant for films that give me an image of and insight into daily life in other countries (ie not USA), which is one reason I liked “Slumdog Millionaire”. I usually shy away from over-hyped, colossal-budget, action-packed Hollywood blockbusters, but some do turn out nonetheless to be worth seeing (most recently “Avatar”). I certainly have to admit that technically the Americans can’t be faulted whereas the Europeans can often be a little self-indulgent when it comes to their editing.
Being a linguist, I prefer to see films in their original language version. Living in Brussels is good for this; for as it is officially a bilingual city, nearly all films are shown in the original with French and Dutch subtitles. I had a curious experience in Talinn once watching the "Da Vinci Code" in English. There was a passage I didn't understand so I looked at the subtitles and had the choice between Estonian and Russian. After struggling with my schoolboy Russian for a moment to decypher the cyrillic, I realized the unknown language was actually Latin and my schoolboy Latin was at least as good.

From my initial comments it is clear that I could run a regular piece for “About being here” on films watched last year, but I’m not sure I will. In the end, most films are quite ephemeral and whilst entertaining the eye and ear for two hours actually leave little mark on the brain and so soon fade from memory. It is, therefore, a sure sign of some greater value if they do actually stick in your mind for any length of time, or indeed make you want to watch them again. A good film, like any good work of art, will bear repeated appreciation.

Films can be memorable for a variety of reasons.
There are those where the image of a certain scene has become an often quoted icon of cinema history.
There are those where the story is particularly compelling. Those that make you cry or laugh without fail every time. Those which in short are just beautifully made in terms of photography and timing, editing if you will, where every time you will notice some new detail carefully included to leave no loose ends.

So now is the time to list some of those films I have enjoyed re-watching, without making any claim for their constituting a definitive list of the best films ever; for having looked at various critics’ attempts at list-compiling in this area, I now realize this to be a most hazardous and utimately quite subjective enterprise. Indeed, in working my way through a composite list of critically acclaimed films (on the website “They Shoot Pictures Don’t They?”), I have made some great discoveries but also seen a fair few which I found disappointing and wondered why they were so highly thought of. There are three directors I find particularly over-rated in this respect, who won’t be on my list but I mention them as they are frequently represented by several films in critics’ “Top 100 films”: Godard for being utterly pretentious (while “A bout de souffle” is still quite fun, “le Mépris” is awful), Hitchcock for playing amusing but ultimately vacuous games (however well crafted “Vertigo” and “Psycho” are) and Chaplin, for not actually being funny, though admittedly occasionally moving.

So here are twenty-four, which I won’t comment on individually.

Amadeus (Forman,1984)
Amarcord (Fellini, 1973)
Annie Hall (Allen, 1977)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)
The Blue Angel (von Sternberg, 1930)
Cabaret (Fosse, 1972)
Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964)
The Graduate (Nichols,1967)
It's a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946)
Kes (Loach, 1969)
Ladri di biciclette (De Sica, 1948)
Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962)
M (Lang, 1931)
A Night at the Opera (Wood, 1933)
The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957)
Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs (Hand,1937)
Some Like it Hot (Wilder, 1959)
Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950)
The Third Man (Reed, 1949)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
West Side Story (Wise, 1961)

It’s too early yet to know whether I want to include them, but the two I have enjoyed most in the last three years are

Das Leben der anderen (von Donnersmarck, 2006)
Gran Torino (Eastwood, 2008)

You’ve probably seen most of these already, but if you haven’t I can warmly recommend them.