Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
I've never been an avid cinema goer and always preferred theatre though I think I have seen my fair share of good films. I will readily confess that my tastes tend towards the romantic which means, for a decade or more at least, I have been left somewhat out in the cold.
Murder, rape and gun- toting have dominated the screen for rather too long now, with, of course, that brand of apocalyptic science fiction that seems always to be based on the appearance of ugly, murderous creatures who have a grudge against humanity.
I was reminded of my younger, more happy cinema-going days when I read two articles by John Walsh in the Independent Review which tried to answer the question of whether or not films might teach you something about life. After reviewing his film-watching since childhood, and describing the films that left an indelible mark in his mind, he comes up with some interesting conclusions.
He admits that he grew up mesmerised by the movies: watching films in the dark, he claims, never seemed to him a passive activity.
"It was more like visiting a shrine, going to a great dark church for prolonged communion." The cinema became his cultural porthole, "our window on the Zeitgeist".
These early experiences might have been regarded as just fleeing memories from childhood, except that they made "such a nagging, intrusive, almost pernicious claim on your consciousness long after they should have been wiped away by the stern blue pencil of time".
Remembering particular scenes and dialogue from films makes Walsh ask if they "were just nostalgic memories of movies I had once enjoyed, or was something more profound going on, namely that all my life I have been storing up images and dialogue and epiphanies from the movies that had come to mean more to me than any true life experience?"
Much of the time people do not realise the effect films have on them. When one leaves the cinema one is thrown into the real world. Watching a film one is driven by the director to laugh or cry or to identify oneself with the film hero. For a while "we borrow a life from someone else and from the array of screen characters and attitudes, gestures, behaviour, dialogue, revelations of personality, we unconsciously select things that will affect our lives outside the cinema."
Yet with all his enthusiasm for the cinema, Walsh does not believe that it can change people. "Only a fool," he writes "would admit that he or she has become a better person through their exposure to the cinema." Cinema, he notes, has never claimed to be the natural home of moralists.
The excessive violence that has characterised so many recent films appears at last to be on the wane. Maybe this trend is somehow linked to the events, and the aftermath, of 11 September, but there seems to be a growing distaste for the gratuitously violent. It is, as Natasha Walter has pointed out, being increasingly replaced by a newly rediscovered gentleness in many of the arts, cinema included.
"The sort of films that are being most celebrated now," she writes in the Independent, "are films in which emotional sincerity is more important than glitz or big bangs." As proof of her contention she cites the recent BAFTAS. It was The Pianist and The Hours that received the most awards. "Both of them," she writes, "are unselfconscious weepies, films in which the directors tug directly at your heart strings."
The Hours has, of course, become a great success. Loosely based around Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway, and with a stunning performance by Nicole Kidman, there can be no doubting the film's emotional impact on audiences. As Natasha Walter puts it: "The one thing you could say about much of the art and filmmaking that is so successful now is that it isn't afraid of being utterly sentimental."
