Thank You for Having Me
CINEMA
By ISABEL QUIGLY
With colleagues and film-people, things are easier: you explain how and why, murmur about overwork, domestic arrangements and the rest of it. You are sad, because those cosy Mon- day mornings or wet Tuesdays after lunch at the Cameo-Poly or the Carlton are over for good. You may go as a visitor but not as an insider again. Everything, after ten years, has the patina of familiarity—the texture of the seats at this or that cinema is as friendly and unglamordus as your tooth-brush, the taste of the snacks here or the tea there as unmistakable as the reiterated flavours of childhood, you could find your way to the telephone or the Ladies blindfold, just as you know the vagaries of publicity men, the hats and hairstyles of colleagues, their gangs and groupings, and the far- or near-sightedness of everyone by the distance they noose to sit from the screen.
It is an easy relationship, weekly renewed be- fore and after the films, when the critics converge from or melt into the surrounding landscapes of Leicester Square or the Haymarket, St James's Place or Soho Square, with their weekly smiles, rolled newspapers, ballpoint pens, pocket torches, umbrellas, fruit-gums, deadlines, gossip; anony- mous-looking, like secret agents, but lifting an eyebrow at any other agent seen on escalator or bus around ten twenty-five on a Monday or Tuesday.
All this is a far cry from the theme suggested for my farewell piece—'films whither or films whence or something.' Films whither demands prophecy, witchcraft, total self-confidence and at least ten thousand words to do it justice. Films whence is another matter. Film critics whence yet another. Because film criticism has changed and is changing in basic ways; and no wonder, since age modifies eyesight so drastically that the world (therefore films) looks to me quite unlike the way it must look to other generations, older or younger.
How you see, rather than what you see, is what counts, as I suppose we all agree; and memory, our private sieve of the past, keeps what most matters, visually, rather as a film director chooses, places and emphasises what counts to him and to what he has to say. Odd that memory has been treated so little in films —I don't mean straight flashback but memory in visual flashes, as a modifier of the present, which is how mine at least works: the past super-
imposed on what is now happening, with a con- stant feeling of déjà vu, of an unformulated, un- explained familiarity that is much more mysterious than strangeness. Resnais uses all this sort of thing explicitly; other directors, of course, imply the visual past all along, but it doesn't seem to have exercised many as a ubiquitous disturber of the visual surface of
things. My own feeling is that the vision of
someone whose past didn't overlap in time with one's own is often bewildering or even baffling—
a message in code. And my further feeling is that film criticism will become more and more a matter of decoding. Already films can echo and refer to other films, enrich one another as past enriches present; already our visual memory
from the cinema is a rich old compost heap that nourishes our current filmgoing. The nrocess con- tinues; memory within memory within memory, not so much of what we have seen directly as of what we have seen through others' eves.
People who remember when films weren't there at all are fast getting fewer, of course, like turtles or empty spaces or open fires: and even the films I first saw are now treated with gruesome respect. I was a film fan from an early age when I saw Freddie Bartholemew and lots of 'costume' films about Napoleon and suchlike; though there can't have been many, because of school, which meant three months' filmless incarceration, in those days, at a stretch. But I nearly fainted when I first, as an adult, met someone who had seen some old eavourite of mine seventeen dines. Les Enfants du Paradis nine times was my record, and something to keep quiet about, I had thought till then. Yet why? No one would smile if you admitted to reading a book seventeen times, a poem a hundred and seventy times. The best films today (when the gap between the masterly and the miserable widens, and there are few in- betweens, much less good-bad than there used to be and still less good-middling) need much more than the single look a press-show allows.
Many of the best films, too, don't lend them- selves to the sort of 'humanistic' treatment that is all such a glimpse permits—a discussion of the subject, a weighing-up of themes, comments on the values expressed, and so on. How can you discuss, say, Godard or Antonioni in such terms? How deal with Muriel or I Pugni in tasca after one sight of it, maybe in the same evening? The technical complexity, the psychological and psychical points made, the `view of life' (which it quite literally is), one's personal reaction to the director's personality (for the film is the world through his eyes), above all the density, immensity and elaborateness of the world they reflect, all these make the process of concentra- ting the experience into a few hundred words a fearsome one.
In a sense, you can no more describe a film in words than you can a painting or a piece of music. You can write round it, comment on this or that aspect, give readers some idea of the kind of thing they may expect to see; but a film is a film is a film and its essence is visual. Perhaps the nearest you can come to that is to seize, as it were, the director's presence and personality, and thus bring across his eyesight, the world through his eyes--for it is he who dictates the weather, as it were, of his films, who uses imagery for his own ends. Five poets with one dictionary will make five poems from the sante available words; five real directors, given the same street, house, tree and cat will make five streets of theM, five houses, five trees and five cats. I am sad to leave this strange world where. amid the ballyhoo and the epics. the essence of cal can thus, in an almost metaphysical way, be isolated by a director's intense eyesight. But I feel more and more that film-going should be a film critic's full-time job, that it grows too complex and too demanding to leave room for others. And since words are my business I am going to spend more time on them. So with gratitude and any number of good memories I say goodbye to a column (though not. I hope. to the ism:urn-row and a way of life; but not to the cinema, for the film critic may quit but the film fan never dies.
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