Do we have to understand movies?

The Spirit of the Beehive

A few days ago I just realized it's been only a short 3 years since I went hardcore on movies. This comes because recently I've been reading some film criticsm and re-thinking what brings me back to film time after time, when I'd previously flitted here and there from art form to art form like a fickle lover. I can't say. I can't say exactly what film means to me either, or what approach of film criticism is the 'right' approach.

It used to be that I thought film could change people's lives. I still think so, actually, but not as much. Be it as it may, film is a medium that, too often, manipulates people around, and often to prove a point. Even Yasujiro Ozu, one of the greatest directors, is a master (and subtle) manipulator, twiddling the audience (very often cruelly) round his fingertips. Although most of his films urge an acceptance of loss and regret at the end, it is never without the trauma of a (concocted) social realism that the audience has to go through first before reaching to that conclusion - leading me to think if ever a manipulator (albeit a fine one) of people on the whole can be regarded as the greatest human alive (if one were to allow film that status).

I think my recent re-evaluation on my film fanaticism can be attributed to three things: the writing of my own screenplay, the recent viewing of what I consider the greatest film I have seen as yet (Werner Herzog's very recent The White Diamond, more on that another time), and the movies that I gravitate to of late. Since I am not a critic by profession and the 'right way to see movies' is not imperative thinking, it is the geek's own responsibility unto himself to rethink what he's spending so much of his life on.

Peter Greenaway said that film is too important to be wasted on telling stories, and that set me off thinking. Not that I'm a huge Greenaway fan, but I'm beginning to see the futility in storytelling for many films. All narrative-driven films seek to exploit (some more clumsily than others, is that how critics separate the good from the bad?) the audience's emotions. Most of us are privvy to that exploitation, but why do we go back to that again and again, and subject ourselves to the strings of a puppeteer when we have our own uncontrollable lives? Discounting the need for entertainment is stupid of course, and there can definitely be a convergence of art and entertainment. But when entertainment wants to be serious art - as is the case of many movies coming out of left-Hollywood of late - where does art end and politics (both human and social) begin? We all know the effects of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, do we allow movies to encroach into those boundaries to triumph our own political leanings? And what can this mean to film geeks who only quote directors by their last names?

And I've not come to my point yet. Recently I saw Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, which has haunted me since I saw it a few weeks ago. I think it is one of the 'big' films in my life that I think is truly great and I love, but I didn't understand it at all, and, most importantly, I realize I don't want to. The same goes for Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror etc. Mirror has absolutely no narrative at all, and I am never completely sure what Melville is trying to say at any one point of Le Samourai. And here, I wish to pose the million dollar: Must movies be understandable for them to have value?

By the word 'understand,' I don't just mean to understand their narratives or characters, but also what the creators are getting at, to the extent of what feeling you're supposed to feel at any one point of the movie. Critics nowadays (the quotable ones at least) assign a value to everything (and it is their job, admittedly), 'Two thumbs up!' if not 'Haunting!' 'Devastating!' 'Hilarious!'. But what are these adjectives and how do they relate to the importance of cinema in our lives?

Of course I must say, this is not completely unrelated to the reactions I got out of my screenplay, to which people often tell me the characters/narrative/my intentions are completely incomprehensible. Being politically correct, I have to 'listen' and 'accept' their criticisms, but all I really wanted to say is 'So what?' Why do movies need to be any of these? Why do movies have to be defineable, and, why do people need to be able to have some sort of exegesis to like or love a movie? And here I'd like to include a quote from Flannery O'Connor regarding the Mystery that I'm attracted to in fiction: 'The serious fiction writer will think that any story that can be entirely explained by the adequate motivation of the characters or by a believable imitation of a way of life or by a proper theology, will not be a large enough story for him to occupy himself with. This is not to say that he doesn't have to be concerned with adequate motivation or accurate reference or a right theology; he does; but he has to be concerned with them only because the meaning of his story does not begin except at a depth where these things have been exhausted. The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes, there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.'

Until recently I'd found myself emphasizing on narrative/intent and the comprehensibility of a movie, and I don't seek to claim any moral edge or superiority to this argument (there are, after all, so many different ways of seeing a movie and no rule), but just to pose these questions, and maybe also as a better way of clearing through my thoughts and 'evolving' in hitherto embarrassingly short career as a film buff. As I see myself, the need to understand movies comes from our very bourgeois thinking, as film buffs, to assign a value to every movie we see. It's almost as if we don't deem a 'like/dislike,' 'good/bad,' or any darn adjective a critic might use to a movie we've seen, we would've wasted our time seeing it and there's no justification or vindication for ourselves. The thing about art (if the movies aspire to be an art form, that is) is that the fact that it has been created is reason enough for its existence. Art is its own raison d'etre, and is its own answer to the perennial annoying question 'Why should art exist?' Whether we like or dislike an artpiece is immaterial and completely irrelevant to anything in the universe.

What then is our duty as film buffs? As purveyors and appreciators of haute culture? Here's something for me to ponder over the next few days.