How to Watch a Movie by David Thomson Read Free Book Online Page A

written and directed by Steven Knight, and I give him great credit. Yet I’m not sure this is what is commonly meant by the film of a director, or auteur. Its authorship andownership owe so much to Hardy (it was the film that established him, beyond Bronson or The Dark Knight Rises , as a major figure), but it also springs from the technology of automobiles, recording instruments, and the subsequent solitude. No film I’ve seen in recent years is more eloquent on where we are now, and on how alone we feel. There is little left but to watch and listen.
    A great change has occurred: once masses watched a movie together; but by now we have only our screens as company.

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    SEE IT ONCE, WATCH IT TWICE?
    F or most of the medium’s history, movies were made to be seen once, or as many times as you could cram into a brief run. Then they were gone. But for at least thirty years now, the technology of video has turned movies into things that can be seen and seen again. They get closer to being paintings (or views through that other kind of screen, our windows), which we may live with so long they are still there after we’ve gone.
    If you see a movie just once, that keeps faith with its being sensational, sudden, yet as drastic as a road accident. But if you go back to watch it a second time, or many more times, you’re allowing that it may be art or ritual, less the same old accident than a portent and a dream. It begins to resemble things like Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas or some of those water lilies by Monet. This is curious, because a real water lily, like thosein Monet’s garden at Giverny (fifty miles northwest of Paris), comes and goes. You can enjoy the white flesh and the crimson core for now, the color and scent, but you know those blooms are not long for this world (like yourself, even if you have a few minutes longer). Be careful! Look too closely at Giverny and you may tumble into the pond. There ought to be an Agatha Christie novel, The Drowning at Giverny , with Hercule Poirot rhapsodizing on the fatal attraction of nymphéas .
    There will be more water lilies next season, and they will be so close to this year’s blooms that you will never tell them apart. But Monet or a professor of botany would assure you that every flower is just a little different. That’s a basis for art, philosophy, and gambling: people are alike, but they are unique, too. Water-lilyness seems ready to go on forever. But these lilies, the ones you’re reaching out to at Giverny, they are now . So seize the moment. You could rewrite those several sentences with “a woman” or “a man” or “a butterfly” substituting for water lilies. This is the enchanting mystery of nature, whereas a movie is always the same, always itself. If you want it to change, your best hope is to grow older. For older people do report that some movies seem to have shifted in their meaning or flavor as those viewers become less impressed by immediacy. In three days, a perfect bouquet may become the relic of a funeral.
    Las Meninas is always the same (if restoration is careful), but it presents a moment in time, as exciting and pregnant as a great movie still. You could imagine Poirot, stepping in front of the picture and saying, “It seems so calm and orderly, doesn’t it—with the infanta, her maids of honor, two dwarves, and a dog, with the flamboyant D’Artagnan-like figure of Velázquez himself, carrying a brush instead of a sword, and the ghostly reflection of the king (Philip IV) and his queen in a mirrorwatching the painting being made. But someone in that picture will be dead in ten minutes—most hideously dead, mes amis .”
    Does that prediction hinge on the one figure Poirot missed: the elegant but slightly sinister courtier who stands sideways with each foot on a different step, looking over his shoulder at the room? He is apparently the court chamberlain. There is