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

a readiness in everything about this man. The others seem to have posed to be painted, but he has another mission to complete. He is a suspect seen in the open doorway in the back of the room. That shaping light around him is as strong as the glow on the infanta’s brow. That infanta lived on until the age of twenty-one when after having four children and several miscarriages she died. Philip lived until 1665, Velázquez the artist until 1660. But no one knows about the dog (it’s a mastiff).
    I’m taking a little time with Las Meninas and the water lilies because they embody quite distinct ways of seeing that are married in the movies. The lilies represent surveillance; they are there forever as a plant, and we can gaze upon them for as long as our forever lasts. The reverie of looking is timeless, pantheistic, and slightly inhuman. That mode is always there in the movies: whatever the rapid turns of story, we are always dwelling on, or in the existence of, Bette Davis’s eyes or the curl of Bogart’s lip. This is not stressing minutiae; it is identifying the crucial texture of watching movies and wanting to be that person. It is why some actors work on screen and some do not, and it speaks to some personality in existence that is more lasting than stories.
    On the other hand, the much older Las Meninas seems more modern in an odd way because it has picked on a moment inthe life of the court of Spain. It says, Look , I think something is happening. It is the essence of movie melodrama, and more than three hundred years later its question is still gripping.
    I am talking about looking and the momentariness that breaks into life at the movies. I cannot think of a painting before Las Meninas in which there is so strong a feeling of something about to happen. “Next” is so alluring. Compare it with Rembrandt’s The Night Watch , done only a dozen years earlier. That’s a masterpiece and a noble spectacle, but it is an assembly of notable people, arranged so that everyone can be seen. It is posed, not poised, and as still as a tableau. Socially it is fixed in the idea these men have of being grandees. Nothing is about to happen. But in Las Meninas some threatening future shivers at the door, and the odd mixture of people suggests a Spain ready for drastic insurgency.
    You won’t see or feel such things unless you look for some time. A movie can spring from an image eager to bloom as much as from a storyline. Graham Greene said The Third Man started with a line he wrote on an envelope about the surprise of seeing a man on the street who had been buried just a week earlier. But I wonder if Carol Reed’s film didn’t believe in that night scene where noise brings a light in an upstairs window and it falls on the smile of Harry Lime (or Orson Welles), who also seemed to have been buried some time ago.
    One viewing is enough, if one is all you get. In the 1980s I spoke to someone who had seen the long version of von Stroheim’s Greed , in 1924—she couldn’t remember it well (she had been seventeen), but she had thought it was amazing. (Stroheim’s eight-hour version was eventually cut by the studio tojust over two hours.) Think what a photograph of that screening would mean.
    There is a speech in Citizen Kane by Bernstein. He is talking about the past and memory and he says he saw a girl once, in 1896, a woman in white with a white parasol, on the ferry over to Jersey. He never spoke to her or saw her again, but “I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since, that I haven’t thought of that girl.” It’s a bittersweet moment, and Welles does not cut away to a glimpse of that woman (a Monet-like bloom) just to show you what Bernstein means. Not that Citizen Kane doesn’t cut back and forth in time; but it’s a movie in which there are only a few “nows,” and all of them are ghosts from the past.
    By 1955, I had been told about Citizen