A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

This year the cinema reaches its

100th birthday. But should we really

be celebrating? David Thomson

thinks we might all be better off if

the movies had never been invented

YOU CAN'T blame the movies for having a centenary, but there's no escaping the embarrassment or the vulgarity of the celebration. It's too close to having to attend the birthday party of a 100-year-old person. This is a remarkable achievement, you say; yet you cringe at the absence of vitality and the agony on an ancient face trying to remember who you are. So many things at 100 are past their prime, or grisly imitations of youth. After all, no one ever celebrated the centenary of music; its strength was beyond partying.

Now, you're going to suppose that I'm tongue-in-cheek or playing devil's advocate. Really, I'm not. Just because someone spends 30 years thinking and writing about movies doesn't mean his mind is made up. It's thinking and writing I depend on, and movies just happen to be my most available pretext. I could have been a golfer, or a yachtsman.

This realisation dawned at the Cannes Film Festival, which I frequented in the mid-1980s. What determined perversity did it require to hurry from one dreadful movie to the next when one might pass 10 days in restaurants and museums, in Nice, Antibes, Grasse or Digne, experiencing that fragrant landscape in spring, and even marvelling at the high-octane dodgem cars of the Monaco Grand Prix? Yet Cannes is a mob of film critics - allegedly searching for the finer things in life - who gobble grotesque "sandwiches" as they run to catch a movie while neglecting sunlight, lavender, Matisse and some of the greatest casual cooking in the world.

I realise the reproach sounds comic or forlorn. Movies are life, you're told by 50-year-old cineastes who think and behave like they're 17. And, after all, who knows but if there hadn't been movies the mood might have swung towards amateur torture or reading TinTin comics aloud.

Of course, we can't just excise movies from the ribbon of history, beginning in 1895 and ending tomorrow, saving you from having to see Batman Forever. Delete the movies, and photography and television are left hanging. (Let a thwarted golfer be candid: there's a more cogent case for wiping those two than for doing away with movies.) But just because such erasures are impossible doesn't make reforms unthinkable - if we reflect deeply enough on the need to lose movies and photography, we might be persuaded to start teaching those subjects to the young children who are so swayed and misled by them - not as sports or careers, but as languages that can lie to us.

So, in the spirit of that thinking, let me offer a few proposals on why we might have been better off if the Lumieres had been gardeners. Or golfers.

APPEARANCE

There have always been appearances, but have they ever been more noticed or pondered than in this century? The habit of looking at people, and at their clothes and their setting in order to understand them is an infection much accelerated by the movies. In making a motion picture, the artists, craftspeople and players realise that every square inch of the screen is delivering information, and thus needs to be filled with decision. There is nothing natural or incidental in the view. And so our society becomes more watchful, more visually aroused, and we all of us learn the paranoia of being watched. Naturalness and spontaneity in appearance are harder to sustain. People begin to fall in or out of that bizarre state known as "good-looking" in which we assume an affinity between looks and character, or quality. Gradually we learn to force our own meanings to the surface - a very mannered, self-conscious effort, which begins to hint at self-mockery. Hidden or inner meanings become harder to support, and even less reasonable. The nature of privacy begins to be eroded.

That's an enormous generalisation - so is the fear in so-called primitive peoples that photography will steal their soul. Many of you will be sure it does not refer to you. Still, in this century there has been a steady pressure upon us all - the climate of seeing and being seen, which prompts narcissism, exhibitionism and shame about our appearance. It is harder to look natural - in which case is it less important to be human?

VOYEURISM

Why is it dark in the movies? So we will not be seen watching the enactment of our fantasies. There has always been an air of nefarious advantage in moviegoing - of seeing or being in the jungle without going there; of watching battle or violence without having to intervene, or feel pain; of watching the woman undress when she doesn't even know we are there. That is why she must not look at the camera; and one reason why women never get to be directors of photography. These are sneaky privileges we could not have in life without some sense of guilt or wrongdoing. That local unease has a broader implication: that we are allowed to watch because we have no power or responsibility, because we don't quite exist. We cannot stop the flow of images. And so the movies begin to provide a model for our indulged impotence in such larger fields as politics, or beholding hardship and evil in the world.

THE INDECENCY OF THE VISUAL

"Don't say it, show it," screenwriters and film-makers are told. The movies depend on action and enactment. And so, next to real life, they require show-offs, self-dramatists, wilful centres of attention. But the more you watch movies, the clearer it becomes that there are certain events that cannot be filmed - I mean re-created and filmed for fictional purposes: death, extreme grief or happiness, qualities of belief, the objects of great fear or terror, concentration camps. To invent such things is to verge upon absurdity and tastelessness. So many heights of drama re-created, and spread on the surface of appearance, like jam, become camp, macabre or profoundly vulgar. You know that as soon as you see the real thing - defiantly awkward and colossally private - in documentary or television news. The power of photography is helpless: it records the actual - which is not the same as telling the truth. But play with re-creating the actual, and inevitably your true subject dwindles into actors and their tricks. The original event shames the tricks, and even the art of an attempt. Thus the gulf between the most serious movies and what they purport to show can be demeaning and corrupting. There is a kind of tact which ought to bar movies from nearly all the most profound events and situations. Otherwise, when we are in the highest dramas of our own lives, we notice that we are acting. We are losing touch with the chance of sincerity.

STORY

There have been so many movies, and so many more versions of movies on TV. We haven't seen them all, but "story" has become a part of our air. We all of us know, deep down (and are dispirited by), the notion that there are only seven, nine or 13 basic story forms in fiction. The number varies, but day after day the same stale mythic outlines are served up. So myth has gone dead on us, too. The wellsprings of imaginative life have been rendered sweet and synthetic. The excess of material has become wearying and unreliable. In 30 years, movies turned the western from a resonant metaphor into a stupid distortion of the real history of America. The genres of American film have taught us to be cynical about our own legends. And so narrative tradition has been befouled.

LITERACY AND LITERATURE

As narrative suspense breaks down, the complex involvement of a reader's sensibility in prolonged story - a novel - is less and less likely. Films are quicker; they require less imaginative work; the "world" is immediately there, a given, pretty as a picture; the seductiveness of the spied-on fantasy is so much more beguiling than the developing powers of private insight and questioning called for in reading. That's a fancy way of reiterating the cliche: "no one reads anymore". Kids spend between four and eight hours a day with the TV on, looking at the broken pieces of stories, remoting themselves from one strand to another. Concentration, attention, introspection, learning coherent linguistic response, all suffer. I am not saying that children, or teenagers, relish this life. On the contrary, many seem bitter and vengeful about it, and often employ its catchphrases and attitudes to undermine other attempts at parental or educational advice. It is as if they know they have been belittled and betrayed by film and TV - after all, in many cases those things have cheated them of the company of their parents.

VIOLENCE

The matter is incapable of proof; even if it could be proved that film and TV violence (or cruelty) affected behaviour, we are so pusillanimous now, and so given over to commercial liberties, that we would only tack on warnings. Common sense and daily observation in the home and on the streets tell us that the destructive energy in films and TV is depressing and dangerous. The heart of the danger may be less in the urge towards imitation than in the steady indulgence of fantasy without a sense of consequence. The voyeur's advantage is in separating the spectacle from its impact and pain; the smoother the dance, the less the damage. We need that kind of dislocation watching Bosnia, Chechnya or famine in Africa - but we have learnt it in the very rich hours of watching terrible things. That is perilous enough, but:

LOVE

Suppose the treatment of love in movies (along with happiness and marriage) is far more invasive, just because its lies are more gentle and insinuating. Movies have taught us to fall in love as well as how to make love. They have laid down an automatic basis for romance and / or sex in all stories. And they have closed those stories with lovers locked together, their image like the sea on the converging curtains. The story's purpose is to discover love which then, seemingly, goes on for ever and ever after. Yet movies have largely disdained the much tougher task of how lovers live together - this was often the central material of the classic novel. Movies prepare people for crises and sensational events - meeting, falling in love, making love, surviving great danger - but they generally omit preparation for ordinary, dull existence, or the chance that there are paradises within the "dull" days when nothing happens. So they have made us more melodramatic and less stoic, more fickle and impatient, less abiding. And we know that that leaves us less likeable or reliable, and more jittery, more easily swept away by our "act".

A MASS MEDIUM

There are theories that as society (or plain population) reaches a certain mass, so new bonds must be asserted to prevent panic or a crippling sense of anonymity. Radio, film and television, it is said, came into being to serve as universal camp fires, gathering places. They had another, idealistic attraction. The culture of literature had never been universal. So many could not read at all, let alone struggle with Henry James or Robert Musil. But we wanted everyone to have a chance at enlightenment, just as democratic and equal societies long to believe that everyone has a chance of happiness. So the movies were the realisation of a profound egalitarian hope, and when the world - truly, all nations and all educational levels of society - laughed at Chaplin or moved with Fred Astaire, one might entertain thoughts of community.

There was something arousing and consoling about being in a theatre filled with strangers, responding in unison, to a movie. It lasted from the 1920s to the early 1950s. (Of course, there were other forces that made the consolation feel more binding - economic hardship, war, the fear of fear.) But by the 1940s the popular movie could be an intricate, artful, moving show - Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, The Big Sleep, Notorious, Laura, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Third Man, and so on. Not masterpieces necessarily, but grown-up entertainments enjoyed by enormous audiences. Today, they look like the Pyramids - mysterious, arcane achievements, sustained by a culture and a faith that overawes us and makes us uneasy.

The massness of the medium drained away, and with it the hope. It was replaced by demographics, and the surrender to a "young" audience greedy for rapid shifts, lurid spectacle, special effects and the marked absence of human content. At some time in the mid-1970s - with the success of Rocky and Star Wars, I think - the business of film began to give up complex experiences, unsettling subject matter and artistic voices. Movies began to take on the antic noise and jagged coolness of video games.

I'm getting depressed now - far from being in my cheek, my tongue is begging for a drink. And I haven't even mentioned such smaller but forceful arguments against the movies as Ronald Reagan, James Bond or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But local disasters, I think, are so much less insidious than the defects in the structure and process of the medium. Maybe even the best films are harmful. And then consider:

AMERICA

The American movie is unlike anything any other country has produced. Only America, maybe, really makes movies, and that's a mark of the egalitarian hope I talked about and the dream of ending ugly barriers of class and opportunity through "entertainment". But the American movie has also made it harder for other nations to make pictures, and it has encouraged a kind of cultural war between universal movies and, say, Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni, Ozu, Bresson, Renoir, Bunuel (you see, there have been great things). No one has been more hurt in this battle than America, or more driven into a toxic cultural imperialism that has marred and compromised all the things about America that excite and inspire other peoples. In the eyes of the rest of the world, America has let the slickness, the vulgarity and the failure of the movies become its emblems. And:

CALIFORNIA

California has suffered especially. I live in California, and not in Los Angeles. And I have to tell you that it is extraordinary - wild and beautiful in nature, and the best chance for a melting pot in society. But for the rest of the world, California was made into a theme park by the movies, long before the ruinous invention of Disneyland. Thus it has attracted immigrants, tourists and the lost ones depicted in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, sleepwalkers in search of the dream. And so the staggering reality of California - from desert to empty shore, from Sierras to thick forest - has been subsumed by that tacky white label posted on the grimy hills above HOLLYWOOD. That is a woeful warning for the way in which the life-like allure of the screen has detached us, maybe irrevocably, from so many begging realities. Film is another state - call it dream, or coma - but it is not the same as being awake and ourselves.

Now, I need that drink. !