Talking a good movie

I'm not arguing that traditional melodrama is the only worthwhile model for moviemaking. Rather the opposite. The current bankruptcy of the medium -- the American craze for special effects, the rest of the world's reversion to, yes, "the tradition of quality" -- is a direct result of caution and uninteresting calculation. But good movies, movies that leave a permanent mark on our imaginations, are not made in the Godard mode. They are made by obsessives, by directors who shut out the distractions of the outside world and fret endlessly over every aspect of their films. The best of these directors eventually achieve thematic and stylistic coherence -- whether they are Hitchcock or Bergman, Hawks or Kubrick -- and, for better or worse, auteur status. They are aesthetic conservatives, people who find their ground and work it until it is overgrazed: Then, they sit back to watch others imitating them. Unlike Godard, they show almost no interest in advancing the cause of cinema in general, of finding new topics for it to take up, new methods of expressing themselves on the screen. Implicit in their work is the notion that everything is not cinema, that there are matters better suited to other forms -- essays, painting, music, even pulp fiction.

Director Stanley Donen once disputed in my presence the Godardian notion that movies "are the truth 24 times a second." They are, he cheerfully noted, "lies 24 times a second." To think otherwise is to impose on the medium an unsustainable burden and, eventually, on a figure like Godard, the sullen silence of the unheeded exile. In 1987, he conceived the notion of doing a kind of gloss on "King Lear." There is some evidence that he never read the play, but he nevertheless recruited some notable figures to the enterprise, among them Norman Mailer and Woody Allen. The former left in high, justifiable outrage. The latter, however, stayed on to shoot his single scene; he is discovered in his editing room stitching together a film with needle and thread. Of the experience Allen later said, "I had the impression that I was being directed by Rufus T. Firefly." It's possible to argue, at the end of Brody's earnest devotions, that he has done no more than trap a furious, impotently winking firefly of another sort in his commodious bottle. *