There is no denying that cinema has
by now infiltrated our collective sub-conscious, our dreams and day-dreams,
actions, reactions and vocabulary to a tremendous extent. Paraphrasing
Shakespeare’s famous quote, I would take it one step further: the art of cinema
is the stuff that dreams are made of.
Drawing inspiration from the
title of Paolo Sorrentino’s most recent movie, Oscar-nominated “La Grande Bellezza” (“The Great Beauty”) I wonder: where lies
the Great Beauty of cinema when it comes to our personal tastes? Is it to be
universally accepted that a critically acclaimed movie should be considered a
“good” movie? Or does it boil down to our personal likes and dislikes in the
end ?
But first, let me get this
straight: I am neither a qualified cinema critic nor a journalist. As to the
pure artistic value of movies, other people are more qualified to speak. What
is important to me is the following question: what is it that makes a movie
speak to our heart?
A primal reason we relish the
chance to watch movies is that they can be our getaway from reality. Whether it
be the boulevards of L.A., the deserts of Tatooine, the valleys of New Zealand
or the snow-covered Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, movies work as
a magic carpet that sweeps us off our feet, out our living room and carry us
away to places never seen before or not even existing. It is thanks to the
imagination of those people working behind and on camera that we have found
ourselves, more than once, oblivious of everyday problems and routine, lost in
another world or another era for a couple of hours. A good movie grips you so
tight and engulfs you into a world that you cannot quit thinking about not just
after leaving the theatre but for days and days to follow. Of course, as Robin
Williams’ quote from “Good Will Hunting”
goes, “I bet you can't tell me what it
smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You never actually stood there and looked up
at that beautiful ceiling”; a video can never substitute a real-life
experience. But movies can be the poor man’s travel agency: I’ve met people of
very limited means to whom the streets of New York look familiar. And, even
though we’ve come down to taking it for granted, this is priceless.
But movies can also work the
other way round: they can help us better connect to and understand our
problems, as they can also make us live through our worst fears and watch them
projected on screen. In the first case, a movie plot can help us clear our
minds and put things in order when it comes to troubling personal issues. As
for the latter case, artists like Alfred Hitchcock became masters of this kind
of experience. Many cinema goers have complained of several sleepless nights
after having watched films like “The
Sixth Sense”. Suspense movies can function as symbols of real-life
situations, much in a way similar to that of Pi Patel in the “Life of Pi”: he had chosen to
symbolically disguise his tragic story using animals, instead of humans, when
obliged to recount it. A movie plot can therefore also work as a cathartic
experience, as a reminder that other people, in other times or other places,
share humanity’s common fate with us.
Movies can also be an
inspiration. When watching a movie, you can see your own aspirations and your
own dreams being achieved by someone else. And it’s not always just fiction.
Touching real stories, like the one of “Erin
Brockovich” can only pump us up with extra doses of courage and
assertiveness. Fragility, doubt, the battle between good and evil within each
one of us, the will to overcome obstacles in order to succeed, fear of failure,
triumph and decadence, in short, everything that makes us human: it’s all
there. How many times haven’t you stumbled upon a piece of news so astounding
that convinced you that movies indeed are surpassed by real life? Cinema
represents life on the silver screen and we are the spectators of our own fears
and dreams.
Movies can also be crucial to our
critical thinking. Films on politics, ecology, the economy, films that help us
think out of the box, agitate our conscience and trigger our reaction. Movies
like “The Three Days of the Condor”,
“Missing”, “The Strawberry Statement” up to the recent “Le Capital” offer to wide audiences a different perspective to
political events and the economic status-quo, a perspective often much
different to the one offered by mainstream media. The importance of political
films was standing out in relief especially in the ‘70s or ‘80s where the flow
of information in the pre-Internet era was much more limited. “The Killing Fields”, “A Dry White Season”, “Under Fire”, “JFK”, “Frost/Nixon”,
among others, managed to reach large audiences and inform them about social and
political issues, our knowledge of which is usually a half-truth. I won’t be
shy to say the following: these movies help us become better persons, by
providing us with incentives to search more, to analyse more, to doubt more and
to think more.
But what about the protagonists?
Those chameleonic artists have the ability to transfigure into a different
person each time they appear on screen. Sometimes it’s hard to remember with
precision an successful actor’s full filmography; this, at least in my case, is
due to the fact that the actor becomes the role to such an extent that, in my
mind, it takes a few seconds before being able to separate the real person from
the role. The oxymoron is that those people that feel so familiar to us, as if
they were sitting next to us in our couch, seem, at the same time, so distant
and inaccessible, as if they were not human anymore, but a species of perfected
humanoids whose lives differ from ours as the one of “S1m0ne” from her creator’s. Or this is what the showbiz wants us to
believe: because, no matter how their lives might differ from ours, actors are
still real people, whose lives happen to have just a tad more of glitter and
magic – at least on the outside. So, there is reason enough for this strange
feeling of familiarity and empathy towards people we have never met: if it
really is our own dreams and fears projected on the silver screen, then the
actors are our mirrors, reflecting the way we see or should see ourselves.
But, in the end, you will ask
yourselves, what makes movies so special? So special so as to set them apart
from all other forms of art, who of course do possess the above-mentioned
qualities? Movies are a combination of several other forms of art, be it
photography, music, etc. Our experience and liking or disliking of these
individual forms of art may influence our cinematic experience with much
importance. For example, a great piece of music always sounds different when
combined to a, climactic or not, movie scene. Our perspective towards the
famous aria “Nessun Dorma” from
Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot” changes
completely when providing the musical background for a scene in “Mar Adentro”, “The Sum of All Fears” or “Bend
it Like Beckham.” Usually, the soundtrack is part of the backbone that
supports our cinematic experience and has the power to lift up or demolish a
scene. Goran Bregovic’s Balkan-inspired work on “Queen Margot” has been criticized as not fitting the 16th
century France ambiance of the film. On
the other hand, there have been several critically acclaimed movies with little
or no music at all, e.g. “No Country for
Old Men” or “Cast Away”. The
absence of music seems to increase the naturalistic point of view of these
movies, but it couldn’t work in the majority of the cases. Just pause and
think: how complete would our cinematic experience be, having watched “Dirty Dancing” without the emblematic
scene where “I’ve had the time of my life”
is masterfully danced to or “Casablanca”
without the masterpiece “As time goes by”
and its tender piano melody?
One could name several more
reasons why cinema has grown to be so close to our hearts and minds. In the
end, as it is in every form of art, it’s all subjective and you can find as
many varied opinions as the number of people on this planet. But no-one could deny
that a good movie is like a good journey that we cannot help but profoundly
enjoy. And, borrowing one of the closing lines of, again, “The Great Beauty”: “Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is
its strength.”
To all
you cinema-goers, I wish safe travels.
