THE CINEMATOGRAPH

The cinematograph was a motion picture camera and film projector combined in a single device invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière. Its December 1895 public demonstration in Paris is the most commonly cited benchmark for the birth of cinema.

The word joins the Greek roots “kin” and “graph” to denote “writing with motion”. By adopting it, this site twists the meaning to express “writings on cinema” with a further connotation of “writing cinema”. Just as a camera reverses an image through a pinhole, this website aims to “write” movies in reverse, traveling from the realized movie backward to the ideas that generated it, leaving readers with a sense of each movie’s inner story.

The history of this site goes back to 1994. Back then, among the regular attendees at Chicago’s cinematheques was a 59-year-old man who would sometimes debate people in the audience after a showing. His observations were so much more thorough than anyone else’s that I guessed he was a professor or a film critic. I was determined to meet him.

That June a mutual friend introduced us, and we hit it off immediately. The man’s name was Lawrence Fox, and he was neither a teacher nor a critic but an accountant with a passion for film, opera, and philosophy. He brought an accountant’s eye to movies, memorizing their details from start to finish before passing judgment. His peculiar viewing methods led him to insights that somehow no one else had ever seemed to pick up.

Larry and I started meeting weekly for movies and discussion at his home in the John Hancock Center, a SW corner unit on the 73rd floor with a city view that only the best movies could compete with. Other film fans and students joined us, including Larry’s partner Julianne Benson, future filmmaker Michael Glover Smith, history professor Zouhair Ghazzal, and actor Sam Fain.

Our friendship lasted 24 years until his death in 2018. He gradually taught me how to see a movie whole, how to look for patterns and structure, and to put a movie’s humanity above its technique and its effect. We often discussed writing a book together, but it wasn’t until a month after his death that a publisher he had met at the opera read his obituary and asked me whether a book was still possible.

A few months later I was the author of Secrets of Cinema: 100 Movies That Are Not What They Seem. I based the book on the lecture notes for my classes, which in turn evolved from conversations between myself and Larry. In September 2022 I acquired the rights back from the publisher and began to put revised versions of the chapters on this website along with 67 new essays.

The Cinematograph was founded on the premise that great films contain far more than critics usually give them credit for. But what makes a film great? While this site prioritizes understanding movies over evaluating them, nevertheless the writings here are guided by a vision of what a movie can and should be.

Instead of trying to speak authoritatively on the subject of quality, it seems fitting to let movies themselves have a word. After all, movies can function as criticism too, and they can give us insights into our values. For instance, Conflagration and Vivre sa vie both argue, each in its own way, that it’s a form of idolatry to elevate an artwork above the subject it’s trying to express. We should understand and appreciate movies, but the point is not to worship them. While romantics may think of art or movies as something above life, a film like Warning Shadows makes a case for the utility of cinema… movies can make us better people, or at least, like Antonioni’s or Duras’ films, they can teach us to see the world with greater intensity. Green for Danger and Red Desert both model a therapeutic notion of cinema, helping viewers adjust to an adverse reality. I Knew Her Well makes a forceful argument that the humanity in a film is worth more than the most brilliant exposition. Critics who want textbooks of filmic devices can have Citizen Kane or Battleship Potemkin, but most of the films discussed here offer new ways of seeing life.

For most people the first question is whether a movie is entertaining. Of course movies should entertain, but this standard is both vague and insufficient. There are many ways to entertain, and they’re not all reducible to triggering emotions. Most of us are aware that entertainment can be coupled with deception and manipulation, and it’s not always easy to distinguish between mindless distraction and lasting enjoyment. Criticism should do more than describe the immediate pleasures of film… it should also challenge viewers to find its potential pleasures, including the lifelong pleasure of insight.

Too often the same people who wish to put movies on a pedestal, elevating them above ordinary life, also wish to deny them their voice by shunning interpretation. Idealizing cinema as a sacred art impervious to interpretation pretends to respect it but actually reduces it to a mute idol. It’s natural for people to interpret the world around them all the time – we do it whenever we listen to language, form political opinions, or navigate anything unfamiliar. It would be absurd to expect people not to interpret movies too.

This however brings us to the loaded question of whether there’s a “right” way to view a movie – a question that usually arouses indignation on one side and defensiveness on the other. Luckily there’s a way around this if we understand the difference between ambiguity and ambivalence. Ambiguity is the property of allowing different points of view at the same time; ambivalence means not knowing what you want to say. Ambivalence is weak, but ambiguity enriches a movie. We can admit that a film can be seen many different ways, while still agreeing that the film speaks clearly and definitively on its topic.

The chief problem with film criticism, today as much as ever, is a trouble with syntax. A lot of wonderfully composed writing on movies still fails to form complete sentences – not literally, of course, but in the sense that it doesn’t get around to saying what a movie is, what it does, and why it does that. Popular criticism relies too heavily on adjectives, when it needs to give us nouns and verbs. More serious critics like to write about “themes”, but a theme is like a noun without a verb. It says what the film touches on, but it doesn’t bother to say what the film says about it or does with it. For further elaboration see the 7 Rules of Film Criticism.

The films I’ve reviewed so far do not necessarily constitute a list of the greatest movies made, although I’ve made an effort to include the ones I respect most (Gertrud is still missing though). Rather they’re movies that have yielded the biggest discoveries or which I find most instructive. It’s not a list of my favorites, but the selection is still limited by my personal experience.

My book, which set the pattern for these writings, was titled Secrets of Cinema: 100 Movies That Are Not What They Seem. I regret the title now, partly because “Secrets of Cinema” is also the title of a BBC series by Mark Kermode, a fact I was unaware of at the time. Moreover, the title suggests a cryptic or even occultish view of cinema, as if I chose movies just because they’re puzzles. After all, why shouldn’t a great film be exactly what it seems to be? And yet, every time I dig into a film that looks promising, I find that it reveals hidden ideas.

The answer to this lies, I believe, in a property that my teacher Larry Fox called “showing” (as opposed to “telling”). The essays on Tokyo Story and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting go into more detail, but the basic idea is that at their best, movies must speak indirectly in order to elicit active audience involvement. If a movie speaks too directly it’s a form of preaching or propaganda, trying to force the viewer to see something. As Ingmar Bergman argues in Persona, the essence of cinema is ambiguity – movies need to give viewers room to form their own ideas. Because of this property of “showing” it’s inevitable that a great film will have its secrets. That doesn’t mean the writer or director is trying to be obscure… a good movie will do all it can, short of “telling”, to help viewers see what it’s saying. Even a film like Vertigo, whose subject is so obscure that almost everyone misses it, points to it in every scene in every possible way.

So in short, the selection here is an exhibit of movies that “show”. Doubtless a lot of good movies don’t fit here, while many flawed movies do. Some of the selected movies, for example, may not be entirely innocent in their depictions of rape, blackface, colonial attitudes, etc. In Andrei Rublev, Caché, Weekend, and possibly three or four others the filmmakers caused unsimulated harm to animals. None of that should be excused. The point of including them here is to learn what we can for the sake of a better world.

Of course the selection here will always be incomplete. No one person can track down or appreciate all the wisdom from the history of cinema. I’m aware of many blind spots, like countries, periods, and directors I’ve neglected. Over the next two or three years I’ll try to make the selection more inclusive, but in the meantime I hope it’s a useful start.