MOVIE CH ,RONICLE
THE DUPES OF THE ART FILM
Penelope Gilliatt
In
England before nylon was invented one used to be offered
two sorts of silk: there was real silk, and there was "art silk," which
meant artificial silk and was much less appealing than it sounded. The
movie industry now has the same division. There is cinema, and there
is
art
cinema, which sometimes seems so far removed from it that the word
"art" begins to imply the same abbreviation.
The sort of film the art-movie addict admires
is
always heavily
overweighted with "style," which in this context has little to do with
real style, meaning the grace and rightness with which something is
expressed: what he likes is a heavy-breathing technique. He is a sitting
target for a flashy bit of cutting, and the use of actors as though they
were statues seems to
him
a great step forward. He is impressed when
the meaning is as misty and cosmic as possible, and a wink at something
metaphysical
is
all to the good, in spite of the fact that he would think
of himself as a rationalist. It is usually accepted that cinema
is
auto–
matically a mass form, which is why it has invited such peculiar respect
from Left sociologists who have no feeling for it, but where art cinema
is
concerned we should give up the pretense: it is obvious nonsense to
suppose that
Wild Strawberries
expresses any idea that is either acces–
sible or interesting to a popular public-unlike, say,
Hamlet
to an
Elizabethan audience. We are used to hearing the middle-class intel–
lectual vilifying the theatre for being a middle-class pleasure, but he
happily admires movies that are designed to titillate a private sect.
It
is
hard to think of the art movie without first thinking of the
art
movie-goer, for without him it would hardly exist. The real gone
crank, who is more often a man than a woman for some reason and tends
to be between twenty and forty, is always someone who would regard
himself as belonging to the Left, since no respectable authority has
provided the Right with a systematized aesthetic and without a system
our friend feels out in the cold. He turns up for art movies in the same
uniform that he also wears to join the congregation at seminars about the
future of the Left--called, probably, "Whither Socialism?" or "Commit–
ment at the Crossroads"-and he carries on rebuking correspondences
