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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
Film purists have long wanted to watch movies "as they were meant to be seen." With the art house all but dead, the future of film is right there in your living room.
Nov 14, 2002 | "Movies as they were meant to be seen." To film purists that has long meant one thing only: on the big screen. It's also a phrase used by the premium cable channels that run movies without the cuts imposed by the major networks, and by DVD manufacturers who have raised the bar on the quality of movies available for home viewing.
With high-definition TV poised to become the standard in a few years, and with DVDs on their way to leaving VHS video in the dust, the way movies were meant to be seen no longer seems so clear. The death of the theatergoing experience has been proclaimed for nearly 20 years now, and it's no more true today than it was when the first VCRs rolled off the assembly line. The fear of technology among film critics and purists (not necessarily the same thing) may obscure the possibility that DVD heralds the dawn of a new age. By that I mean an age in which movies have a life span far beyond their theatrical runs, and an age in which the condition of classic movies is immeasurably improved.
The argument that home technology will kill movie theaters is the latest version of one that began in the '50s with proclamations that television would kill the movies. (In Joe Dante's "Matinee," set during the Cuban missile crisis, there's a shot of a local movie house with a banner hanging outside that says "FIGHT PAY TV.") A half-century later, the death of the movies (at least as far as their commercial viability goes) is no nearer than it was when this issue was first raised.
By the time VCRs became common in the early to mid-'80s, repertory houses had been struggling for most of a decade. The movie audience that coalesced during the '60s and '70s and provided a backbone of support for emerging new American directors and foreign films had started to disintegrate around 1975. By the time the Reagan decade rolled around, audiences who would have laughed at movies like "Ordinary People" or "An Officer and a Gentleman" just a few years earlier had made them, and even worse pictures, into big hits. The audience drift away from quality movies coincided with the studios learning, courtesy of one terrific movie ("Jaws") and one lousy movie ("Star Wars") that there were enormous profits to be made from blockbusters.
Not that it was ever easy for quirky, personal movies. Even during the '60s and early '70s, when moviegoers were most adventurous, some of the films now rightly regarded as classics never found an audience. No greater American director than Robert Altman emerged in the '70s. But apart from "M*A*S*H" he never had a commercial hit. "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" turned a minuscule profit, but gems like "The Long Goodbye," "Thieves Like Us" and "California Split" didn't even do that.
Even in New York, Jean-Luc Godard's '60s movies routinely got commercial runs of about a week. When the restored version of "Band of Outsiders" opened in New York last year, it was the first time it had played the city since its original American release -- and this run was about four times longer.
I share the nostalgia for repertory houses. I was lucky enough to grow up outside Boston at a time when that city and neighboring Cambridge had a thriving repertory scene. In my high school years, a small rep house operated for a while right in my suburban town, and my best friend Steve and I were able to see pictures that ranged from "The Third Man" to "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" to "Straw Dogs" for the first time, as well as new foreign films and commercial American movies that had disappeared before finding an audience. The theaters in Cambridge and Boston allowed us to see Godard and Ingmar Bergman festivals, legendary and little-seen foreign movies like "Celine and Julie Go Boating," and Hollywood should-have-been-classics like "The Crimson Pirate."
Everyone who loves movies owes a debt of gratitude to the theaters that are somehow managing to keep that tradition alive, like the Brattle in Cambridge and the Film Forum in New York. But it's hard to feel nostalgic for the slim pickings of what followed the glory years of rep: Endless double bills of "King of Hearts" and "Harold and Maude" (or, later, "Diva" and "The Road Warrior").
The most inconvenient truth obscured by waxing nostalgic for the glory days of rep houses -- and the one that is most pertinent in defending DVDs and home video -- is that people who don't live in big cities or college towns never had access to anything but mainstream commercial movies.
Video changed all that. Not only could movies be watched at home uncut and uninterrupted, but video extended a movie's shelf life. To this day, good movies that did bad box office ("Galaxy Quest" is a good recent example) become hits on video. It's unthinkable for us to imagine a world where people heard about but couldn't read Melville or Joyce, or, for that matter, P.G. Wodehouse or Raymond Chandler. But that's exactly what the availability of movies was like in the pre-video era.
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