Beyond the Multiplex

March 1, 2007 | Cinema is conventionally described as an art form that blends image and sound. That's OK as far as it goes, but to my taste it overlooks the most important element, the very thing that makes movies movies, the reason they can haunt us and possess us and provoke such powerful emotional responses. That missing third dimension is time. Films are experiences in time, confrontations with time, escapes from time and sometimes meditations on time.

Most obviously, there's the time we spend sitting and watching a movie, and by the standards of fractured contemporary life even a 90-minute genre film demands a significant investment. (Ask anyone over 35, especially a working parent, why they rarely go out to the movies anymore: "Who has time?") Then there's the sense of time inside the dream world of the film itself. Within those 90 minutes, we may experience a decade of war, a six-week police investigation or the events of a single afternoon (and many other things besides).

Finally, there is the time that has passed since the film was made. Every movie is a document of the past, whether near or distant: It captures moments in the lives of the people who made it; it signifies or reminds us of moments in our own lives; it reflects episodes of our shared social history. Watching "L'Avventura" or "A Streetcar Named Desire" or, I don't know, "Risky Business" is a vastly different thing today than it was when they came out. Watching "Brokeback Mountain" in 2007 would be a subtly changed experience, now that it's an artifact of history (and a point of moronic political contention) as much as a movie.

Good filmmakers are always aware of the power they wield over time (and the power it wields over them). This applies in all movies, regardless of running time. Nothing distinguishes a bad film more clearly than its slack and careless use of time. We've all seen three-hour movies that passed in effortless delight, and 88-minute movies that lasted forever.

This week we've got two more fascinating entries in what's been a remarkably strong winter season at the art houses, both distinguished by their challenging use of time. Just a few minutes into the French film "Exterminating Angels," a beautiful young actress takes off her clothes and begins masturbating for the camera. So we are launched into the self-regarding erotic and/or pornographic dream state (pick your own adjective) of writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau, who was himself charged and convicted of harassing and defrauding young actresses during rehearsals for his last film, "Secret Things" -- by coercing them into masturbating in front of him.

Viewers will have to form their own judgments about Brisseau, and you can read "Exterminating Angels" as both a confession and a defense. Simultaneously brilliant and naive, the film strives to manipulate and implicate the viewer, seducing us into Brisseau's sexual and mystical intrigues and then punishing us for our complicity.

At the opposite end of the time-management spectrum comes German director Philip Gröning's 162-minute documentary "Into Great Silence," shot without any crew or any artificial lighting over six months at Grande Chartreuse, the legendary Carthusian monastery in the French Alps. If Brisseau dares us to wrestle our sexual demons, Gröning dares us to be alone with ourselves, and with whatever concept of the Infinite we embrace. It's less a movie, in any conventional sense of that word, than a life experience. I fought it, and surrendered to it, and fought it again and mostly loved it. But let's face facts: The intensely introspective journey it demands is not what most people seek at the movies.

There's other stuff to cover too, including the long-overdue DVD restoration of the early films of Kenneth Anger, the avant-garde film pioneer whose pop-infused, expressionistic dreamscapes have had an enormous influence on generations of later directors. Anger's works may be said to exist outside time -- or to use "cinematic time," in film-theory talk -- but these days so do TV commercials and music videos.

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