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That's not just sweeping hyperbole dribbling from a Film Comment-lubricated brain. With the availability of film today, one doesn't need to look too far back to find cinema's own Shakespeares, its Mozarts, its D.H. Lawrences or its Matisses. Whereas the other arts were encouraged by elitist culture and intelligentsia, ever, film was in a way never forgiven for being fueled by its sheer popularity with the masses. The implication was that nothing that can be this popular, this pleasing to the senses, should be taken truly seriously. As a result, the earliest critics thoroughly distrusted film's innate seductiveness unless it was leveled with some all- important theme. Depression audiences, then, were chastised for enjoying escapist comedies rather than suffering through solemn treatises on the state of things. It was not until the second half of the century that film started being talked about in the same breath with the other arts. With the emergence of various important film artists from all corners of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, suddenly it was OK to treat film as a force to be reckoned with, rather than a mere diversion. Of course, that just shows how prejudiced most critics were of the art produced in their own land. Way before those mavericks, brilliant directors were toiling in Hollywood under the invisible hack patina, unpretentiously crafting masterpieces that, exactly due to their lack of artistic braggadocio, had gone virtually unnoticed by the tastemakers. The most important (and most lasting) aspect of this awareness of film's artistic potential has been an enlargement of our definition of what cinema is. Today, a low-budget American western can be on a double-bill with a Russian avant-garde project, and an open-minded audience can appreciate both equally. As film artistry has developed more self-consciously, so has film criticism. There was a time when a serious, detailed book-length study on Hitchcock would be all but drowned by the derisive cackling of the critical establishment. It is difficult nowadays to walk into a bookstore and not see at least a dozen detailed studies on Sir Alfred. It's not the greatness of Hitchcock that has changed in the years since, but rather what can be studied and accepted by the critics as being "great." Even in these more enlightened times, however, critics make themselves all too vulnerable to attacks by others by simply expressing their opinions. Writers can intellectualize their responses to a movie all they want, but the truth is that cinema has always been primarily an emotional art. Since one's opinions of a film (or of a novel, a play, a song) are irretrievably tied to his or her emotional responses toward it, expressing them can be an extremely personal process. A film seen is an experience lived -- it becomes part of one's life, a memory, a set of emotions as concrete and important as any other event. That's why movie buffs (and I include myself proudly in that group) resent the tinge of condescension that some people to this day attach to the term. The implication of wasted time and useless information accumulated over the course of a lifetime watching movies strikes a buff as a personal insult.
Once film gets in your blood, there is no stopping it. To buffs it is more than life filtered through a camera lens -- it is
life itself. The idea of the transcendental power of cinema becomes more than a simple belief -- it becomes faith. Critics
who moan the death of cinema and insist on the stupidity of audiences will no doubt find no shortage of ammo in most
movie houses now, as flotsam like Kangaroo Jack and A Guy Thing takes over the spots occupied less than a month
ago by Gangs of New York and The Pianist. Rather than narrowing my eyes into the here and now, I prefer to keep one
eye back in the past for the cinematic treasuries still buried, and another in the future for the teeming visions of grandness
still in blossom. Film is now as mercurial and exciting as ever. In as grim a worldview as today's, it has become one of
the most precious forms of art: it is through art that we can assert human beauty over empty nihilism, and film just
happens to be the art of the future.
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