I did one of those internet polls the other day where you click on every movie you've seen from someone's list of 250 top films, and the website counts your score. I got 208 of 250, which seemed a bit low for someone who makes a living writing about movies. A cinematographer I know got 211. Show pony!
A discussion ensued between some older cinephiles about the stupidity of the list. No screwball comedies, no silent films, most of it from the past 30 years; when are these children going to realise that most of the best movies were made before 1960? That always happens when the old farts get together. It takes time for some movies to prove their greatness and box office has little to do with it. Many classics made no money; many turkeys made millions. The ones that last, and people keep watching, have little in common except, perhaps, integrity. They're usually made by people who love the medium, and make the images work harder than the dialogue. One of the reasons the old farts despise a lot of current film-making is that it's mostly the other way around now. The really hardcore cinephiles believe that all the best movies were silent. I do not agree but I do think a lot of current movies would be better if they just shut up.
One of the golden rules of scriptwriting is to show rather than tell, but it's easier to cover situations with dialogue – and most writers can't do great dialogue. Verbal film reached a peak before and during World War II in American screwball comedies like His Girl Friday and The Lady Eve, their scripts honed by writers from New York and Chicago who migrated to Hollywood with the coming of sound. Then Hitchcock arrived and dialogue took a back seat. His camera did the storytelling, and there were many others. In general, the studios respected their gifts enough to let them keep working. After the war, with the rise of television, visual film-making started to wane. When movies began to be sold to TV after their theatrical run, the talking head came back, but without such great dialogue. You could hardly see the horses in a western on a seven-inch black-and-white screen, but you could hear John Wayne when he yelled, "Take 'em to Missouri, Matt", in Red River.
The American new wave of the '60s and '70s were almost the last of the non-verbalists. Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma were all great visual artists, even if raised on television. I heard De Palma say on TCM recently that "a non-verbal cinema is something that has almost died in the last several decades". More than the others, he pursued Hitchcockean visual ideas to the point of obsession, recreating whole scenes from his favourite films, reworking them like jazz standards. The railway steps shootout in The Untouchables was his version of the most famous scene in Battleship Potemkin, only louder. Sometimes it leads to formalism. Alfred Hitchcock was always accused of being cold. In Scorsese's hands, it became like grand opera – passionate, expressive, adaptable.
So why and when did it disappear? It would be wrong to say truly visual cinema died with the rise of computer-generated imagery, but it was mortally wounded. There are some great film-makers who work only in digital – John Lasseter at Pixar was one – but many more for whom the tools to create easy spectacle have obviated the need to be inventive with the camera. Even those who have a strong visual sense have succumbed to gargantuan visual flatulence – Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan.
An audience desensitised by vast spectacle soon grows bored and moves onto other things, like computer gaming. It's true that the worldwide audience is deserting cinema for other screens – computer and TV. In the past 20 years, American television has stepped into the dramatic void, as cable channels threw off the strictures of censorship. The best stories are now on the small screen, which is enjoying a golden age. Anyone with a brain has taken refuge there, but TV remains a largely verbal medium. The great TV series excel because of the writing, more than the image-making. It's as if a whole generation has forgotten how to tell stories visually.
I know there are many exceptions. Road to Perdition remains one of my favourite films of the past 15 years, partly because Sam Mendes uses the camera so well. The control of focus, framing, duration of shot, manipulation of light and dark, sound and music – all masterful. Tom Hanks says very little as a man trying to protect his son and avenge the murder of his family, but the camera gives us everything we need. Some critics accused it of formalism too, but a lot of critics grew up in the age of verbal cinema. They sometimes see a director who thinks visually as an egotist.
It's true that visual cinema requires more concentration from the audience. We have to watch closer and interpret more, but that's a compliment, not an insult. This stuff matters because cinema, this fabulous young art form, is in danger of making itself irrelevant, by pursuing empty spectacle over stories that mean something in the hearts of those watching. It was just getting started and it might already be over. Say it ain't so, Joe.
Twitter: @ptbyrnes
