Cinema, I suspect, is going to become so rarefied, so private in meaning, and
so lacking in audience appeal that in a few years the foundations will be
desperately and hopelessly trying to bring it back to life, as they are now
doing with theater. The parallel course is, already, depressingly apparent.
Clancy Sigal's (admiring) account of Beckett's Endgame might have been written
of Bergman's The Silence:
Endgame's two main characters . . . occupy a claustrophobic space and a deeply
ambiguous relationship.... Outside, the world is dead of some great
catastrophe.... The action of the play mainly comprises anxious bickering
between the too principal characters. Eventually, Clov dresses for the road to
leave Hamm, and Hamm prepares for death, though we do not see the moment of
parting . . . none of the actors is quite sure what the play is about, Beckett
affects complete ignorance of the larger implications. "I only know what's on
the page," he says with a friendly gesture.
Is Beckett leading the way or is it all in the air? His direction that the
words of Play should be spoken so fast that they can't be understood is
paralleled by Resnais's editing of Muriel so fast that you can't keep track of
what's going on. Penelope Gilliatt writes, "You may have to go to the film at
least twice, as I did, before the warmth of it seeps through . . ."; Beckett
has already anticipated the problem and provided the answer with the stage
direction, "Repeat play exactly."
When movies, the only art which everyone felt free to enjoy and have opinions
about, lose their connection with song and dance, drama, and the novel, when
they become cinema, which people fear to criticize just as they fear to say
what they think of a new piece of music or a new poem or painting, they will
become another object of academic study and "appreciation," and will soon be an
object of excitement only to practitioners of the "art." Although L'Avventura
is a great film, had I been present at Cannes in 1960, where Antonioni
distributed his explanatory statement, beginning, "There exists in the world
today a very serious break between science on the one hand . . . ," I might
easily have joined in the hisses, which he didn't really deserve until the
following year, when La Notte revealed that he'd begun to believe his own
explanations—thus making liars of us all.
When we see Dwight Macdonald's cultural solution applied to film, when we see
the prospect that movies will become a product for "Masscult" consumption,
while the "few who care" will have their High Culture cinema, who wants to take
the high road? There is more energy, more originality, more excitement, more
art in American kitsch like Gunga Din, Easy Living, the Rogers and Astaire
pictures like Swingtime and Top Hat, in Strangers on a Train, His Girl Friday,
The Crimson Pirate, Citizen Kane, The Lady Eve, To Have and Have Not, The
African Queen, Singin' in the Rain, Sweet Smell of Success, or more recently,
The Hustler, Lolita, The Manchurian Candidate, Hud, Charade, than in the
presumed "High Culture" of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marienbad, La Notte, The
Eclipse, and the Torre Nilsson pictures. As Nabokov remarked, "Nothing is more
exhilarating than Philistine vulgarity."