Lucidno
Nostalgia and cinephilie
In a way, I have lived with Jean-Luc Godard longer than Anne-Marie Miéville. I fell in love with JLG in 1960, when I saw Breathless at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street, London. I didn't know what to expect. I was overwhelmed. I had no other film to judge it by. I'm at an age, alas, when I can claim to have seen all of Godard's films chronologically. I say 'alas' ambiguously, because there are some advantages to having a long life, one of which is having a lengthy retrospective. For example, younger filmgoers than I would have entered Godard's career at different points. Even if they started with Breathless, they would have been exposed to films that had been influenced by it. In other words, even though they could appreciate it and were able to articulate this appreciation eloquently, often better than I, they would never be able to capture the pristine pleasure of seeing it brand new.
Around the same time, I saw, through my virginal eyes, more French New Wave first features such as The 400 blows, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Le Beau Serge. Nobody seeing them for the first time some years later as part of the directors' oeuvre could experience the freshness I did. 1960 was the miraculous year during which I also saw premiers of La Dolce Vita, L'aventurra, Rocco and His Brothers, having never previously seen a film by Fellini, Antonioni or Visconti.
From a different perspective, I can boast of having seen Psycho, in the same year as Breathless, without knowing any element of the plot. I made sure, more than usual, to arrive on time because the cinema staff had been instructed by Hitchcock not to let anyone in after the picture had started. There was also a warning in the trailer to potential audiences, delivered by Hitch in his most plummy tones, that nobody must reveal anything about the plot. What punishment they would suffer if they did so was not clear. I could say that alone among my near contemporaries that I saw Psycho as it was meant to be seen.This doesn't mean that no foreknowledge of the plot and the element of surprise are essential qualities of the film, unlike disposable who-dunnits, but it is intrinsic to it.
I proudly belong to a generation described by Susan Sontag in her 1996 essay The Decay of Cinema as the last era (the '60s and '70s) of cinephilia. 'Cinephilia itself has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish... For cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences. Cinephilia tells us that the Hollywood remake of Godard's Breathless cannot be as good as the original. Cinephilia has no role in the era of hyperindustrial films.'
Film criticism hardly ever takes the generational and nostalgic effect into account. There are few film critics who would admit that their age has any influence on their views. Irrespective of a knowledge of film history or film theory, critics in their 50s have more in common with each other than with critics in their 30s. Each generation shares a frame of reference. That indefinable thing called taste is likely to be formed early in one's film-going life. For example, being brought up during the golden studio era, I had different aesthetic expectations when each logo appeared in the '40s and '50s. Regardless of objective judgement of quality, I have fond memories of MGM and Fox musicals, Warner Bros, melodramas, Paramount comedies. There is no longer such studio identification.
I lived in an era when I could see the latest John Ford, Howard Hawks, Nicolas Ray, Vincent Minnelli, Billy Wilder, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock to mention only Hollywood output. Although I can't claim, like Groucho, to have known Doris Day 'before she became a virgin', I did see Elizabeth Taylor blossom into a woman and learnt at first hand to tell the difference between Anthony, Daniel and Delbert.Mann.
I remember the excitement of seeing the first CinemaScope feature even if the memory of The Robe has faded. In those days, as Janice Paige and Fred Astaire sang in Silk Stockings, "If you want to have the crowds come around you've got to have to have glorious Technicolor, breathtaking CinemaScope and Stereophonic sound." I also saw the first showings of 3-D, Cinerama, VistaVision and Todd A-O. A decade later, I saw Jacques Tati's Playtime in a cinema in the Champs Elysee in 70mm before it was reduced in time and space on release. I now realise that this was 52 years ago, long before many film critics were born.
Each film changes over the years, depending on the social context in which it is viewed. Nobody born in the '80s could see a '60's movie in the same way as somebody born in the 40s. In fact, the younger critics bring a different, valuable perspective to their critiques of films of the 'distant past', completely without any trace of nostalgia, which the older critics cannot eliminate.
Ronald Bergan
