Everything Went Black: 'Intro'

Into the black...

Heya, cabal, and welcome to the first communique in what will, with any luck, turn out to be a weekly film column that'll either leave you apoplectic or eager to buy me a Fernet Branca next time you see me out. Possibly both. Hopefully both.

First though, a note on the name: yeah, I know 'Everything Went Black' is the title of a Black Flag album and has nothing to do with film, except that it does, actually.

The theater goes black, the dark curtain of the subconscious rises along with suspension of disbelief, and, if the filmgoing experience is as immersive is it should be, you, the viewer, black out of the stale, mundane existence that is your daily life and into some better/stranger/altogether more "real" place within the context of the cinematic experience.

That feeling of having blacked out during the time spent in thrall to a particular film has always been a benchmark criterium of how I critique any given film. I yearn for the sensation of stepping out of a theater on shaky legs, exiting the dream and re-entering reality, albeit a reality that -- if the film I've just watched is as powerful a narcotizing experience as I always hope it will be -- is suddenly skewed, different, semi-surreal. The light is too bright, the grass is too green, and fuck, is that a human ear at my feet? Oh, David Lynch/Andrzej Zulawski/Wim Wenders/Werner Herzog, you have spoiled me, but good.

Filmmaking at its best -- art at its best -- should leave you shaken and stirred. It scars hearts and shreds minds, or at least the preconceived ideas contained within, and it challenges you to a knife fight in the dark atop Griffith Observatory and then commandeers your will. It's the blade game from Rebel Without a Cause: there's no sticking, just a little jabbing. Except when it sticks.

So that's what I look for, but so very rarely receive, in a film. If it sounds a tad grim, well, art imitates life, and the best art improves on life, which can get pretty, ah, grim at times. Which isn't to say that great films are by definition art films (although from that directorial list above I can see how you might think that's the way I see it), just that they have a quality of soul-affecting artfulness about them.

Great example: Charlie Chaplin's entire oeuvre is positively drowning in oceans of despair, yet throughout it all is maintained a optimistic buoyancy that keeps me coming back again and again.

That's due in no small part to the fact that it mirrors (and probably had a hand in shaping) my own cynical-optimist outlook.

Privation and predation are two of the most important words never once mentioned in all of Chaplin's silent intertitles. The ability to draw comedy from calamity -- in the case of The Great Dictator, epic, and at the time ongoing, tragedy -- is part and parcel of both great art and great, often subversive, hilarity.

Chaplin is just one example among many, but if the ending of City Lights doesn't stick you in the heart and leave you floating on a sea of giddy tears, then frankly, you have no business watching movies in the first place.

Okay. That's as good of an explanation of my critical, movie-mad mindset as you're going to get for now. Next Wednesday: why Sight & Sound is Deaf & Dumb.