Movies, in all seriousness

HERE it is at last: the smoking gun, the Saturday night special that, wielded by woozy French cinephiles, drove their previously sympathetic American cousins off into the night, muttering rebellion -- or at least puzzled dissent -- over the mysterious workings of the Gallic mind.

Hitchcock, yes. Howard Hawks, yes. Anthony Mann, why not? Robert Aldrich, maybe. The French intellectuals had, with their excitable (if occasionally unreadable) enthusiasm, rescued these directors from their American status as merely popular entertainers; they were auteurs whose work needed to be analyzed with high seriousness, which these critics, grouped around the magazines Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, did -- shot by shot, sequence by sequence.

But this -- this was too much: Jerry Lewis, for God’s sake -- manic, infantile, witless Jerry Lewis, auteur of more cinematic misery (if your mental age was anything over 9 years old) than anyone could readily imagine. Sometimes, reading reports in general interest publications about Lewis mania in Paris, one idly wondered whence the sources of the madness, the Ur text that set the terms of this mystifying endearment.

This matter, at least, is finally settled. Lewis owes (or owed -- surely they have come to their senses by now) his Parisian reputation very largely to a slightly gaga critic named Robert Benayoun, who began writing about him in 1956 and eventually devoted a book to him. Along the way, he wrote a piece naming him Positif’s Man of the Year in 1963. It is reprinted in the excellent anthology Michel Ciment and Laurence Kardish have drawn from Positif on its 50th anniversary and it is, blessedly, not typical of the book’s other essays.

Benayoun makes much of Lewis’ “innocence” -- his calculated adoration of children, to whom he shamelessly and sentimentally played -- and of his technological pioneering. We owe to him that admittedly valuable innovation, the video assist, by which directors can see the shots while they are making them. But Benayoun writes mainly as a slightly demented fan. His loving descriptions of gag sequences in such Lewis movies as “The Bell Boy,” “The Ladies Man” and “The Errand Boy” are painfully unfunny. And unpersuasive. Mostly he speculates, based on dubious secondary sources, about Lewis’ character -- the humanist beneath the craziness and all that. One can see how the sheer force of his burble might have got Paris talking back in the ‘60s. But -- please trust me on this -- Eddie Murphy’s remake of “The Nutty Professor” is in every sense superior to Lewis’ incoherent and laugh-free original. That would be as true on the Champs-Elysees as it is on the Third Street Promenade.

But as the editors note, Positif always had close ties to Surrealism, which in France is more of a worked-out philosophy than a vague catch-phrase, so it’s easy to see how Benayoun got snookered by Lewis. It’s also easy to see how anomalous his piece is in this volume. Most of the essays do not attempt career overviews; they tend to be close analyses of specific films, very detailed in their attention to the way individual sequences are worked out and often very smart in the way they judge their effect on the film’s overall design. For example, Louis Seguin’s essay on “Belle de Jour” interestingly worries the question of just which passages in this authentic Surrealist masterpiece are dream sequences, which are intended as realistic, the interpenetration of those two states being crucial not only to our understanding of Luis Bunuel’s film but also to our appreciation of all Surreal art objects.

It is a piece with which to conjure. So is Jean-Loup Bourget’s article showing how the circular structure of key sequences reinforces the overall, entrapping circularity of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” Or Michel Perez’s reflections on how the quotidian details of a seemingly normal pregnancy reinforce the gathering horror of “Rosemary’s Baby.” Or Alain Masson’s insistence on the importance of the wind-chill factor in “Fargo.” “Coldness and stubbornness condition everything,” he writes, suggesting that the movie would not be so profound and touching -- and deeply funny -- without the unspoken moral relevance of its bleak imagery. Finally, there’s the elegance of editor Ciment’s reflections on “Days of Heaven.” He reads Terence Malick’s film as both an attempt to reclaim the universality of silent film -- its dialogue is very spare, and most of its meaning is carried by its striking imagery -- and as a modernist commentary on the death of the American pastoral tradition. Ciment, incidentally, brings in brief comments on “Giant” and “East of Eden,” which he claims -- accurately, I believe, now that he’s made me think of it -- share similar pastoral preoccupations.

The American reader will find some things about this collection strange. Every piece is in some sense an appreciation; the whole raucous “thumbs up, thumbs down” manner that rules American reviewing is notably absent in Positif. Similarly, they avoid the moralizing tone that is such a tiresome aspect of American reviewing. These writers accept these movies on their own artistic terms; they don’t care about, say, the scandalous aspects of “In the Realm of the Senses” that so preoccupied American reviewers. Above all, these writers don’t offer much in the way of plot summary. They assume that a civilized human being will be keeping up with what’s happening in cinema in the same way that he or she keeps up with current fiction or current affairs. In short, they are writing for people who have seen the movie, not for people who are trying to make up their minds about seeing it.

This, too, will cause problems for some readers. If you have not seen the film under discussion in this or that essay, the piece may well prove incomprehensible to you. On the other hand you have to envy the “culture” -- the word is used advisedly -- that produced this magazine, this book. As the latter’s American editor, Kardish, observes, “Films alone do not make a culture resonant, but thinking, writing, arguing about them, their makers, and their context do. With the disappearance of regularly published film magazines at once serious and popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and with the ascendance of the sound bite masquerading as criticism, writing about movies, especially in America, has become either the expression of a journalist’s bias (hardly the basis for contemplation) or of an editor’s interest in celebrity (which has nothing to do with the film itself).” Kardish doesn’t even mention our ludicrous interest in opening week box office numbers or the career moves of studio potentates.

The old, fairly knowing mass audience for film having largely disappeared (you can find its aging and otherwise disabled remains at the Laemmle theaters most weekdays), what passes for a film culture in this country is largely the province of freaks and geeks, people who have seen everything (especially in the horror and sci-fi genres) and understood nothing and spend their lives e-mailing useless opinions to one another. A cineaste, like me, who has recently been in France, talking to his opposite numbers, has to be impressed by the range of their cinematic interests, the depth of their historical references, their undying admiration for the great figures of the movie past, the passion of their arguments. OK, every once in a while someone like Jerry Lewis intrudes on the conversation, but that is a small price to pay for the pleasure of their company.

Ciment ends his piece on “Days of Heaven” by writing that it “aims at nothing less than the original purpose of cinema, which is to become a synthesis of all the arts that preceded it.” I’m not certain that the film is quite worthy of its own ambitions. But I also know that we cannot have a film culture that ignores those ambitions. If we are to have great movies, we need to reassemble a great audience. In its way Positif has done what little it can to do just that -- for which it deserves our admiring respect.