Introducing non-cinephiles to film

I guess one potential benefit of going straight to Tarkovsky would be that it has the potential to be a major watershed sort of thing. The films are massive, sublime, and very artistically accomplished, and I imagine that many people might go farther with a hard start like that.

Yeah....but.

Those movies are off-putting, not entertaining, have little humor and often a plot that's "difficult" at least. If I were the novice, I'd have to wonder, if all "good" movies are this grim and humorless, why bother? It's not self-evident, e.g., whether Tarkovsky, or Bergman, or whoever, is The Greatest. You have to be nearly convinced before you get to the theater, like, "I'm going to see a flick by the world's greatest film maker". He's great to you, but maybe not to me or the person in the next row.

I'll go to a football game instead.

You don't become a marathon runner all at once, going out running until you drop and wreck your knees. What you do is to start with shorter distances and work you way up.

I would use the Ludovico technique.

Back when I was an undergrad, one semester, I had a choice between several course requirements, one of which was "film" (which really was film back then....no digital). Movies seemed easy so I got to write my 10 one-page, typed single space reviews and got my college credits. I had to see "Art Films" (from a list available in the library), so it was instant immersion. I have to admit that I punted back to more fun movies after that course.

Do you remember what was on the syllabus?

Not exactly, but it would have included Fellini, Bergman, Hitchcock, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind and some other war horses of that time. It was, however, heavily weighted toward European movies.

Oh, the great "No one NEEDS movies" spiel.


Yeah, and no one NEEDS dentists either. It just means all your teeth will eventually rot and fall out of your mouth. But good thing no one actually NEEDS teeth either. Just gum your gruel baby and stop complaining. Because no one NEEDS to eat steak.


Yes, people NEED movies. And it's always convenient that this line of thinking that no one NEEDS them, is always introduced when we are talking about so called serious or difficult films. Almost as if we've got to undermine an entire medium before anyone dares start talking about what the value of something like a Tarkovksy film could be. Let's just throw the baby out with the bath water because some people take great offense when a film dares to speak over their head when they weren't listening anyways


Now will we all fall into metabolic collapse if we are deprived of movies? Of course not. So in that way, I suppose they are not NEEDED. But what art supplies is still vital, and supposed art films, which might not be conventionally entertaining (but,.yes, are still absolutely entertaining) give us the tools we need to understand other ways of seeing the world. Different philosophies and traditions and cultures and all of the emotions that come with these things. As Ebert once said, they are an empathy machine. And for them to do this job in full, they need to show humanity from every angle. Yes, even those that some people can't help but immediately become distracted by because they don't bend at the knee for their most basic entertainment needs.

Crumbs is weirdly annoyed but I agree.

People need art - otherwise, they wouldn't make it. Art has so many reasons to exist, and so do arthouse films. Art films can do so many things that simple, entertaining cinema cannot do. Best arthouse films are edifying, transcendent, and even life-changing. I think it's salient that many people talk about art films with a lot of spite only if they had to take a class where they were forced to watch them. A similar situation to obligatory school reading - most people hate those books only because they had to read them for class. Had they tried reading them for their pleasure/enlightenment, their feelings could have been very different.

That being said, Tarkovsky is indeed one of the greatest filmmakers ever and one of the first directors I started with. To be more exact, I started my cinematic journey with the movies of Tarr, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Kurosawa, and Angelopoulos, and trust me, my standards used to be so high that anything else would feel so much inferior than it was. This includes other great filmmakers like Hitchcock. A Hitchcock film felt just OK compared to a Tarkovsky. For the first few years of cinephilia, I was constantly UNDERRATING other great films because I was comparing them all to the seemingly unreachable peak of Tarkovsky and Tarr. I'm not doing it anymore because my standards are much lower these days. But I'm sure if I rewatched a few Tarkovskies and Tarrs, I'd resume doing it.

Gladiator is good, used to be my favorite film of all time when I was 8. I watched it a few times, the last time at the age of 17-18 when I already knew Tarr and Tarkovsky. While I didn't hate it on my last watch, it felt flat in comparison to these greats. Just a film to watch and forget - I watch many films like that and probably OVERRATE them. But oh well, A Tarr or Tarkovsky is a film you watch in awe and then can't stop thinking about it for many days. These films are special, they change you, they shape you. And Gladiator is a film you just watch and that's it.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

I think it's more like weirdly livid.


And there isn't anything weird about it, unless we only view this kind of thing through the lens of movies or art having some kind of secondary worth in society.


In short, we're ****ed without art and treating it like it's some little trinket meant to kill some time, and that any serious discussion surrounding it, or any personal revelations learned from it, are somehow being looked over when assessing its value, says a lot about the society we are living in. Especially when this is the consistent response of most people. And it has certainly become that over the last ten or so years. Constant shrugging. Constant suspicion towards anyone who takes the time to articulate or think about anything. Constant deferral to 'who cares, everyone's opinion, or lack there of, is of equal value'. Which should be concerning to everyone, even those who couldn't give a rats ass about Art. Thats because the more we devalue these things, and the less importance we consider art with, the more likely we are to be dealing with a similar deficiency in our sense of community and a rise in political apathy. The more we treat thinking and talking about art as being a burden and not one of its obvious benefits, the more the value of just thinking about anything in general becomes suspect.


Art can be thought of as the canary in the coal mine. The more and more we treat it as nothing but a distraction, the more this says about the society we live in. And when these canaries keep turning up dead (I'll assume the post mortem will be shrugged off by some as boredom) the more we should prepare for similar garbage thinking everywhere else.


Is this the intent of everyone who makes these kinds of claims. Obviously not. As is usually the case, things are mostly just said flippantly. But that doesn't change that these things matter. And I would say, they are becoming of more and more critical importance the more we are watching all of our institutions decaying in real time.

This inevitably leads back to that old question about what art is. When I think of Tarkovsky, what comes to mind is an obligatory bow to something called Art (note the capital A) as taught by an academic. Often cinephiles know too much, often summarized by comments that amount to "this has been done before". Yeah, it has. Just about everything that can be put in front of a camera or animated into a script has been done before.

What I also can't help thinking is whether "Art" has to mean obscure, boring, not emotionally engaging. Apparently, according to some, that is what it means. Last night, seeing the Dune movie, I found myself thinking that, while most moments in the movie were well composed as individual images, most of it was also crashingly boring. Most of those moments would make good still images, but too much sand, not enough plot and dialog, none of it entertaining. Does Art have to be boring?

Having one foot in the world of commercial images, I can't not notice that an awful lot of people like me are really good at composing images, but they are images like retail ads, something rarely mentioned in the same sentence as Art. There's nothing entertaining about a lawn mower ad.

That's where Dune lost me. It looks good, but without a compact plot, engaging characters and performances, so what?

You just described the bulk of Hollywood's big budget movies...Looks great, but not filling. I haven't seen Dune Part II so can't comment on it specifically.

Art is a subjective experience that can evoke different emotions, thoughts, and interpretations in different viewers. Art is NOT a competition to see who can create the most original, complex, or demanding work. Ergo, art is supposed to challenge, inspire, and provoke us to see the world in new ways - and THIS is what many critics appreciate (or at least they should). Sure, if the movie is just entertaining and does it well, it's an enjoyable watch. But being just a nice watch doesn't cut it. Incidentally, artists don't have an obligation to make you feel good or entertain you. That's the lie of commercial cinema.

When you say that cinephiles know too much, you are implying that there is a limit to how much one can appreciate a film past which one needs to resort to high-brow evaluation. But I think this is narrow-minded, as it dismisses the interpretability and richness of cinema as an art form for the common folk. In other words, quoting Herzog, film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. If you were criticizing film scholars, fine. But your problem seems to be the very art films. But films are made for people, even the most demanding and personal ones.

Now, it's obvious unique films will get bonus points for doing something that has never been done before (or at least is rarely done), but countless great art films aren't unique in any specific way. Their uniqueness stems from the perfect combination of all known elements.

When you say that Art has to mean obscure, boring, and not emotionally engaging, you are projecting a weird caricature of what Art supposedly is (AKA how you see some art films, I presume) instead of taking into account the very complex nature of the actual thing.

Further, your very assumption that art has to cater to your tastes, needs, and desires ignores the possibility that art can challenge you to expand your horizons, appreciate different perspectives, and experience something outside of your usual entertainment fare. You are closing yourself off to the potential of art to teach you something or make you feel something you've never felt before.

I'll skip the Dune part because I haven't seen Part 2, and wasn't crazy about Part 1.

"Does Art have to be boring?"

No, Tarkovsky's films are some of the most edifying, stimulating, and interesting films ever made. None of them are boring in the least. If you find them boring, that's your prerogative, I guess, but if you dismiss them only for being "boring", that's on you, and kinda shows what kind of film watcher you are.

I'd love to see a list of your favorite films. (I mean this without spite.)

What Minio said. Tarkovksy isn't boring.


And no one measures a films greatness on how boring it is. Here's a newsflash: people who like these films aren't bored by them. They like them. Hard to believe but critics aren't actually on the hunt for what they are unmoved and unstimulated by. They aren't on the hunt to find some dry as dust academic exercise to tout as the next great film. They like these films precisely because they ARENT bored by them. They find the process of engaging with them exciting. They find the experience of understanding the human elements they depict rewarding. They aren't a cabal of cobweb covered scholars adverse to enjoying movies and forcefeeding everyone else to eat their tasteless pap. They simply enjoy different things about them.


I'll repeat, They enjoy them!


This default assumption that any film which rewards thinking or any kind of deeper reflection must be boring, speaks volumes about how distrustful so many seem to be about the value of thought.


Thinking isn't boring. It isn't work. It isn't the opposite of entertainment. It's just about the greatest gift humans have, and art is often at its best when it's stimulating as much thought (and it's ensuing empathy) as possible.

Plus, I'm pretty sure as much as he claims he wants entertainment from films, he never ever dared to venture far enough from the mainstream to even have any clue about what's available beyond Netflix and a few 101 classics.

I've actually watched a whole lot of classics and found an awful lot of them to be like taking my medicine, something I do for the sake of cinematic literacy, but for a night out....no. "He" has a lot of experience with a lot of movies that I found to be completely boring. This goes back to film-class and 8 1/2 (like watching plaster harden). For what it's worth, I also think that Citizen Kane is over-rated (except for Welles' great mid-Atlantic accent, that rivals Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn). If there isn't SOMETHING entertaining in a movie, just WHY would I go? Checking the boxes on cinematic devices doesn't make for much of a night out.

Well, aren’t you the martyr, enduring those classics for the sake of cinematic literacy. Someone get this person a medal!

Yeah, I bet your experience boils down to film school 101, most of which you found boring and some low-bar American entertainment. Once again, I'd love to know which films you do NOT find boring.

Entertainment is not the only criterion for judging a movie. Plus there are many ways in which a film can make me entertained. A movie can be entertaining by making me laugh, cry, swoon, think, feel, wonder, imagine, empathize, sympathize, connect, relate, meditate, have Stendhal syndrome, and be hypnotized, to name a few. Good films usually do that by being engaging, (awe-)inspiring, challenging, transformative, transcendent, captivating, moving, stimulating, evocative, sublime, immersive, emotional, thought-provoking, expressive, jaw-dropping visually, or enlightening.

A film is a portal to the head of its auteur, their ideas, thoughts, vision, style, philosophy, passion, and creativity. Films can show you a perspective on a given topic that is different from your own, for your consideration. They can show you different cultures and realities, including those that do not exist, but always filtered through the lens of the camera and the minds of the filmmakers. Films are windows into the world as much as they're mirrors put in front of their auteurs.

A great art film amazes you. It makes you think "Damn, I didn't even know THIS was possible." It inspires you to try and find more films as good as that. Maybe it even inspires you to pick up a camera and shoot something yourself. Great films aim to, sometimes with arrogance, reshape the world. The greatest films succeed in that. They reshape my word, your word, any other film watcher's world.

A film is not just the story and characters, but it's also everything in between: the space between characters and objects, the framing of the shot, the movements of the camera, the hues, the little neurons in your head while you're watching it, the thoughts and dreams you have after watching it.

That's why cinema is art. But...

Cinema is more than art. It is life itself. Just like Walbrook who asks "Why do you want to dance?", if one asks "Why do you want to watch films?", the only right answer is "Why do you want to live?". I don't know exactly why, but I must. It takes courage to live and die cinema, but to speak of it...

There are books. But cinema is not books. It's not made solely of or for the story. There is music, but cinema isn't that either. The image you say... surely. But the image is also unnecessary, as per Jarman's poem and Debord's provocation. And yet, the image is important because it defines the film. It's just that it doesn't have to be a painting or a photograph, but rather a flicker; painting in motion - 24 paintings per second, clocking in and out, changing, transforming.

So cinema... you wonder now, what to make of it. Life is its essence. Life, a start of life, like Plato's forms is a start of philosophy. There have been other lives, will be others: a fallen angel, a chased fugitive, a dead whale in a city square.

That life itself must be amplified to make it astonishing or obscured to strip it to its bare essentials. Not for scholars, but for humans in general and cinephiles in particular. Life itself is made up of close-ups of joy, freeze-frames of pain, camera pans of awe, quick and slow edits, loud and soft sounds, dissolves of longing, and shadows of hope.

But life is more daring than Keaton's stunts and vanishes much faster than the Landscape in the Mist. Life traverses faster than Shimizu's pans and sneaks by more quietly than Okamoto's samurai. Its seizures are harder than Anna's in the metro, its mastershots longer than Satan Tango. Life's beauty is greater than any glimpses of Mekas, its desperation greater than that of Mizoguchi's heroine. Life's more avant-garde than Brakhage's experiments and more moving than Yamada's endings. Life's miracles are more sublime than those of Dreyer, and its dreams more vivid than those of Obayashi. There's more to life than the smiles of Takamine and Karina, more than the glances of Gong and Kyo.

In the end, all is blurred, and it turns out that the only big question in cinema is "What is cinema?"

And then you have the mainstream cinema. The commercial stuff made for money with the sole idea of entertaining the viewer. Of creating a mirage of meaning, and whose only real aim is the swinish joy of the audience. There's no room for beauty, no room for life. It's the cinema of death. Its directors, death's messengers, they drop from nowhere, and their cameras are already rolling. They capture what they never cared to see, what they never lived. They never pause to gaze upon life. But to show life, one must have seen life. And to see life, one must have watched it for years.

If you treat cinema as "a nice night out", then everything I said will go over your head. You cannot learn to love cinema through film studies. You either love cinema or you don't. You can fall in love with it, but rarely through film studies.

I think, you think I'm more jaded than I really am. What I am is a guy who's seen more movies in a lifetime than most people ever heard about, good ones, bad ones and many more indifferent ones. What I do know is that, aside from Oscar night blather, movies are 60% an investment. A bank or actors or friends or whoever else has some deep pockets gives a producer and director some millions of dollars and expects to make some money on that investment. If some art happens along the way, great, but art is the means of making profit more than the goal of the investment.

Your nightmare is a Heaven's Gate, spend a lot, lose a lot and everybody hates it. If you're lucky, good and all the stars are in alignment, you get a Blair Witch Project, invest $90K and make a couple hundred million. Not all of it is about money, but an awful lot of it is. Whether it's an indy flick, foreign or the latest blockbuster, money is a big part of what it's about and how the bills get paid to make the next movie.

If you make money AND have some literature and audio/visual aesthetics, all the much better. It's a business and an industry, plain and simple. A lot of jobs and incomes depend on it. It's been much harder on theaters during COVID because not many butts end up in theater seats.

I mentioned the Blair Witch Project because it's one of the best examples of the whole ugly, business of cost and profit. They spent 90K making it in my part of the world ("Blair" is a localism for a road name), got loans for a few hundred thousand for distribution and ads and made a huge return, several hundred million. Personally, I thought it sucked, but audiences loved it, some thought it was true, but it's not. I appreciated the entrepreneurial spirit much more than the movie. My hometown favorite is John Waters, who has done quite well with his cast of folks that went to school around me. Barry Levinson has done quite well with the whole local thing.

For me, yes....it IS a night out. If I'm going to pay for a ticket (I do, a couple times each week), I want a movie that doesn't make me feel cheated. I don't want to sit in the basement streaming it while I eat leftover chili, even though it's a nice basement, good video system and decent chili. I want to go downtown, where the lights are bright, hopefully run into someone I know, and see a show and maybe get some drinks afterward. There's nothing wrong with combining art and entertainment and I'm not good at seeing movies on an empty stomach.

No, I think you're just a normie movie buff.

You know, watching more movies than an average Joe heard about is not a flex, considering an average Joe is practically deaf. If all the movies you watch are nothing but commercial American films, you should try watching some movies that have artistic value, cultural relevance, and originality. But sorry, I forgot all you want is to have fun on your night out. You're literally a slave to consumerism.

If you're just describing the way it is, there's little to nitpick here. But if you believe this is the way it should be and want to play along, the problem is no longer only with the status quo, but also with YOU, who mindlessly agrees to that state of affairs and rejects alternatives.

These films don’t let you think or feel for yourself. You just go along with whatever they show you. It’s like a conditioned reflex. They rely on flashy effects to manipulate your emotions. All the tricks in the world to keep you entertained. But if you remove these cheap tricks, they are laughable, because they have no heart. Maybe some of them still look good because they are fast-paced, but they are as shallow as a nightclub. They don’t make any sense. Godard once said something brilliant: In the past, they made silent films and you understood everything, without any dialogue. You understood more than the plot, you understood the human condition. And then, some filmmakers tried to do even less. Not minimalist, but focused. And you still felt something, without any dialogue, without any effects, without anything. And I don’t mean bleak things, just normal things. It’s a very hard thing to do - impossible with commercial cinema, especially the contemporary American mainstream kind.

You treat movies like girlfriends and yet you go to a few different ones a week? In what other way can you mean "cheated" other than the film not meeting your expectations of entertaining you? And if that's the case, once again, your approach to cinema is consumerist and normie. Nothing wrong with it if you want to have fun once in a while. But if that's ALL you want from and ALL you see in cinema, you're not a cinephile. Damn, I'm not even sure if you're a movie buff. You just watch a lot of movies, but I doubt you really love film.

Let's think about what loving cinema really means. Is it just loving individual movies? No. It's loving cinema as a whole. It's loving entire genres, movements, and types of cinema that YOU supposedly wouldn't even bother checking out. You claim you're into entertainment, but I bet this is limited to just American films or whatever is trendy at the moment. But my idea of entertainment is much more varied than that. It's Japanese nuns whipping each other, CAT III films with Shu Qi, Simon Yam, or Anthony Wong, it's a cheap knock-off of Star Wars with Hasselhoff. It's Italian zapata bandits shouting "Vamos, compañeros", it's 3-hour-long Masala goodies, it's cheap and dirty American SOV debaucheries. It's a Wakaliwood VJ going crazy, it's Cuneyt Arkin's vehicles, silent serials of the 1910s, and Etaix's shenanigans, Shaw Bros wuxia and Taiwanese xianxia extravaganza. It's Deodato's cannibals and Bava's colors. It's Goblin's score reverberating in expressionist interiors and Marins's colorful hell. And somewhere in the distance, a mustachioed Harrison is blowing everyone away with a katana. And next to all of that, there are films by Tarkovsky, Bresson, Kurosawa, Ozu... However, you reject the entire second "category", and presumably the first, too, since my hunch is you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

But sure, enjoy your nights out. Just please stop pretending you're doing it for the films. You're doing it for everything BUT the films. You're doing it for the thrill, the entertainment, the popcorn, the drinks, and the meetups after. You mantled cinema in a whole socio-consumerist package, making the core the least important part of the whole. And this is something a true cinephile would never do.

If all you want is to socialize, you don't need movies. Nobody's stopping you from socializing on some nights and watching films with due respect on other nights.

Just eat before you leave, bro. Eating while watching films, if that's what you're doing, is triply disrespectful: to other people in the audience (unless they're pigs who do the same, of course), to the film and its creators, and to your dignity as a human being. I'd even say that it's a sort of addiction, one you have to rid yourself of. If you don't do it and I misunderstood what you said, my respects.

And sure, none of us is ideal. I ate popcorn at the movies once. I regret it to this day because I went against my convictions in fear of what would happen if I was assertive and told the girl I was with what I really thought about it. It didn't work out anyway, so my resolve after that was to never do it again. The next girl already got some harsh talking-to after her inexcusable behavior at the movies. Of course, she didn't like it. I hate normies. Cinemas should be holy places, not pigsties

Just because there is an unavoidable business element to moviemaking, doesn't mean this should be the lens we view it through. All of the things Minio has stated about the personal and cultural benefits of watching film shouldn't be completely ignored because the film industry is chock full of capitalistic parasites.


Putting the exchange of money above the humanistic elements of art, is exactly the kind of cultural rot I'm always talking about.

But I suppose it makes sense that one might lean heavily on an argument based upon profit margins when defending the basic Hollywood template for movie making. It's a quick and easy way to defend hack filmmaking, without having to go through the bother of actually talking about the merits of the film itself.