Try Harder

One of the most fascinating essays reprinted in Jonathan Rosenbaum's new collection Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia bears the deceptively simple title "Rediscovering Charlie Chaplin." The more accurate title would be "Try Harder." The piece (originally from the September 2004 issue of Cineaste) was tied to a new issue of Chaplin DVDs armed with copious supplemental documentation and appreciations from major global directors (the late Claude Chabrol, the Dardenne brothers, et al.). "I think the period we're now living through may well be the first in which scholars have finally figured out a good way of teaching film history," Rosenbaum proposes of the "didactic materials" that classic films on DVD often come armed with.

With reference to Chaplin's films specifically, Rosenbaum finds the need for education urgent: in a world where it's easy to scorn the Tramp as sentimental and outmoded, he insists "one can't even begin to grasp Chaplin's importance without processing sizable chunks of the twentieth century." He then does his best to lay out some of that historical space briefly, and by the end even a hardened Chaplin skeptic may well be convinced they're the ones at fault. Not because of some facile argument about watching a film and making allowances that the film was "impressive for its time"; that presumes an awful lot of knowledge about what was normative and what could be expected at best from a given era. Rosenbaum's argument is simpler and more convincing: when you're looking at a film that has survived decades, has many substantive admirers and nothing in it speaks to you, you should probably do some reading on it, or at least watch the extras. You may learn how quickly your gut reaction can change.

When DVDs were first taking off, NPR aired a worried little think piece about whether having access to hours of making-of footage would demystify movies, sapping them of a presumably fragile spell by showing the inevitably cruder back process. This is probably not something most people worry about a decade on: supplements are largely promotional gloss, but the praiseworthy ones almost invariably prove to be helpful. Bonuses like that are geared toward people who already like what they've seen and want to know more, but what Rosenbaum proposed is different. Basically, it demands that any viewer who is semi-conscientious start from something like a supplicant position, no matter how knowledgeable they already feel themselves to be -- not to pay lip service to classics that don't speak to you (life's too short), but at least to understand why and how they work for others. The extras are mandatory if you don't like what you saw; smart Google research is a valuable and increasingly breezy post viewing habit to get into, especially when starting from the (legally sketchy) Books option, which makes it simpler to skip over TV listings and other internet chaff by pointing towards verified sources and histories first. (Ditto tcmdb.com, which is almost invariably more informative on classic Hollywood than the usual IMDB grab bag.)

Chaplin is a bona fide icon whose natural pop-culture afterlife is fading by the year. The gap between a popularity that never needed to be explained and his current near-proximity to museum culture can make him surprisingly hard to connect with. This is everyone's problem as a viewer as canonical reshuffling is inevitable and personal blind spots unavoidable. Right now, Akira Kurosawa's cultural cachet is under assault for similar reasons, with accusations of the work as being too crude, too literal, too drained of visceral juice. (I can sympathize and often feel the same way.) Perhaps there's a titan you can't vibe with: Maybe Fellini seems too gaudy, Godard too obtuse, and so on. Every icon has their potential, utterly subjective Achilles' heel for viewers. But in an era in which it's simpler than ever to read up on the underdocumented and overexposed alike, not trusting yourself is probably a prudent idea. Reading up may leave you still feeling unmoved, but the odds are higher now that there's material that'll undermine you softly rather than as an order from on cultural high. It's not (only) about respect, but alternate routes to pleasure.

Posted by ahillis at October 26, 2010 12:35 PM