First-Person Film Historian POV: 35mm Celluloid Rewind Bench
"Le silence est une présence, non une absence." (Silence is a presence, never an absence.) — Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe (1975)
Last Friday evening, an ambitious graduate student of mine convinced me to accompany him to a San Francisco multiplex to witness the latest three-hundred-million-dollar superhero spectacle.
I went in good faith, armed with a lukewarm espresso and a resolve to be open-minded.
I survived for precisely forty-seven minutes.
In those forty-seven minutes, the film subjected my central nervous system to an unrelenting barrage: eight hundred and sixty-two individual camera cuts, three synthetic orchestral crescendos that sounded as though a synthesizer were being dropped down a flight of copper stairs, and four separate explosions rendered with such frantic CGI velocity that the human eye had no hope of discerning what was actually colliding.
Not once in forty-seven minutes did the camera hold still long enough to observe an actor's eyelids tremble with genuine doubt. Not once was the audience permitted two uninterrupted seconds of silence to consider the emotional wreckage on screen.
When I quietly excused myself to walk out into the cool, merciful fog of North Beach, my student whispered in bewilderment: "Professor Sinclair, what was wrong? The pacing was so fast!"
I had to gently inform him that velocity is not pacing.
A blender set on high speed has velocity. A pneumatic jackhammer has velocity. But neither possesses rhythm, and neither will ever make a human being weep.