In the early 1990s, I stopped telling my students that film was the art of the twentieth century. These children of Blockbuster Video were eager to get industry jobs, not indulge in extravagant dreams. It even seemed cruel to suggest to them that the shelf life of cinema as an art form had been less than a hundred years and they had missed it. Besides, it was faintly embarrassing to recall that for some of us, long ago, cinema had been all-consuming.
It was 1959, shortly after I had refused to be shipped off to that peculiar form of incarceration, the English boarding school. Thwarted in their initial scheme to widen their son’s horizons, my parents turned to Plan B— culture—and persuaded the Peterborough Film Society to let me become a member. On Sunday evenings for the next few winters, my mother and I squeezed into her tiny car and drove across East Anglia to be educated by cinema.
I clearly recall that as I entered my teenage years civilization was going through a bad patch. My older sister had returned from Paris to inform us that God was dead, England was still remembering rationing, my left-wing aunts were quarrelling bitterly over Soviet betrayals, and Buddy Holly had just died. Only movies offered hope.
That winter the family drove to London to see John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. I was bored. Why agonize over pusillanimous England when on any Sunday night I could escape to the exuberance of Federico Fellini’s Italy or the India of Satyajit Ray? My political aunts might despair of Cold War rhetoric, but from socialist Europe came a flood of movies that promised a golden future. I had no doubt that my sister was right and that God was dead, but who cared—I had just discovered the films of Yasujiro Ozu and Jean Renoir. Was neurosis ever more fun than in the films of Bergman, elitism more satisfying than through my new-found passion for Hawks and Ford, anything more wonderful than living in the Paris of Truffaut, Rivette, and Godard? To my parents, brought up on the great Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, I am sure their movie-obsessed child was like a born-again Christian, strident and annoying, but I would brook no opposition. With nothing else to believe in, I would believe in cinema.
When my parents finally packed me off to boarding school, one of my aunts gave me a handbook on starting a film society. Aimed at rehabilitating inmates of Her Majesty’s prisons, the instructions worked equally well in the more repressive atmosphere of my private school. I think my aunt had hoped that The Wild One, The Battle of Algiers, and Ashes and Diamonds would awaken a spirit of rebellion among these children of privilege, but I had no intention of encouraging democratic tendencies among my classmates. The film club was fed a strict diet of Hitchcock, Ford, and other classics. I had already begun to display the arrogance of a true cinephile. All films might be equal, but some are more equal than others.
At eighteen, rather than head off to university, I crossed the Atlantic to run errands for a film company in Manhattan. Life was wonderful. I shared a sublet with cockroaches on the Upper West Side and was within walking distance of the repertory theatres strung along Broadway. I fraternized with a group of young Jewish and Italian film students who understood that arguing loudly about movies while gulping down Chinese-Cuban food between screenings was the way to live. I was British and had to learn both skills.
The French New Wave and anti-Vietnam War protests were both picking up steam, and we could not bear to miss either. The war enraged us, but it was cinema that dominated our dreams. We were excited by the new, and enough original films were made at this time to win our lifelong loyalty. We were also still of an age when ambition and lust are easily mistaken. In the morning we might respect our hero directors but at night we could not help noticing that Rossellini had rearranged bombed-out Rome to be a backdrop for glorious Anna Magnani; that while the rest of the twentieth century was going to hell, Michelangelo Antonioni’s camera lingered on Monica Vitti’s passive beauty; that even Ingmar Bergman was inspirited by new lovers. In short, that obsession with a beautiful woman was a perfectly sound basis for even the most serious filmmaking.
Hollywood had taught previous generations how to kiss; we were being taught how to dream. By now a few of us had begun to write about cinema, and our new theories, glorifying the director at any cost, mostly glorified our own ambitions. The films we adored were often made by directors hardly older than we were, and if they basked in glory now, why not us tomorrow? Just as millions waited to hear if the Beatles could repeat the freshness of A Hard Day’s Night, we waited to see if Truffaut and the others could match the inspiration of their early films. When these artists grew in stature with each new work we were thrilled.
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