The problem of journalism is simple. Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn't' witness it personally. They are entirely dependent on self-interested sources to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality.
The discrepancy between what actually happened and the version of what happened provided by sources is an enormous gray area.
I understand the feelings of critics asked to come up with the ten best films of any year, who say, Ten? Ten's a lot! - and those more generous spirits whose thumbs grow as long as Pinocchio's nose from overrating a lot of pictures, because they want the medium to do well, and because they'd like to feel good about it.
Louis B. Mayer is one of those with a claim to posessing the equation... he began to buy up nickelodeon arcades in the years before the First World War in and around Boston. He had noticed that people liked going into the dark to see the light... the appeal of the movies is beyond the sensible, rational or the hard-working. Going into the dark, afte centuries of progress in which mankind has staggered toward artificial light, smacks of delicious perversity.
What guided Chaplin was the proper protection of self-interest (or craziness). So Chapling, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mark Pickford, with DW Griffith and William S Hart, made an alliance, called United Artists, whereby they would own a distribution company that would market their pictures, allowing them a greater return than if they leased the movies to some outside distributor.
I regret the way that America has elected to make films for its bluntest section of society and in ways that flatter them, and we have to recognize how much that is being done for money. We have to find another way of measuring ourselves. And film is one of the few ways that might be done.
We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands.
Who can now deny the loss of natural light, of skin tones, of real place, and common but precious things in our movies, to be replaced by the gorgeous imagery of things that have never been and never will be? The most special effect in movies is always the human face when its mind is being changed.
In the first week of the showings of the The Matrix Revolutions, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II played on cable television. I started watching, and I was held; I wanted to go through the process again. Can anyone credit that 30 years from now there will be an audience for the three parts of The Matrix, anywhere? Even if Keanu Reeves is our president by then?
In 1972 Charlie Chaplin was allowed back to America to receive an honorary Oscar, 'for the incalculable he had on making motion pictures the art form of this century'. That's what the Academy was always for - to blur the equation enough so that profit and fame could be called art.
The Deer Hunter is securely on my list of American movie events, by which I mean those films that aspired to the whole equation, to be show business and art at the same time.
I dislike The Exorcist, and I found it a warning sign of the dangers in a furious cinematic talent putting the audience through it (a Hitchcock phrase) without purpose, or without the nagging moral anxiety that activated Hitch. You see, I don't think William Friedkin believes in the Devil, or cares about him. I think he found exorcism a pretext for a gross-out and he calculated there was an audience for it, or a crowd ready to be challenged. Maybe I'm too much of an atheist to stand religion being so thrashed.
Bonnie and Clyde became not just a big hit, but a movie that went through young audiences like a first slug of Scotch. It affected clothes, talk, manners. Though set in the thirties it had the feeling of 1966, the most dangerous moment in American young people remembered.
The capacity for loving strangers, whether one thinks of them as fictional beings or stars one will never meet, is a profound reflection on the new consciousness whereby every individual leads his or life while aware of all the billions of other people on Earth. Perhaps it is a fantasy or a fallacy that we can feel for so many strangers. Perhaps it is a mask for selfishness. But no matter the modern stress on special effects, there isn't a sight in movies as momentous as shots of a face as its mind is being changed. And only movies have allowed that.
