Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

What a film demands from a viewer varies a great deal. Often not much is demanded. Keeping the characters straight, remembering what has happened, and following the plot are usually enough for much commercial cinema to “work,” to make sense and entertain. We easily accept the illusion that we are watching a fictional cinematic world in which we are not present or detectable, and we allow ourselves to imagine that we are watching, unobserved, what simply happens in that world. We can occasionally notice that an actor is doing a fine job or that a director has edited a sequence in a confusing way, but if that happens too frequently something is going wrong. Things are going well when we are absorbed in the depicted world, not attending to the world as filmed; that is, when we attend to the filmed world, not to the film world, the world of the actors, the sets, the music, the directorial decisions.    Some cinema addresses its viewer in a different way, though. Something brings us up short when viewing it alters our immediately absorbed attentiveness and seems to demand a regimen of reflective attentiveness. We can still be absorptively engaged in the filmed world; a level of concern, interest in what is happening, tense expectation, still engage us — but in parallel, and, if done successfully, in a way that does not interfere with the normal reaction. We are puzzled that we are looking for several seconds at an empty staircase or an open door or an empty meadow, that the camera lingers on a scene several seconds after a character has departed it, that between one scene and a later one a temporal slice has gone missing and we are not shown events that have happened that we would expect to have seen. We are puzzled that characters speak in a somewhat flat tone, or with minimal affect; that unusually long periods of silence occur; that our attention is drawn to various sounds in scenes, sounds that would not be salient in the normal filmed fictional world; that our angle of vision into the world is highly unusual; that characters’ faces are blank when we would expect great expressiveness. And as just noted, this is what can be risky. If not done well, we end up mainly noting a film’s self-consciousness about its own artifice and self-conception. If we begin attending too much to the world-on-film, then the fictional world itself ceases to grip our attention and we suspect an artistic or “artsy” pretension that has itself as its own object. This distracts us. And it destroys the sense of genuineness and credibility that a film can, uniquely among the arts, create. It can be the directorial version of the actor’s classic absorption-destroying mistake: looking into the camera.   Yet an implicit rejection of a viewer’s conventional expectations about movies and movie watching, or our sense, by contrast, that the film is demanding something unusual from us, need not destroy the cinematic credibility of the movie world. The films of Robert Bresson (1901-1999) are frequently said to be “demanding” and “difficult,” and in that way often “bring us up short” in the way described above. But the films themselves, in all their unconventionality, are so powerful that it is hard to imagine not being moved, anxious, sad, absorbed and invested in the experience of watching what Bresson has made. (It is hard for me to imagine it, at any rate; I realize that some viewers report being bored or baffled.)    Over a forty-year career, Bresson made thirteen filmed fictional narratives that he claims are not even movies or films at all. They are, instead, “cinematographs.” He insisted on this because he was dissatisfied with the fact that movies have failed to make full use of the medium-specific capacities of motion picture photography and have instead rested content with being “filmed theater.” His contention is that such a compromise with theatrical conventions has resulted in aesthetic representations that are themselves theatrical, or must inevitably be experienced as staged, and therefore not credible in their presentation of a human world and in some sense false, untrue both to what cinema can do