Seeing it Again, for the First Time

I watched Jacques Tati’s Playtime for the first time last week. I wasn’t as blown away as I had planned on being, given the stellar reviews I’d heard from friends and critics. At the outset, I understood that Playtime wasn’t your average movie, that I would have to maintain some sort of critical distance, appreciating framing and visual gags, not worrying about getting immersed in a fictional world. Even though I knew these things, I couldn’t help viewing it the way I view every movie – identifying characters, and trying to figure out what’s coming next for them. Even if I know that’s not how I should be viewing a film, its extremely hard to discipline myself to not think this way, especially on the first viewing.

So then I listened to a critic’s commentary track on the DVD, and of course, one of the first things he says (directly quoting Jonathan Rosenbaum, I think) is: you have to watch this film multiple times to appreciate it. So there was confirmation that I wasn’t a complete square for not having adored the film right off the bat. At the same time, I somewhat resented having to spend another 2 hours watching the film again to “get” it. And what if I watched it twice and still didn’t like it? Should I keep watching it until I like it, until I “get” it?

What’s the most intriguing to me about the whole experience is that even though I knew what to look for the first time out, I couldn’t help but be distracted by something. Perhaps it was not so much the fate of the characters (as is the case with most narratives), but with the suspense over what the author/artist will do next? What will the whole film look like? What is the overall shape of the film? How will it all tie together? All the while, I think I was trying to mentally construct what “type” of art film Playtime is, what sort of game Tati was playing, whether or not the pace of the film would pick up or slow down. And I think it’s the inconsistent pacing of a lot of so-called art films that throws me, that keeps me from sitting back and appreciating the film on its own terms during the first viewing. Playtime seemed internally inconsistent, flirting with becoming a traditionally-paced narrative, but never quite making it.

In contrast, Gus Van Sant’s trilogy of languidly paced films (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days) are perfectly internally consistent. Most viewers (myself included) had almost certainly known what they were getting themselves into when they watched the films, either by reading reviews or, in the cases of the latter two, knowing that the director had made extremely slow-paced barely-narratives. With Elephant and Last Days being based on historical events, you know what’s going to happen in the end, so there’s no surprise there, even on the first viewing. And, more importantly, there are no stylistic surprises during the course of the films. They unfold at a perfectly even pace, not really trying to hook viewers in any more than they are already to the paper-thin plot. I have no problem sitting back and appreciating those films as art films on the first viewing. My mind can settle into one reading strategy. Its as if I’m adopting the “multiple viewing” strategy on the first viewing. I simply couldn’t do that with Playtime, or another film I watched last week (for the first time): Julien Donkey-Boy.

Why 1.5-3.5 hours?

On the two DVDs I watched last week – Julien Donkey Boy and Playtime – critics and/or writer/directors defend the work in question by saying that they were part of an effort to push motion picture making forward, to change the language of cinema. I appreciated those sentiments, and yet, I can’t say that I enjoyed either film very much, even though I knew before watching them that they were going to be “different.” Why couldn’t I break out of my standard viewing strategy of guessing what will happen to the characters, or guessing what kind of artistic statement either film would be, what specific developments in cinematic language they would bring about?

Part of it has to do with the fact that a movie unfolds over time. If you want to be non-linear, or non-narrative, fine, but you cannot change the fact that certain parts of the whole will be viewed before the whole can be evaluated. Thus, its really hard to banish the thoughts of “what will the whole turn out to be” or “how will the parts fit together” from the viewer’s mind.

With an abstract painting, you get it all at once, therefore there is no wondering what the whole will look like. You can try on different interpretive stances while looking at the painting. There is no penalty for adopting a stance which doesn’t turn out to be fruitful. You can just start over. However, with film (or any mode of expression that unfolds over time), there is a penalty for adopting an “unproductive” stance towards the material. Each passing moment, if you didn’t orient yourself in a certain way towards the film/video, then you’ll have to do the work of revising your initial interpretations after the fact, or you’ll have to watch it again. And many art films, Julien Donkey Boy and Inland Empire among them, flirt with traditional narrative structure within scenes and between scenes to such a degree that its very hard not to keep switching between various stances towards the work, and, in the end, feeling a bit lost.

Another thing that caused me to fall back into that traditional “what happens next” narrative viewing strategy is the fact that these films are almost always between 1.5 and 3.5 hours, roughly the same length as traditional narrative films. Really, the only thing I’m used to watching that is that long is a traditionally structured narrative. If Julien Donkey Boy had been a 9 hour long looped installation at a museum, or a sort of fictitious 9-hour webcam narrative available online, or a 10 minute short, I would've viewed it in a totally different way. Even if I know to try to watch either of these films as “art films,” its really hard to overcome that habit of viewing 2 hour motion pictures in a certain. Filmmakers like Harmony Korine and David Lynch have discovered how liberating digital video can be in terms of the footage shot, and yet they’re still slaves to the time constraints of cinema, for no good reason that I can discern.

My favorite example of an “art film” that I was absolutely devastated by is Clu Galagher’s A Day with the Boys – 10 minutes long. But had this been 1 and a half hours long, I’m almost sure it would’ve had very little impact on me. Really short videos get to you before you have time to wonder if you’re viewing it “the right way,” or if you need to keep track of characters. Really long videos/films (Empire, though I’ve never experienced it, seems to have this effect) wear you down, until you give up trying to interpret it and just let it happen.