INTRODUCTION

AND therefore I pray thee, lean listily to this meek stirring of love in thine heart, and follow thereafter: for it will be thy guide in this life and bring thee to bliss in the tother. It is the substance of all good living, and without it no good work may be begun nor ended. It is nought else but a good and an according will unto God, and a manner of well-pleasedness and a gladness that thou feelest in thy will of all that He doth.

—The Cloud of Unknowing

I don’t cry, Norman. This from Jesse Burns, the romantic interest in Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It. She speaks tilting her head slightly to the side while daubing an eye the way every girl knows to do, grieving the tragedy of her would-be-actor brother’s failed life. He is a self-absorbed womanizing fool, but she loves him still, despite it all.

Few can watch Redford’s film and not feel a familiar throb in the throat just at that moment of the simple gesture of the grieving sister, and again later when Norman’s own tragic brother is pronounced beautiful by their mournful father, an old man broken to the point where he cannot even look up to engage a response.

Aestheticians since the 1950s have been ruminating over the strange, almost magical power of film art and drawing conclusions about its source from the formal to the political. It is about the nature of the iconic signs. It is about subconscious desires. It is about the subtle reinforcement of favorable power relationships. Meanwhile ordinary filmgoers have continued to react on the practical level, and if asked they would likely place the answer in a context more tangible; namely, the way film so readily taps into the tender realm of personal losses and longings.

Common after all is how we brush our griefs into soft piles out of sight, protecting ourselves from even the remembrance of the myriad losses we accumulate throughout the unleaving golden-grove of our lives, hoping that some movement in real time or in the measured-out time of art will not awaken the breeze to stir them back over the path. We are vulnerable and want solace but are troubled by the truth-telling balladeer,

In every heart there is a room

A sanctuary safe and strong

To heal the wounds from lovers past

Until a new one comes along.

That has been my experience. I don’t cry, Norman could be our family motto, the heritage left by a gristled Scot stonemason grandfather who came to the new world with ten children and then promptly lost their mother and married again, and whose second wife, a good Irish woman, raised as many of the ten that she could recover from foster homes and then bore three of her own, two of whom received orders of the Church. And comingled with this inheritance of blood comes the solidity of the bungalows of Chicago at a time when John Wayne was the symbol of true manhood. Boys in our neighborhood readily believed that when your arm was shot off storming the beach at Normandy, you stooped down, picked it up, and kept moving. Men were taught to keep the faucet of the emotions tightly shut and do what must be done. Leave that maudlin business to the poor woman who will need your steady shoulder to guide her back into the house some dark day when pestilence or the angel of death visits.

Yet, I still cry along with Jesse every time. The film triggers something that the strongest efforts cannot hold back.

The art of film is so reliable a means, blending form with desire and our sense of physical smallness in a uniquely powerful way. An old, torn album with the faded photographs of our childhood home and the boy smiling from the top step of the porch in ill-fitting clothes may carry us into an afternoon reverie and drop us down moodily at the dinner table; but capture those images on celluloid and project them on the magic screen with wistful music in the elaborate illusion of a deft master, and something still more profound occurs.

The power in Redford’s cinematic retelling of Norman Maclean‘s tragic novella lies in the magic medium exposing something pulsing quietly within us. That pulse touched and we feel suddenly and forcefully that though alive we are so very temporary, separated forever from the me that is gone forever, the lyrical, fading young and easy of Dylan Thomas,

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

The emotional effect of certain films emanates from their intrinsic beauty born from the complex graces of this quintessential art form capable of sculpting time and capturing the delicate nuances of life. That beauty is itself sourced in numinous realities bound together with the roots of our common humanity. Those realities combine two elements—a longing to be fully known and a longing for permanence. Call them love and heaven.

As human beings we desire, perhaps more than anything else, to have the narrative of our lives affirmed. We want to believe that we play a unique part in a master story in some ancient book with beginning, middle, and end. In that book surely a line can be drawn that curves unbroken through the arc of our lonely days. My life starts here, right in this place and in this spot of time, and see how it glides upward, then falls again right there. See the loveliness of the slope and then those jagged ridges where it fell first, and again. That story must exist; all our instincts attest that it must, and that story must stretch before and beyond us and touch both horizons of a world imagined with the birth of the simple light/In the first, spinning place. We perceive that we have been loved into existence in a moment in time, for we are nourished in the deepest places only by love. And so, yes, we are or were known; to be loved and to be known are the same. We long for the old embraces which exist still in the mind as does the affection that warmed them, the comforts we felt from those who suffered alongside and who dared to confirm in word and gesture, if only a moment’s glint of an eye, that we were and are real; and if real, then made for something even more real, something to come and permanent. Solid as a table yet fluid as no table can be. Heaven.

In 1914 Clive Bell wrote that the starting point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion.¹ Art worth the name should move us in a peculiar way. Leo Tolstoy, though an aesthetician of a much different orientation, concurred with this point, There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art.²

The two writers, opposite poles in aesthetic theory, had in view a core truth, the peculiar feeling drawn from us by all significant works of art. The art moves us because it is beautiful, but also because it touches us in a personal way, and it does so because of how we are designed. Bell, speaking along with his Bloomsbury modernists, developed his aesthetic principle to place emphasis on the formal elements that trigger the aesthetic emotion, what he called the significant form of great works, a form comprised of lines and colours combined in a particular way that stir our aesthetic emotions. Tolstoy, the Christian romantic speaking alongside Tennyson and Hopkins and MacDonald and other aging knights of the former kingdom, likewise celebrated those forms of beauty, but sought to direct aesthetic analysis toward extrinsic principles, categories of honor and nobility and devotion and benevolence.

In this book, I will consider both but lean toward the latter; that is, the way the aesthetic beauty of a film evokes external categories of beauty that arouse bittersweet inner realities of the heart. Our interest will be less on the specific categories formed in the mind than on the experience of those longings in the heart, and what those experiences suggest; and by heart I mean an aspect of soul, the substance which creates our emotional responses, not the responses themselves. The art which moves us most deeply taps most deeply into the tender tendencies that define us as human. We long for love, and we long for heaven, for we sense we are made for both. We weep in those dearest moments of a film because we have lost hold of elements of our own time. In fact, we have lost and lost again and fear losing even more.

Though this analysis will, therefore, incline toward the metaphysical, the arguments will be more definite than would come from a purely aesthetic analysis of beauty. It is easier to identify the experiences a work of art brings us to recall and that move us than it is to explain why one work of art brings those experiences into sharper relief than another.

Harder yet are the levels of beauty achieved between kinds of art, say, painting versus music versus theater versus film. The influence of the film version of A River Runs Through It differs from that of Norman Maclean’s source novel, which is why conversations about the merits or demerits of a novel to film adaptation so often seem tedious. Nonetheless, the significant form that moves us in such a film seems a question worth addressing, and it will be in a chapter to follow. Film like all art functions as vehicle of expression regarding truth in ways unavailable to complementary forms of art, and those vehicles of expression must be described if we are to talk at all about why this something is beautiful and why it means what it does.

The essays in this collection are also, of course, grounded in my personal experiences with certain films. After all, our personal experience of a particular emotion derives in large part from the tender points of our own losses; yet most readers will readily identify with them. The analyses will trace the form of each film to describe the internal system that becomes the film’s beautiful language of evocation—its narrative structure, thematic arrangement, elements of style. Then the analyses will take the second logical step and address the relationship between the form of the work and the larger world of forms beyond it, those that warm the heart and light up the path which ends in our mysterious longing for divine love and heaven.

It is simpler to capture all this by using the terms associated with religious matters: when a film achieves a formal beauty, it incarnates a type of mystery, and the concomitant realization in we the viewer provokes something analogous to a mystical vision. We are awakened by the art to our immortality and to intimations of the divine power that birthed us in time and for time. Thus, broken free from cultural and temperamental restraints we have no recourse but to respond in an elevated way, our words too elusive to express well our thoughts. With inarticulate groanings we tell of our lost loves and hope that they likewise grieve our absence; we respond in tears the way we may shudder in the presence of a ghost in the house.

The unseen but sensed nonetheless, believed even while others deny—call it heaven. It may very well come through an echo from the laughter of the children in a distant place still ringing across the sky of our present in an old song. Or perhaps the laughter of lovers on the porches of our dream mansions conjured through the mist of pure imagination. If a certain slant of light oppressed the poet Emily Dickinson on winter afternoons, these slants of light from that other realm stir our hope contrariwise. Jessie Burns would not cry in front of Norman McLean if it were not that she knows what ought to be; that is, what her brother was meant to be, and perhaps what grace working through extreme suffering may yet bring him to be. The hope of heaven. Jessie’s brother is our brother or father or self, and perhaps we will one day meet.

The Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand drew a distinction between an association triggered in us through the beautiful and the way our heart is touched by it.³ Beauty goes beyond this, since it awakens in our soul something that exists in a personal manner, something with a specifically affective nature. In our context the perfection of design, the significant form, of a masterful work of cinema like A River Runs through It captures in its beauty an experience common to all and deeply affecting, one which draws the curtain from our mortal experience to our secret selves. We respond without words, through a sudden mood. Call that mood joy as C. S. Lewis might or sorrow as Wordsworth might or melancholy as might Keats. It affects different souls differently. However, the source of the experience is the same for all. We long for love and live in a world where love is transitory, and we are made for heavenly permanence in a world slowly folding in upon itself.

What follows then are reflective essays on twelve twentieth-century films that have proven to stir the heart. I arranged the films initially in a chronological fashion with one film from each decade beginning with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) to Martha Fiennes’ Onegin (1999). However, since the steam that drives the engine of the moving picture propels its subject toward greater and greater verisimilitude⁴ and since that insistence produces a bias with most viewers to favor films more modern, it seemed best to work with the elements and reorganize the list from more recent films to older. Beyond this, it seemed likewise prudent to make a strong first step into the argument, and so the collection begins with a different film from the 1990s, Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1998), as Benigni’s film poses an artistic anomaly striking in effect which illustrates the point; that is, Life Is Beautiful is a perfect little film on a contrary topic that can only be fully understood in the context of the human experience these essays explore.

Should some readers disagree with the premises drawn here, perhaps compensation will come at least from a detailed examination of twelve works of ingenuity and beauty, which, whatever one concludes about the metaphysical realities behind them, make us feel glad to be alive. Some readers will no doubt quibble about the choices and prefer Seventh Heaven (1927) to Sunrise or Field of Dreams (1989) to The Natural (1984). Such are always welcome to form their own lists and write their own books—the worst that can come from reasonable conflicts of taste and judgment will be, after all, the opportunity to enjoy two masterpieces and not just one, the doubling of pleasures, as the Bard once upon a time suggested.

For the sake of categorical consistency, nearly all the films described in these pages can be classified as comedies, forms designed around the marriage bed and not the grave, despite how the graveyard embraces the shadow of the church tower and its bells. And so, for example, although Life Is Beautiful has been compared by those paid to render such judgments to Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Open City (1945) as all are about the horrors of the Second World War, the Benigni film addresses marriage principally, whereas the Spielberg and Rossellini films begin and end with meditations on death. The sorrow which waters the soil over those forever lost to time and memory has a different source, and so needs a different description.

The type of comedy that these films represent is the kind Western culture’s greatest comic author, Dante, had in mind, the redemptive story of a world governed by benevolent providence with kind intentions toward the little souls seeking respite from the neverland of threat and misstep. Dante, after all, might have been lost forever in the dark wood but for the love of his Beatrice and her intercession for him with the Queen of Heaven, a grace in a world built and redeemed only by grace.

Finally, I selected the films in this volume with an eye for the non-politics of true diversity; in other words, the list is as international as could be without drifting down a path that might seem obscure or pedantic. So, while emphasis is placed on more familiar classics of American mythos like Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), the scale is counter-weighted with a classic film from a foreign, yet similar spring, Gabriel Axel’s Danish masterpiece Babette’s Feast (1987). The chronological structuring of the list allowed for the happy balance of something old, something new, something foreign, something. . . .

The twentieth century which produced these films might well be described as the most violent and calamitous of human history. Our grandparents, entrusted with the task of preserving the Western culture so long crafted by the old guildsmen working under the towers of Christendom, fell into disarray under dark clouds of social transition and threat, clouds which hid their true enemies, who then led our parents off the cliff of the First World War. The bereft children fell into excess and despair where there should have been jouissance. Mercifully, the matter of human life has not fundamentally changed though the trajectory of Western culture has taken so drastic a downturn. The sun still rises brilliant in the still of the morning, and the birds welcome it with song, and the heart still longs for the consolations of human and divine love and sympathy, around the corner just ahead.

1

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger or higher or wider, nothing is more pleasant, nothing fuller, and nothing better in heaven or on earth, for love is born of God and cannot rest except in God, Who is created above all things.

—Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Roberto Benigni’s 1998 masterpiece Life Is Beautiful is a comedy set upon the backdrop of fascist Italy in the darkest period of that country’s complicity with the genocidal campaign of the Third Reich, a period Italian historians and most ordinary Italians have worked to forget. Taking the cue from the awful contradictions of the times, the film presents a paradox: a comedy yet one wherein the groom father dies off-screen from a machine-gun blast in the back; and one in which the principal marriage is celebrated off-screen. Likewise, the film strays from narrative conventions, concluding in a freeze-frame with a voiceover introduced for the first time at the climactic moment of restoration between a widow and her orphan son.

In one of the more memorable scenes from Life Is Beautiful, the father, Guido, tries to shelter his son, Giosué, from the brutality of the prison camp where they have been sent as Jews by translating incorrectly the brutal orders of the German commander in charge. The three basic orders given are don’t try to escape, don’t ask questions just obey, and don’t try to riot unless you want to be hung. Guido turns this into a child’s game for Giosué wherein the child will lose points for crying, begging for his mother, or for a snack. It is a storyline impossible to explain adequately to anyone who has not seen the film; yet it works in a strange, magical way in context. The innocence of youth, the purity of the virgin, remains preserved in the bleakest of circumstances through the unlikeliest and kindliest of