What Draws Us to Cinema?

A reflection on my obsession with ominous obsession…

From Frantz (2016), Writer-Director François Ozon, Cinematography Pascal Marti. Inspiration: Broken Lullaby(1916) by Ernst Lubitsch.

Is it simply the image radiating on the screen that draws us so helplessly to Cinema? Is it a story told through its flowing visual language? Is it the deep, overwhelming emotions the medium conjures? The mesmerism of vista, the dread of shadow? The heightening of a fictional world that envelopes us? The desperate journey of a flawed but irresistibly compelling character? The grace of an innocent? The duplicity of an anti-hero?

Is it the visceral dynamism of the “action” movie”? Is it the quiet, intimate drama of looks and gestures, the friction and tension of dailiness revealed through what remains unspoken?

Is it the suspense of the cliffhanger, of what it might be that lies in a closed box, of the protagonist capable of going one way or its transgressive opposite, of the impossible moral dilemma, the devastating epiphany, the fate perhaps, that awaits the oblivious unfortunate? The true identity of the stranger, the true meaning of the event, object, sound, sight yet to be revealed?

Is it the charisma of the star? The experiential nature of an art which fools us into thinking we can stay safe as witnesses before rendering us impotent at the mercy of a power both overwhelming and insidious?

Is it simply the drama that plays out on the screen’s planarity, captured from optimum angles, observed from a distance one minute, engulfing us in its turbulence the next?

Is it the thrill, the hypnotic spell, the voyage out of ourselves that we come to discover takes us into ourselves?Might it be the quiet contemplation of one film’s resonant understatement or the fairground antics of another’s brash flamboyance?

Is it spectacle or is it something commonplace we might see each day but given fresh significance by lighting, framing, or by context afforded placement in the cut?

Or are we drawn to the movies simply to escape, to divert ourselves, to taste the excitement of danger, violence, death but without cost, to thrill to the erotic, the sensual, the seductive — to realms of desire and delight denied the humdrum life of the audience around us? (Although perhaps not all of it!)

What is it that you can’t resist and so draws you in? Is it any of these — or is it something else?

I was recently watching Francois Ozon’s 2016 Frantz. The first part of the movie is a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s poignant 1932 Broken Lullaby in which, after the end of the First World War, a French soldier, burdened with remorse, visits the family of the German soldier he has killed. Mistaken by the dead man’s parents and fiancée as his friend, the protagonist finds himself unable to reveal the truth…

Ozon takes the story further. He puts us in the narrative POV not of the penitent Frenchman but of Anna, the German fiancée who, not knowing of his past, falls in love with him. After he leaves without revealing his identity or what he did — in the process prompting unbearable suspense — Anna decides to travel to Paris in search of him.

As she seeks out his whereabouts, and the camera journeys with her over her shoulder or — as I recall — becoming her eyes, I was reminded of another film, one to which I have always been inescapably drawn. Hitchcock’s Vertigo has long been my favorite movie. As James Stewart’s hapless “Scottie” Ferguson heads with unhesitating determination to his devastating fate I am tugged along with him, reveling somehow in an odyssey I know can only end badly.

Anna and Scottie, I realize, follow a path with which I’m familiar. Somehow I know it, so I identify with them.

Vertigo (1958), Director Alfred Hitchcock, Screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, Cinematography Robert Burks.

My nightmares have lasted most of my life, terrifying in the darkness of early morning hours until, strangely enough, with the arrival of the pandemic they stopped. In these tenebrous episodes I would find myself, like Anna and Scottie, en route through some barely defined interior, some street or alley draped in shifting shadow toward some as yet unknown but undoubtedly terrible revelation. Meanwhile, even I as moved relentlessly forward, some nebulous presence would approach me, like a dollying camera, from behind — never seen and never quite making its unthinkable contact before I’d wake, screaming down the neighborhood and surrounding environs.

Here I have, what I now see, draws me to Cinema.

Ozon’s Anna and Hitchcock’s Scottie are obsessed, Anna with finding the French soldier, Scottie with the enigma of Madeleine. There are countless remarkable movies that lack any such obsessive protagonist but it is obsession, the obsession that certain cinema captures and conveys so obsessively, that obsesses me. Just as in my sleep I have walked obsessively along so many ominous paths toward… and only to be ambushed by… what?

The Godfather, to many, is the film they regard as the greatest. With his myth, Coppola exposes the guts of America and perhaps the dynamics of patriarchy and family more ancient. Vertigo, by contrast, and Ozon’s Frantz, with their myth, and maybe the weekly nightmares screening in the cinema of my sleeping mind, conjure not the canvas of power and bloodline but burrow even more terrifying into the defiant, lonely, primal psyche.

Even if we do not all share in Londoner Jesuit-educated Hitchcock’s flawed persona—admission: I’m a Londoner by birth if not similarly acculturated — or have experienced what I believe may have been the complex PTSD behind the chilling claustrophobia of my scenarios, the phenomenon that leads me to Cinema, I realize, has nothing less than universal reverberation…

Such a journey is of course, one that we all venture along as we voyage, day by day, to the final unknowable event that, sooner or later, awaits us…

Peter Markham June 2023