User:TPoole/sandbox

YEARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called How Much Paint Does a Painting Need? What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, Francois Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre (3–40). Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) before he directed Citizen Kane (1941).Over six decades later, a graduating film student that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions— probably has no answer: How much film history does a film need?

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in The Player (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about Touch of Evil (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.