Horrible, stupid question. I'm sorry, but it is. "Where should I start?" or "Which would you recommend?" -- either might be the start of a conversation, but that first? The answer to that first question, the honest answer, I can't say, at least when working in a bookstore.
It seems there are still people -- men mostly in my experience, and well-heeled gentlemen at that -- who still seem to feel some strange sense of obligation, a duty, if that word isn't altogether too quaint, to... what? Take a bit of culture, for what ails 'em? Is that it? I don't understand the attitude; art as a bitter pill. Why? We're Americans. There's no shame in ignorance. Who is it that's made them feel they ought to have read something good? "A classic"? Clearly they might read anything they want, or read nothing at all. Wouldn't think it's harmed them much, or at least it's not kept them back in the world, has it? Not reading Penguin paperback classics.
Faced, for example with a shelf of Dickens novels, perhaps knowing very little of Dickens beyond Scrooge, I can even now see how daunting, even impossible all those fat books might seem. Where to start indeed? (I don't even remember where I started, or quite when. Doesn't matter, in my own experience. All that matters, at least all that's mattered to me has been the start. The going on will see to itself once the conversation's going, if it is to. Still, as a bookseller, usually asked to make a recommendation because I have a reputation for not reading much else, Oliver Twist would be my usual suggestion, to friends, or for just good natured people brave enough or curious enough to ask without that pained sigh, that sense of grudging duty. There's a familiarity to Oliver Twist, for most of us, even if not quite as sure as Dickens' Carol. For some readers though, after a bit of conversation, I might suggest something else; say David Copperfield because that book is as easy to love as the author did, as nearest to him, or a later title, like Bleak House for a reader of more difficult things, like some college kid who expects something denser and deeper, or maybe Pickwick Papers or Nickleby if the customer might like something more anarchic and plain funny. For some readers new to Dickens, the best way may be the journalism. It depends upon the conversation, ours, and the one yet to be had with the novelist.)
That's what art is, that conversation with the unfamiliar, with something larger than just our time or our peers, or a clerk in a shop.
Huff puff.
That's the fantasy, isn't it? That honest conversation between equals? Not always, or even often the case. As someone whose job it is to sell books, it is seldom my place to say what one ought to read. It's never my place to question if anyone should.
There's nothing to say that the well-heeled fellow won't like what he buys. Meanwhile, we're grateful for his custom.
I hate the very idea that someone can't read Dickens, or that anyone might not, if they tried. However, I confess, I hate nearly as much the idea that anyone should, that anyone is obliged to do so, or at least to have done. In school, certainly, I suppose, but after that?
Read good things, and then read better things, because the thing is good, because it might be better than what one knows or is used to. What else is art for?!
Myself, I always feel I've come so late to so much that is really wonderful. For everything I read when I was young, because I was sure I would be judged ignorant for never having done so, I am only now grateful, knowing how inadvertent my own education proved to be. How lucky I was, in a way, to know no better. How little I understood what I was doing! Now looking back, I can see the happy accidents that shaped my own taste and interests. (And how woefully wrong I was not only about what was or wasn't good until I found what was better, but how wrong I was about what would matter to other people -- at least until I was able to find like-minded friends, and better guides and teachers.)
Film is worse than fiction, as to what is or isn't worth knowing, or rather it was before the wonders of our own age, when nearly anything from the whole history of movies might be seen by the click of a button or an order made and mailed. If there were few opportunities in my own early life to find the best books, back then there was only the slimmest chance of seeing a movie worth watching. If I've loved some bad books down my days, how many bad movies must I once have watched, enthralled, in front of the television!
Anyway now, I can see so many great things. It is so simple, isn't it?
Here's that metaphoric shelf again, that row of the world's best everything. And where to start? Inadvertence still plays a part, perhaps even more important than with fiction. One book, with a proper introduction if an old one, say, leads logically to the next. To read in one author is to engage in a conversation, and if the author is good, and more, if the author is great, then coming to the end of just his or her length of shelf, not only leads naturally to the next -- or the one before -- but also back to the beginning and, if there's time and a good intention, to a new conversation with an old acquaintance. To read even a little about film, as with any good criticism, helps, but once one sees, say, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956) -- A Man Escapes, as I did not all that long ago, that can and probably should send someone backwards and forwards with a filmmaker just as with a novelist.
Tonight I watched Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) -- The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne. Adapted from a story from Diderot's Jacque the Fatalist, this was a smashing 40s melodrama; all shimmering, feminine emotion and fabulous fur hats, fast cars and revenge. The film starred the glorious Maria Casares as a woman who makes the mistake of testing her man -- he fails, of course -- and then there's Hell to pay. (Think Joan Crawford with a script by Jean Cocteau.)
I can't think how I would ever have found this film, had I not decided to see everything ever made by it's director, Robert Bresson. (True, Marie Casares was in my favorite film of all time, Les Enfants du paradis (1945) playing Nathalie, but I hadn't realized that until tonight.) I can't quite say that tonight's movie was nothing like that later masterpiece I'd watched so recently on Turner Classic Movies, but had I not known that the same man made both, I might never have guessed that the director of A Man Escapes had made this one.
I've watched nearly all the feature films directed by Bresson now, renting them one after another and each has been something of a revelation. I can't think of another filmmaker who has so completely understood the dramatic possibilities of a story told in just that frame, frame after frame, each composed in such a strangely natural and yet disciplined way, everything extraneous to the story eliminated. I can't think of anyone who so effectively, mesmerizingly simplified the sound motion picture into something as pure as any silent picture. I can't recommend any of his work highly enough -- nor am I qualified to say how or even what it was he did so beautifully well.
But then here I was tonight watching his second feature, not, as I've said, very like his later work, and yet already an excellent early example of the taste and restraint that would make all his latter stuff so quintessentially cinematic, and so satisfying. There's a lot of rain in this one, for example, and lovers caught, time and again in it. Such a simple, predictable device for driving two people together. The first time it happens, the scene might almost be from any Hollywood picture of the period. But then, there's the poor girl's raincoat. This would be Elina Labourdette, a poor dancer, down-at-heel, finally in love with the man she's meant to ruin, and, walking to meet him in the rain, she looks like Hell. That damned raincoat! It's the only one she got, you see, that and a sad little hat. We've seen her in these time and again by now, and only now, in what looks to be a very real, very cold, somehow very Parisian rain, she's heartbreaking in a way that looks more like something from the New Wave than the Occupation. It's quite startling, and quite wonderful.
And then there's Casares in her triumph, not as Crawford might have been shot in the same scene in some "women's picture" of the day, all statuesque fury on a grand staircase, nostrils flaring in a dazzling close-up, no. Instead, we see Casares through the window of her old lover's car. She's blocked him in his driveway with her own car, and he's frantically trying to maneuver around her. She stands there, as he backs up and pulls forward, again and again, and she goes in and out of the shot, and every time she manages to say something awful and never moves. It's wonderfully claustrophobic, even cruel. The sequence is amazingly modern.
But I can't really talk about all of this in a very meaningful way. Bresson has to be seen. As I've said, the great thing for me is that he can be, nearly all of his work, if not quite in an ideal way, in a cinema, then at least in excellent prints on our big TV.
I won't suggest one Bresson movie, over another. I haven't seen them all yet, and I haven't seen any of them yet more than once except his Joan of Arc.
No one need feel that these movies ought to be seen. I certainly lived a fairly contented life before and might just as easily have continued so without feeling pig-ignorant for not knowing any better. Again, that is just such a ridiculous way to think! No. What I've meant to suggest tonight is how glorious the possibilities of discovery and rediscovery may still be, evan as I approach fifty. There is still so much to see, to read, to read and see again! -- and without once thinking how awful it is that I'd never seen a movie directed by Robert Bresson, until I did.
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