Reading

6. Below is a piece of journalism, which looks into our taste in movies. The author shares her opinions and hardly leaves us wondering about where the truth is. Read through the text and, in the gaps, mark your attitude to the expressed ideas. Use the patterns from the chart (acronyms are invented for convenience).

revolutionary (put: R)	speaks my mind (SM)	novel (N)	frivolous (F)	subjective matter of opinion (SMO)
common knowledge (CKn)	hypercritical (HC)	unreasoned (UR)	true to fact (TF)
far-fetched (FF)	opinionated (O)	food for thought (FTh)		confusing ( C)

Why we Should not be Ashamed of What we Like to Watch

From Trash Art and the Movies by Pauline Kael

We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them and what we enjoy about them has little to do with what we think of as art. (_____ ) The movies were­spond to, even in childhood, don't have the same values as the official culture supported by school and in the middle-class home. At the movies, we get low life and high life, while the moral­istic reviewers chastise us for not pa­tronising what they think we should, "realistic" movies that would be good for us.

Movie audiences will take a lot of garbage, but it's pretty hard to make us queue up for pedagogy. ( _____ ) At the movies we want a different kind of truth, something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or ac­curate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful. ( _____ ) We get lit­tle things even in mediocre and ter­rible movies. And it's the human material we react to most and remember longest. The art of the performers stays fresh for us, their beauty as beautiful as ever. ( _____ )

Do we need to lie and shift things to false terms - like those who have to say Sophia Loren is a great actress as if her acting had made her a star? Wouldn't we rather watchherthan better actresses be­cause she's so incredibly charming and because she's probably the great­est model the world has ever known? ( _____ ) And there are absurdly right little moments - in Saratoga Trunk when Curt Bois says to Ingrid Bergman, "You'revery beautiful," and she says, "Yes, isn't it lucky?" And those things have closer relationships to art than what the teachers told us was true and beautiful. ( _____ ) Not that the works we studied in school weren't often great (as we discoveredlater)but that what the teachers told us to admire them for was generally so false and prettified and moralistic that what might have been moments of pleasure in them, and what might have been cleansing in them, and subversive, too, had been coated over. ( _____ )

Because of the photographic na­ture of the medium and the cheap ad­mission prices, movies took their im­petus not from imita­tion of European high culture, but from the peep show, the wild west show, the music hall, the comic strip - from what was coarse and common. ( _____ ) The early Chaplin two-reelers still look surprisingly lewd, with bathroom jokes and drunkenness and hatred of work and proprieties. And the west­ern shoot-'em-ups certainly weren't the teachers' notions of art and which over the years have progressed through nice stories to "good taste" and "excellence".

All week we longed for Saturday afternoon and sanctuary - the anonymity and impersonality of sit­ting in a cinema, just enjoying our­selves, not having to be responsible, not having to be "good". Maybe you just want to look at people on the screen and know they're not looking back at you, that they're not going to turn on you and criticise you. ( _____ ) Far from supervision and official culture, in the darkness at the movies where nothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses. Unsupervised enjoyment is probably not the only kind there is but it may feel like the only kind. Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognise. ( _____ )

… It's the feeling of freedom from respectability we have always enjoyed at the movies that is carried to an ex­treme by American International Pictures and Clint Eastwood Italian westerns. However, they are stripped of cul­tural values. (_____ ) We may want more from movies than this negative virtue but we know the feeling from childhood moviegoing when we loved the gam­blers and pimps. The appeal of movies was in the details of crime and high living and wicked cities and in the language of toughs and urchins. What draws us to movies in the first place, the opening into other, forbidden or surprising kinds of ex­perience, and the vitality and cor­ruption and irreverence of that expe­rience are so direct and immediate and have so little connection with what we have been taught is art that many people feel more secure, feel that their tastes are becoming more cultivated when they begin to appre­ciate foreign films¹. (_____ )

One executive told me that he was quite upset that his teenagers had chosen to go to Bonnie and Clyde rather than with him to Closely Observed Trains. He took it as a sign of lack of maturity. I think his kids made an honest choice, and not only because Bonnie and Clyde is a good movie, but because it is closer to us, it has some of the qualities of indirect involvement that made us care about movies. ( _____ )

Art is still what teachers and ladies and foundations believe in, it's civilised and refined, cultivated and serious, cul­tural, beautiful, European, Oriental: it's what America isn't, and it's espe­cially what American movies are not. ( _____ ) If we don't go to movies for excitement, if we accept the cultural standards of refined adults, if we have so little drive that we accept "good taste", then we will probably never really begin to care about movies at all. We will be­come like those people who "may go to American movies sometimes to "relax", but when they want "a little more" from a movie, are delighted by how colour­ful and artistic Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew is, just as a couple of decades ago they were impressed by The Red Shoes, made by Powell and Pressburger, the Zeffirellis of their day.