Encounters With Moments: Before Sunrise

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Partly because I'm currently reading the fascinating Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory, it has occurred to me that one nice ongoing project for this blog might be to occasionally point to some particularly striking critical attempts to describe cinematic moments, along with an image or two which evokes them. Sometimes I may offer my own description of these moments, at other times not. Either way, I intend the series to stand as a tribute to one of the prime tasks of the film critic - as Victor Perkins put it: "to articulate in the medium of prose some aspects of what artists have made perfectly and precisely clear in the medium of film". As any film critic knows, this process constitutes an always challenging, and often exhilarating, experience (as Girish, with the help of Stanley Cavell and Christian Keathley, begins a discussion about here).

It seems strangely fitting to begin with an instance of a critic finding that words in fact fail him when faced with a moment he especially prizes: Robin Wood, speaking of a scene from Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995) in his book Sexual Politics and Narrative Film. Wood's admittance of failure here is a touchingly honest reminder of the difficulty of our endeavour when we try to put into words the ineffable.


Wood writes,

"I have to confess, at this point, to a failure: even on first viewing I told myself that I would 'one day' analyze in detail the scene in the listening booth of the record store, in which nothing happens except that Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy either do or don't look at each other, their eyes never quite meeting. After a dozen viewings I abandoned the project. I suppose one might try an elaborate system of charts and timings, annotating 'direction of the gaze', when and how long each looks (or doesn't)... which would demonstrate nothing of the least importance. With no camera-movement, no editing, no movement within the frame except for the slight movements of the actors' heads, nothing on the soundtrack but a not-very-distinguished song that may vaguely suggest what is going on in the characters' minds and seems sometimes to motivate their 'looks' ("Though I'm not impossible to touch / I have never wanted you so much / Come here"), the shot seems to me a model of 'pure cinema' in ways Hitchcock never dreamed of (not merely 'photographs of people talking', but photographs of them not talking), precisely because it completely resists analysis, defies verbal description. All one can say is that it is the cinema's most perfect depiction, in just over one minute of 'real' time, at once concrete and intangible, of two people beginning to realize that they are falling in love."

A number of years ago I attempted my own partial account of this moment, focusing on one aspect of it in particular, in this piece comparing Linklater's movie with Minnelli's The Clock (1945). Yet neither Wood nor I have captured its essence; both despite and because of its simplicity, it remains elusive, "at once concrete and intangible".

I look forward to revisiting other instances of critics trying to do justice to their encounters with moments. The amazing thing is that, sometimes, we almost succeed.
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Robin Wood: 1931-2009

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“You know, I believe that if there's any kind of god, it wouldn't be in any of us, not you, or me, but just... this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”

– Céline (Julie Delpy) in Before Sunrise

Robin Wood was one of the greatest and most influential of film critics. He was also one of the main causes of my learning to love writing about the cinema. Some kind of personal tribute to mark his passing feels absolutely necessary, since – apart from anything – it is probable that this blog itself wouldn’t exist had I not encountered his work.

Many film scholars and cinephiles who grew up in the 60s and 70s can trace their serious interest in film back to Wood’s classic book Hitchcock’s Films (1965). It is easy to see why, given it appeared both before Hitchcock’s reputation had been consolidated (Wood felt it necessary to open the book with a question that would never be asked today: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?”), and indeed before American film itself was regularly treated with seriousness by English language critics. However, I (and many friends and colleagues my age) am proof that one certainly needn’t have been around at this seminal moment in order to have been inspired and influenced by Wood’s work.

The first piece of Wood’s that I definitely remember reading is his article ‘Rethinking Romantic Love: Before Sunrise’ (from Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond). It was with a beautiful, sharp shock that I read its first words:

I knew, the first time I saw Before Sunrise, that here was a film for which I felt not only interest or admiration, but love.

Most of the articles and books I had previously read as a film studies undergraduate attempted an ‘objective’ tone, avoiding first-person emotion at all costs. Wood, clearly, was attempting something different. What drew me in was not only the fact that he felt the same way about this film as I did, but that he had felt it necessary to open an article in such a forthrightly, nakedly personal manner. It seemed to me that this writer was being open about something that was being problematically repressed in so much other scholarship: the absolutely central, unavoidable, importance of the critic’s own personal response – what V. F. Perkins calls “the evidence of feeling”. The article went on to engage in a detailed, impassioned reading of Before Sunrise from various angles (authorship, structure, historical context, ideology, performance, style), yet this reading had clearly been prompted, as Wood makes clear, by love. Never before had I been moved by film criticism.

Looking back on this moment now, perhaps the reason I was so immediately seduced was because Wood was writing from a perspective of love about a film that I too loved, which in itself was concerned with love. In one sense, there was probably already enough romance in this to have caused a young fan and critic of Before Sunrise to swoon. Yet, even more, I remember being struck in particular by the way in which the emotions Wood admitted to were placed in perfect dialogue not only with the film, but with the critical act itself. Towards the opening of the piece, Wood (making reference to a line of dialogue from the film) says that he immediately knew Before Sunrise was a film that

I would ultimately want to write about, as a means at once of exploring it more systematically and of sharing my delight in it with others – of finding that "magic" in the "attempt".

Then, at the end, writing of the film’s own beautiful final sequence (watch it here), he writes:

The sequence evokes the ending of Antonioni's L'Eclisse, but without its sense of desolation and finality: rather, the feeling is of sadness and happiness inextricably intermingled, regret for the separation and the uncertainty but a deep satisfaction in the degree of mutual understanding and intimacy two human beings have achieved in a few hours, how nearly successful the attempt to bridge “this little space in between”. And, as Celine says, the “answer”, the “magic”, must be in the attempt. The same might be said of the critic's relationship to the films s/he loves.

Of course, part of the beauty of the personal quality of Wood’s writing is simply that it allows you to feel as if you in some sense know him, meaning that to engage with his arguments is to – as he once said of another critic’s work (Jim Kitses’ Horizons West) – “engage with another mind, another psyche, in a fully human way”. For Wood this was not just a question of honesty: it was a matter of the irreducibly social nature of criticism as an act of intellectual and emotional communication. I think this fact is made poignantly transparent in the quotation above.

Wood finds a way to make the entire article – like the greatest cinema – have a ‘form’ that is inextricable from its ‘content’. The personal nature of his writing here is not only a matter of frankness, but also a necessary response to the themes of the film, to the relationship between critics and films in general, and to the relationship between critic and reader. Furthermore, in one final layer of coherence, Wood’s writing very often ensured that the particular nature of this relationship between critic and reader was – as I can attest to – one of love.
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