To The Film Industry In Crisis

In a healthy world I happily devote much of my free time to repertory cinemas. Editing a magazine about movies and writing about them means hours and days spent in screening rooms and at festivals. When theaters were closed citywide I turned to years of discs and tapes, piled up by intention and happenstance alike. They captured my attention more than the voluminous streaming options. These individual physical objects served as punctuation marks during the sprawl that time had become during the pandemic. Amid the horrors and helplessness of the world, focus was its own reward. Every movie had, if not always a narrative, at least an endpoint.

By that measure, Legally Blonde and Stuff and Dough served the same purpose on a day in the free-fall known as March 2020. They were equivalent distractions from a world of morbid unknowns. I could nod along to Reese Witherspoon’s absurd underdog sorority-heroine dispensing comeuppance, or ride with Cristi Puiu’s three smuggling youths in a truck, their fates seemingly bolted to the interior camera tracking their conversations. But the supreme truth about this studio/Cannes pairing of 2001 films was that one was 96 minutes and the other 90.

Defoe refers to the 1665 plague outbreak as a “visitation,” a term with a supernatural ring. In early corona days, a kind of miasmic cloud seemed to fill my vision of the world outside; the occasional blindingly blue skies and outward stillness of New York looked not just incongruous but artificial, disconnected from the suffering behind closed doors across the city.

This faintly hallucinogenic sensation was hard to shake, and the hyperawareness seemed to pervade whatever I watched in the safety of my apartment. Sometimes it didn’t take much: after the cancellation of SXSW, the early spring film festival, I viewed one selection, Amy Seimetz’s contagion thriller She Dies Tomorrow, at home. The film’s plot has an earworm elegance: a woman believes she will drop dead the next day, and that conviction spreads to others around her. It’s unclear whether the symptoms are purely psychological, or whether that would be any less fatal.

This state of suspension keyed into the fear and confusion of the March countdown moment—waiting for the other shoe to drop, for 14 days of lockdown to tick by without medical incident. Part of me wondered whether the identity of Seimetz’s film, conceived long before this moment, was being obscured; another part—the high-pitched-whining anxiously vibrating core—thought the match was ideal. At a time where everyone was being touched by mass death, or feeling queasily and guiltily insulated from it, horror did not seem a bad way to channel the emotions.

As it turns out, A Nightmare on Elm Street was already sitting by my television as lockdown began, which seems improbable, but there it is, or was. The movie’s blurring of consciousness and unconsciousness, reality and nightmare, felt true and real. The world was being upended. The sick described corona feeling like someone was standing on their chest and taking over their ravaged bodies. Wes Craven stages his Nightmare moving seamlessly from waking and dreaming on the same suburban sets, which gave houses and streets and teenage bedrooms the appearance of facades. His characters are always waiting, waiting, for the visitation.

I did go out. Masked, minimally, essentially. Back at home I watched Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends, slack-jawed at French twenty-somethings playing blithe games of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not, the whisper-thin plotting trembling in the breeze. The social nuance felt anthropological, the idle romantic self-destruction at parks, cafés, and parties luxurious, all ending in color-coordinated 80s-box-cut outfits for its central pair of couples.

I realized then that any movie with freedom of movement through a city was going to wring tears from me, and that proved equally true for The Great McGinty. The somewhat desperate hustle and bustle of a Preston Sturges film is always a tonic, and as McGinty pushes his way up from ballot-stuffing hobo to Tammany-style mayor, I remembered that watching someone grift their way to high office could be funny, not infuriating.

That same day I also viewed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and throughout Scorsese and Burstyn’s portrait of perseverance, the respites of female camaraderie seemed to glow like embers throughout Alice’s story. Hitting the open road with her son, once again, she can escape some but never all of her circumstances. I’m loath to even reduce her story by slotting it into my piteous plague logbook, but the film provided the escape velocity to get out of my own head as few movies did at this moment.

With time came more perspective, or to be honest, anxiety and panic congealed into numbness. Systemic observations about a post-corona world (or mid-corona one) that first flooded my mind in March seemed less wild during April’s firestorms. In many ways, the future appeared now simply to aggravate and accentuate current social ills and divisions, history laid bare. Watching Lightning Over Braddock, Tony Buba’s 1988 feature-length look at Reagan-era Pennsylvania steel country, I listened to earlier generations’ stories of abject economic neglect and abandonment, and their accompanying landscapes. The economy’s strangulating grip on workers has only grown tighter—a condition, rather than an affliction specific to an industry or a transitional epoch.

Buba’s storytelling (his film comes between Sherman’s March and Roger & Me) is alternately self-deprecating and self-mythologizing, as the frustrations and futility seep into your bones; a day later I confess to appreciating the bombshells openly flung left and right by Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. As ever with Lee, I felt the meta-annoyance that the film had not been seen at the time for what it accomplishes, and that mood of outrage persisted when watching Be Natural, a busy, unkempt, but nutritious documentary about pioneering French filmmaker and showbiz powerhouse Alice Guy-Blaché, aggressively elided from film history.

I’ll stop there, but I kept watching. We all kept watching. I thought back to Defoe’s above description of what we’d call now asymptomatic carriers, one in a series of astute observations with an eerie echo across the centuries. Quite apart from its literal (and precocious) medical truth, it began to sound like a cautionary prescription for empathy.

I wrote the above before the police killing of George Floyd sparked vast, sustained demonstrations for justice. The solidarity in the streets became a rare source of hope for the country, but there remained the infuriating possibility that any lasting effects could be slow in coming. Meanwhile in movieland, Hollywood studios and theater chains plotted their grand re-openings of blockbusters like Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. Ready or not, here they would come.

In watching Be Natural, near erasure of a key figure in cinema had made me think of history as something requiring constant, vigilant upkeep. And by history, one must also mean the present. For if any single thing moved me most during my site-specific moviegoing, it was the fear that the upheaval and disaster of the pandemic would simply happen to us. Everything would change, and nothing would change.

Nicolas Rapold is an editor and writer from New York. He has written regularly for The New York Times and has contributed to Artforum and Reverse Shot, among other publications. He has been editor-in-chief of Film Comment since 2016 and hosts its podcast. You could always email him at nicolas.rapold[at]gmail.com.