Watch Twice
When we’re little, we obsess about the same stories over and over and over again. We can watch the same movie dozens of times. We ask our parents to tell us the same stories to the point of them going insane. We listen to the same songs on repeat, looping over and over again. Then we grow up and we do less of that. Maybe we still do that with songs because they are very short. But we are less likely to watch movies multiple times or to read books more than once, saved from some select favourites.
That makes it so that often we tend to dismiss art when it doesn’t work immediately on us, and more importantly, it means that a lot of art is designed to be immediately rewarding, which leads to being built around a specific formula. Creativity is a complex balancing act between invention and structure. We most likely have lost many of the first observations about how to structure stories, for example, but the two-act structure in plays has been with us since Aristoteles. It has been very influential to this day, even if it has now been mostly replaced by the three-act structure popularised by Syd Field in what is possibly the most influential screenwriting book of all time, Screenplay: the Fundations of Screenwriting. To be able to conform to a precise narrative rhythm is a great help to writers, to avoid the overwhelming slate of possibilities that each story comes equipped with. It's also perfect for viewers because it means that most movies follow, subtly, a very similar structure, something that becomes comfortable and familiar viewing after viewing.
When it comes to wide-release feature films, one could argue that most of them are structured in exactly the same way, a structure that I think has been best encapsulated in Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet. There are variations across cultures, but most of the planet is trained to expect a specific rhythm, even if they have no conscious sense of this. It's not unlike pop songs: very few of them swerve away from the tried and true verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus formula. It can get to the point where watching anything that is not structured in that way might start to feel wrong.
Shapeshifting Art
But in order to explore all that art can give us, it’s worth exploring the kinds of work that require just a bit more work to be appreciated. Most of us have had the experience of having a piece of art grow on us. In my case, some of my favourite pieces of art did not blow me away after the same time I experienced them. La La Land was a perfect example from the recent past. The trailer for that movie made me believe I would have easily fallen in love with it, and gone to the cinema with very high expectations. Yet, my first viewing of the movie left me very cold and disappointed. The trailer sold me a nostalgic, romantic ode to classic musicals, but what I had seen was far from that, and my first instinct was to dismiss the movie as being bad because a part of me is used to thinking that art should immediately work, especially when it’s released on such a wide number of theatres.
But something about the movie stuck in my head. The soundtrack really got me. And there were some scenes that I thought were fantastically put together. I could not deny the pure cinematic craft behind the movie. So I watched it again. And it didn’t work too well, once more. And I still felt like I was missing something, I could just not stop thinking about the movie. So I watched it a third time. And again, not a fan. But something was growing on me. Was it Stockholm Syndrome? Was it something else?
Watching the movie for the fourth time was a revelatory experience for me as a viewer, beyond La La Land specifically. I stopped searching for the movie that I expected it to be and started paying attention to the movie that it actually was. And when I stopped watching it as a retread of old musicals, I realised that it was a melancholic drama about the difficulty of balancing passion and expectations, and how hard it is for two people who really love art to do so together. I stopped looking at it as a classic musical and realised that its structure was different, yet very solid.
When I internalised the rhythm of the movie, I fell in love with it, quite deeply. To this day, I think it’s a masterpiece.
Learning Rhythm
La La Land reminded me that, for how much of a cinephile I considered myself, I had become a bit lazy in my movie habits, and not looking outside conventional distribution methods. That got me stuck to the most mainstream rhythm in movies and numbed me to less common ones. It’s one of the many ways cinema is like music. We’re used to listening to tracks in 4/4, but once we get to ones with odd rhythm signatures, it can be overwhelming to follow them, unless we do that over and over again, and realise the beauty of constant change, variety, how language is meant to shift shape.
After a couple of years, during Covid lockdowns, I watched a large number of older movies, of classics that build their structures outside the norm, I remembered how many greats in cinema have experimented outside of conventional formulas and worked with radically different structures. L’Avventura, by Michaelangelo Antonioni, was probably the most radical example of this. But one can think of Breathless, Au Hasard Balthazar, Roma, the Three Colours trilogy, Chungkin Express, Shadows, and Daguerréotypes…. these movies have an internal rhythm that is their own.
And yes, with many of these movies, watching them twice is really the best way to experience them. The first viewing is about getting a sense of their rhythm. The second one is to experience it fully, with a sense of their structure that gives us a way to explore further and have more fun with it.
This has happened even with some mainstream movies. Blade Runner does not have a typical beginning: it sets up a very complex word, introduces a side villain, and then we get to meet the “hero” of the movie, but he’s not heroic, and his task is forced upon him. There is no real sense of the stakes of the story, and the dramatic arc is so thin that many critics, including the great Roger Ebert, when the movie first came out panned it as just… bad.
While some movies are hard to watch because they are just bad, some just have a very unique groove, and given that we are not used to many different ones, we tend to struggle to adapt and really listen.
Gatekeepers are ridiculous
The silly thing is that there is quite a lot of gatekeeping around the idea of “art cinema” and the such, just like it happens with some circles of culture because some people like to elevate themselves by showing off the sophistication of their taste. Go to any festival or smaller cinemas, and you are at risk of meeting that specimen, the movie fan whose knowledge of movies is 80% of their personality. To be fair, this kind of behaviour is even more prominent in art and literature circles.
The funny thing is that it’s not that hard to get into obscure cinema and art. It’s just a matter of having a roadmap to gain the tools to appreciate their language. Like anything in education and knowledge, it’s about resources, time, and finding the right path, being just a bit more intentional about getting exposed to a variety of different kinds of art. And it’s something that anyone can get into and should get into because it’s a lot of fun.
If you have a genre, a director, or an actor you especially love, dive deeper into their most obscure work, researching the best-received of these.
Then, go to some classics from the past, or from some foreign countries from yours. Countless crossover successes managed to become very successful outside of their niche, across very long spans of time, and these usually manage to do so because they are so well made to work almost regardless of one’s “movie literacy”.
The more one does this, the more kind of narrative structures and shapes they get exposed to, and the easier it is to watch all kinds of movies. The expectation of the three-act structure becomes less and less of a necessity; it becomes completely ok to dive into a new story open to novel structures, themes and the such, and the entirety of the history and geography of cinema opens up.
To be clear, there are instances when a movie is boring and confusing because it’s just not made especially well. Going to a film festival can be a frustrating experience because you get to see a lot of movies like that. And while it’s not hard to find mediocre movies in mainstream cinema, most of their formulaic nature means that they are usually competent. On the other hand, some more experimental movies can gain traction because of an interesting idea or concept, but be truly terrible outside of that narrow path. But even watching bad art can be a good way to appreciate good art… better.
I’ll end this with a list of “movie paths” that can lead to appreciating unusual cinematic shapes a bit better.
A list of gateway movies and directors to expand your cinematic horizons
Blow Up is a great film to get inside the rhythm of Michelangelo Antonioni’s filmmaking. From there, you can dive deep into the waters of L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse.
Quentin Tarantino is sometimes criticised as being a derivative director, which is a lazy way to discount how easy it is to dive into his movies and then branch out into countless other great works of art that he quotes or pays homage to.
Martin Scorsese and Paul Shrader did something quite similar to what Tarantino has done with his career: they both merged the spirit of the movie critic and the craft of great filmmakers in one, so it’s easy to find out all of the movies that they take inspiration from, and very often, especially in the case of Shrader, he explicitly talks about them. Scorsese, as a key figure in movie preservation and movie history, has also made documentaries about the history of the medium.
Japanese Anime are arguably the most popular form of eastern entertainment in the west, and a great way to get used to less conventional forms of storytelling. Hayao Miyazaki’s movies are rarely as straightforward as most of western’s animated work; great successes like Akira or Ghost in the Shell have very uncommon structures. And that goes for a lot of work from that part of the world.
David Lynch might be one of the most notable human bridges between mainstream and art cinema, primarily because of the success of Twin Peaks, a very rare case of a true mainstream hit that has been directed, with very little compromises, by an “art house” director. Watching Twin Peaks from the first season to The Return is a fantastic way to explore the different shapes of storytelling. But you can do the same with his movies: you could just dip your toe with Elephant Man; then truly start with Blue Velvet, a dark yet relatively linear story; jump into Wild at Heart; then Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and eventually Eraserhead, which is an extraordinary work of cinema that starts out being almost unbearably dark and offputting, daring you to look closer, until you get to see blinding beauty.
I’ll update this list over time, when inspiration strikes.
