The two cuts Peter mentioned are both moments I love. The cut in
"Clara's Heart" isn't to all that long of a long-shot, and it's of
course needed to show the hand-on-hand gesture, but it still has the
effect of pulling back from letting faces do the work to letting the
viewer, and the composition of two characters in a room, provide the
emotion. There's actually a related moment in a John Ford film, and Ford
was another great director who withheld close-ups at a time when other
directors might use them: Late in "The Last Hurrah," a cleric from a
different religion than Skeffington's stops in the doorway as he leaves
and in the distance we see him make the sign of the cross. (I hope I
have this right!) There's a stately beauty to the restraint here that's
incredibly moving.

I think "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a great and moving film that need not
be excused as a "third-tier" Mulligan. There are other Mulligans I like
more, but that doesn't make this any less great. "Air Force" may be a
"third tier" Hawks but it's a tremendously great and poetic film too.
The problem is that I've seen "To Kill a Mockingbird" (and, for that
matter, "Air Force") too long ago to mount a detailed defense.

I note, though, that nothing Craig says either for or against the film
has anything to do with how I value film as art. Craig, you don't agree
with the way the film represents the racial situation in the South.
Well, fine. Social critiques of films are important, and we need more of
them. But by those standards you'd have to throw out a vast amount of
classical Hollywood cinema, with its attitudes toward male-female
relationships, towards Native Americans, and (at least from my point of
view as a self-described eco-exstremist) toward nature.

A friend of mine once told me about how a whole session of a college
class on Dante was spent dealing with the complaints of women students
that he was a "sexist."

Films reflect the attitudes of the times and of their production
systems. Where are the Hollywood films made at the time of or before "To
Kill a Mockingbird" that express the rage you want? I'm not saying there
aren't any, but I can't think of any just now, and surely there aren't
many. "Rage" simply wasn't publicly expressed all that often before the
late 1960s. And, by the way, where is the rage in the black-made films
of Oscar Micheaux? I recently saw "Within Our Gates" (1920), which I
liked very much, and which is thought to have been a response to "The
Birth of a Nation." Not long before its release several dozen Chicago
blacks were murdered by white mobs in a so-called "race riot." Where is
his rage? There are some nasty white racists in the film, but nowhere
near as nasty as the Chicago murderers. Please. You can write critiques,
but if we judged works of art by the social values we want to see
expressed we'd have precious little left after we got done with our
judging.

Besides, I don't think great art works that way. A great film USES SPACE
to express an entire vision. In my own writing, I've tried to describe
the way many different filmmakers use space in different ways. A lot of
that writing is on my Web site so I won't start repeating myself here,
but I'd like to think that I don't just use "space" as a meaningless
word, but try to give it specificity by describing different uses of
space. By contrast, the statement that you find Gregory Peck more
"convincing" in one film than in another is to me an example of the kind
of mystified and unjustified and unexplained personal tastes that make
much mainstream film criticism so worthless.

You wrote, "The 'power of cinema' doesn't redeem cinema."

Yes it does. We couldn't disagree more. The true statement that you deny
above is a corollary of the historical truth that the power of art
redeems art. Why do you think a painter like Rembrandt, a composer like
Bach, a writer like Shakespeare, have survived for so many hundreds of
years? Why do so many artisanal objects, such as so much great
pre-Columbian pottery, seem so sublime today? It's not because of what
they were made for, to be sure. We don't see them used to eat out of
when we see them in museums, nor do we see those wonderful and scary
sculptures of the rain god Tlaloc used in the way they were intended to
be used -- to receive the blood of children murdered in human
sacrifices. It's hard to think of a more odious use that a work of art
can be put to, and we shouldn't forget that, but the objects are
stunningly great. Does Bach survive because of his religious views --
which his cantatas, passions and masses amply demonstrate and argue
passionately for? I don't think so. What about great abstract painting
-- or abstract filmmaking? When you disagree with the social content of
a film, it's completely kosher to critique it, but such a critique is
not the same thing as evaluating the film as a work of art.

I think I may have quoted from this before here, but I think I also
botched the quote. W. H. Auden wrote an elegy for William Butler Yeats
after Yeats died in 1939, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." Auden had the
problem of accounting for Yeats's highly reactionary political and
social views (when Yeats decries the then-current wave of "base-born
products of base beds" in "Under Ben Bulben," his "credo" and his last
great poem, I've always wondered if he would have meant to include me,
the offspring of Lebanese Christian grandparents on one side and Eastern
European Jewish ones on the other). And so he wrote:

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

and concludes, addressing the poet:

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

I'd ask something similar of a filmmaker: "Teach the free man how to
see." This is no more nor less important than telling the historical
truth about race, it seems to me, but is actually a rarer skill.

I'm curious about your aesthetic now. Can you tell us what's great about
your favorite, or one of your favorite films? One thing that I've long
noticed about myself is that the things many others, including many
others on this list, value about films are not things I care about all
that much.

- Fred