The history of cinema started in 1952. Specifically, it started in March, when Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma<\/i>, in its second year and tenth issue, ran the twenty-one-year-old Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s encomium to Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s recently released \u201cStrangers on a Train.\u201d The article was followed by a sardonic note emphasizing that \u201call the points of this article are aimed against the editors-in-chief\u201d\u2014principally, the great critic Andr\u00e9 Bazin, whose soft spot for his visionary young critics didn\u2019t extend to their taste. The note suggested just how controversial and unusual such enthusiasm for Hitchcock\u2019s films was.<\/p>\n
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Now that point of view is no longer controversial: Godard, Truffaut, and company have carried the day regarding their recognition both of Hitchcock\u2019s genius and of the art lurking behind high-studio glitz and B-movie grunge. Young French critics in the nineteen-fifties were talking about new movies, expounding the artistic merits of films by Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Otto Preminger, Max Oph\u00fcls and Ida Lupino, Kenji Mizoguchi and Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini and Jean Renoir. They were setting up the ideas and cultivating the taste for these contemporary releases and for other, unanticipated shocks, such as the films of Jean Rouch and Alain Resnais. They also primed audiences for the radical, revolutionary movies that they themselves were planning to make, that they in fact made, and that quickly got nicknamed the New Wave.<\/p>\n
The history of cinema isn\u2019t a matter of the past or the present but of the future of the art<\/a>. A critic is a prophet who envisions the trajectory of movies, who discerns the principle of aesthetic vitality in a work, and who recognizes the vistas opening from it. That\u2019s why taste in movies is inseparable from ideas and creation, and from the very notion of progress in art.<\/p>\n Thanks to DVDs, streaming video, cable channels, and the remarkably vigorous revival-house scene, classic movies are ubiquitous; yet the history of cinema is receding by the moment. When Godard wrote about \u201cStrangers,\u201d he was closer to the release of the first talking picture<\/a> than we are, currently, to the releases of \u201cDo the Right Thing\u201d and \u201cSex, Lies, and Videotape.\u201d In 1952, many of the classic-age filmmakers\u2014Chaplin, Dreyer, Lang, Walsh, Dwan, Bu\u00f1uel\u2014were alive and active, and their later films were as controversial then as the later films of such directors as Malick, Eastwood, Scorsese, and Godard are today.<\/p>\n As the history of cinema recedes, its works and its artists tend to fall into an undifferentiated glow of veneration\u2014an idealization of styles, manners, and practices arising from the very fact that they\u2019re of the past. The history of cinema often veers toward nostalgia, in overt resistance to the modern.<\/p>\n The most notable series in town at the moment is the complete retrospective of the films of Kenji Mizoguchi at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens. I wrote about it here