A film doesn’t need to tell you what it means. It doesn’t even need to say anything at all. A film is a series of images in time, a collection of framed moments, a durational collage of sight and sound. It works on more registers than just narrative and metaphor. Story and signification are in the mix more often than not, but they’re not the only elements through which a film operates on its audience. At a more elemental level, the basic composition of a shot or sequencing of a scene are their own transmissions of ideas and energy. To tune to this intuitive frequency is to open a high-bandwidth connection between the filmmaker and the moviegoer. Doing so takes practice, and requires asking what a movie does instead of what it means.
Reading a film in this way is not an intellectual challenge, or at least it doesn’t have to be. An easy way to start is just to notice when something is beautiful or interesting. Light’s texture on an actor or a landscape; a certain balance or clash of colors; sounds mixing to convey the atmosphere of a space and the weight of a moment; the reveal of information (a punchline? a scare? a delight?) through the movement of a camera or an actor or a prop. These are self-evidently worthy of attention and inherently rewarding. The feelings they create and the experience of appreciating them are just as much the “point” of a movie as the morals or warnings embedded in its script.
Compared to pretty pictures in otherwise entertaining movies, experimental or arthouse films are a tougher sell, but they can accelerate the development of formal attunement. It only takes 4 minutes and a dark room to learn from Mothlight that a movie doesn’t need sound, story, character, or even a camera to create atmosphere, rhythm and a sense of space. La Jetée is a 30 minute montage of still images, demonstrating how much of a narrative can be filled in by the audience, how capable of association and projection we really are. Patience itself is interrogated by Jeanne Dielman over its 3 hour meditation on a middle-aged woman’s tedious daily activities, but what it achieves in its slowness is a hypnosis that obliterates one’s awareness of time altogether. These works make demands of your attention in a way that common cinema (or streaming) fare does not, but they also give you permission to try something new. By being so unabashedly unconventional, they create opportunities to practice new kinds of attending to and understanding film.
The Mastermind doesn’t come anywhere close to the deliberate unpleasantness of Jeanne Dielman, but the latter is what I found myself thinking about after hearing my family’s unanimously negative reviews of this year’s heist movie that’s not really a heist movie. Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt, a filmmaker known for her quiet, observational style, The Mastermind is slow and confoundingly patient. It’s unapologetically uneconomical with time, lingering lackadaisically with characters well after they’ve said their last line of dialogue in a scene. The central heist of the film’s plot consumes barely more runtime than an unscored, wordless, dimly lit scene in which the protagonist unpacks four stolen paintings from a wooden crate in a barn, carries each painting and the empty crate, one at a time, up a ladder to the loft of that barn, then re-packs each painting into the crate in the loft before accidentally kicking over the ladder and having to jump clumsily back down to the ground. There is no awards-ceremony-ready monologue in which the main character lays out a complex plan, declares the purpose of his mission, or confronts the trauma in his past that set him on a skewed path. The Mastermind is a film that watches a man make a series of poorly-considered decisions and then watches how he navigates the aftermath of those decisions. It makes no overt thesis statement and concludes with minimal direct conflict, retribution, or resolution. Casual film fans enticed by “Josh O’Connor does a museum heist” are likely to come away disappointed, or at least a little sleepy-eyed.
But indirectness does not make a movie meaningless. In fact, The Mastermind is dense with ideas1, though they’re presented more through juxtaposition and implication than by any direct explanation. The film has a point of view, even if its hero does not, and we don’t have to like the main character to like what the movie is accomplishing through him.
Nor does a slow pace make this movie boring. Its gaze is careful, and what little action it contains remains within the boundaries of mundane reality, so unlike the chaotic unraveling that defines Marty Supreme, the adventures of this bumbling con man are unlikely to raise your heart rate. But, provided you can modulate your attention, there’s plenty of tension and comedy to be found in this film. And there’s more than enough story to be spun from what its characters say to each other, as well as by what’s happening in the margins. The Mastermind is not in the business of proving that it’s worth your time, or of drowning out your distractions with its own noise. It exists, content in its own completeness, and you are welcome to bring your attention to it if you wish.
The venue of the cinema, the theater with the sticky floors and loud popcorn chewers and teens in the back row cracking jokes, may die and be replaced entirely by streaming subscriptions. This wouldn’t be an unqualified downgrade—there’s something to be said for cheap access to massive film libraries, the comfort of our own couches, cuddles from family members and pets, and beers at grocery store prices. What we would miss, though, would be the cinema’s unique relationship with attention: the separateness of the space, the darkness of the room, the solitary and overwhelming illumination of the feature when the previews and logos are done. It’s easy, in that context, to relinquish expectations and be carried by light and sound through the entire sensory experience of a film. It’s easier there than in a living room to accept, even appreciate, a movie for what it is instead of resenting it for what you could have been doing instead.
The important thing, though, is not where your seat is but where your head’s at. The quality of engagement you can achieve with a film is much more within your control than you’d expect. It’s got plenty to do with the movie itself, sure, but it’s also a function of what’s going on inside you when you choose to press play. What do you know about this movie already? What are you expecting from it? Have you already read reviews or made up your mind about whether it’s any good? And, by the way, how’s your day going? When did you last eat? Attention and appreciation are both skills that can be practiced, and there are straightforward ways to make them easier for yourself. If a film’s not working for you, try paying closer attention to it. You might find something to like.