I like watching old movies. When I’m not being sucked into the hyper-intense world of journalism and writing, I watch old movies. It’s not that I insist on them; however, I tend to Google lists of movies, and certain movies always comes up. One of them is The Godfather, whose first was made in 1972 and which I’d heard a lot about. In my old movie era, I saw it—and it was great.
Vito Corleone, played expressively by the ‘father’ of method acting, Marlon Brando, was the character pull of Godfather 1. In that opening scene where a man whose daughter was assaulted seeks revenge, or justice as he terms it, we see the camera do a beautiful thing: its focus is initially on the man, whose every syllable was drenched in shame and suffering. The story he tells too, unfurls slowly, just as the camera ascends and slowly pans across the room to the distinctly sour face of Don Corleone.
When I was done watching the three Godfather films, the strongest message was how easily establishments could get eroded. In the face of blazing new change, in philosophy which is influenced by time, one could find themselves suddenly on the wrong side of history. It was something that old Corleone understood and suffered for. But his suffering doesn’t remove what’s at stake: a better, more rewarding, yet complex, and severely demanding, view of life.
It was a good start into old movies. The thing is—it’s not just that old movies have a certain coldness to them, because they’re from an era whose sensibilities, even though recognizable through film, haven’t quite been felt by us. It’s not familiar in a visceral sense, as the contemporary is. And if properly engineered, that lack of familiarity could penetrate the humane quality of the story in a way it never could for a recent movie. For me, that becomes all there is to see, the story. And so writing becomes an important requirement of such purposes.
Old movies are incredibly written, you see. It’s because of its alliance with the traditional forms of storytelling. If you study it far enough, from the Greek epics and down to the birth of European and American cinema, some patterns begin to emerge. One such pattern is the central figure whose inner life is rocked by some change. He grasps in the dark for a while, and life seems bleak at this point, but then someone comes to help him, often a master or lover. Through the motions of their relationship, the problem is solved and life returns to its previous state. Many films and books you’ve read take after this form.
When I started watching old movies, more than anything I was looking for the humanity of the characters, how much they resembled the ones in today’s world. I wanted to see what had changed in moral perceptiveness and reaction to conflict, and American cinema rose with such lofty material: it’s part of that famed Dream and why so many of us grew up with a vein for the stateside inside us. But we mostly loved the spirit of adventure. The fact that a man could wake up one morning and drive across the country, seeking a bliss he cannot describe.
In Chinatown (1974), Jack Nicholson’s character of J. J. Gittes has a similar freedom, although a social problem is encoded into his job as a private investigator. I soared with those characters and suffer with them. Suffer: again, the word. Do I seek suffering every time I watch a movie? Perhaps—art’s requirement of empathy. That to create moving work, one must first be moved, and to move from this to that, you must unravel exactly what moves you. Where does the character on-screen rise to touch the character of your being?
Loosely based on the life of the composer Mozart, the 1984 movie Amadeus, in summary, reveals an emotion that made Shakespeare the icon he is: envy. Most embodied on Othello, we see in his work how putrefaction happens in the mind, its evolution from simple hole to messy rot. And unlike hate, envy begins with love—there is something in the other person you’d rather have for yourself. So you covet. You get close. Subconsciously, getting immersed in that person’s life.
Sometimes you have to stay away from what attracts. Stoic defiance. Another feature of the old films I like. You find this in The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and Daughters of the Dust (1991). While Shawshank is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Dust is quite obscure. But it’s as affecting and wise as the former. In it, there’s a technique I liken to melting ice-block (hello, Hemmingway). From solid matter, heat (details) is applied, and water (the story) emerges: the Peazant family living on the island where the Igbo Landing happened, separated from the rest of the Americas and tending their African culture.
Eventually, most of the islanders decide to get across the water, to become one with the world, to become ‘modernized’. Leaving behind the world of their ancestors, it would have been an easier task except for great-grand mother and family matriarch Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day), who remembers the old days with fondness. She speaks of the spirits and the living as one, and encourages her children, if they must go, to carry a part of their history across the water. In the scene of departure, she asks them to kiss her hand, wrapped with a heirloom atop an old book. Many of them do, but one of her daughters, a Christian tired of her old ways, curse out: you’re supposed to be dead!
Then one of the daughters, the one most closest to Nana, becomes possessed and she speaks the words: “Do you understand what we are and what we have become? We’re the daughters of those old dusty things Nana carries in her tin can. We carry too much scars from the past”.
Do you understand what we have become?
Last night, I saw Forrest Gump, released in 1994, same as Shawshank. Both of them share certain realist features: the hard, penetrating look into American systems through the lives of its characters. But where the other relays smartness, just as 12 Angry Men (1957), whose dialogue and rhetoric belongs in the highest class, Gump is a depiction of the world from the eyes of a “stupid” person.
Born with a low I.Q and characteristics that align with autism, Gump however quickly proves to be a reliable person, a plain man, whose inability to understand things quickly make a lot of people ask him: “Are you stupid or what?” Like a didactic lesson, the implicit point becomes—if this person is stupid, what then is the world? He’s the best character we meet on-screen and as he tells his story to people he encounters on a public bench, they’re increasingly receptive to him.
It touched me in several places, and as the hours unspool from that film, I think now that it was how willingly Gump loved Jenny—pure, unselfish. Even when she was all but those things. There’s not a clear message there, but I found myself wanting to take more “risks” in the arena of love. “I may be stupid, but I know what love is,” says Gump in one scene. I, too, want to know what love is. And the better, if it’s old movies that drives one crazy to the brink of knowing.