Ann Hornaday, movie critic for The Washington Post, talks about wonder and awe in movies during her lecture Friday in the Amphitheater.
Ann Hornaday, film critic for The Washington Post, rounded out the Week Seven theme of “Wonder and Awe — A Week Celebrating Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial” with a focus on the role cinema plays in creating enriching, awe-inspiring experiences in society during her morning lecture Friday in the Amphitheater about films and film criticism.
“There’s no medium that has so ambitiously, and often cravenly, and sometimes actually successfully, cultivated wonder and awe — not just as an aesthetic, but as a business model,” she said.
Hornaday explained that, by their very nature, films are designed to create spectacle and awe for viewers in order to keep them coming back to theaters. This drive to outdo one another has resulted in a perpetual churning-out of that spectacle and awe.
As an example, she told the story of the 1896 Lumière Brothers film that showed a train entering a train station in France, barreling toward the audience — it proved to be so realistic, shocking and unprecedented that audience members ran from their seats in the theater, shocked by the spectacle.
“It’s that very porous border between art and life that has acted as an operating principle for film,” she said. “It’s a creative goal, and a goad, and it’s an ethical challenge.”
Hornaday posited, though, that despite this push to make each film bigger, bolder and better, the most awe-inspiring moments can often be found in the “quietest and most liminal spaces.”
She spoke about a number of movies she has enjoyed, and explained the specific techniques that made the movies not only successful, but demonstrated an awe-evoking effect.
She highlighted work, including Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and David Lane’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” in addition to the work of Terrence Malik and Martin Scorsese, as being examples of enduring works from filmmakers who wield a great deal of talent in portraying scope and scale.
“They take the big swings and they’re going for deep meaning, and they’re going for big themes, and they are among the most admired filmmakers of their eras,” she said. “But I want to humbly suggest that as often beautiful as these movies are, and as much as I do admire them, I’m not sure that they’re what I’m talking about when I talk about wonder and awe.”
Hornaday gave some background about her path into film criticism, which was not a straightforward one. She moved to New York City in the 1980s — a time when many publications were actively seeking writing about pop culture — and she found herself increasingly specializing in film coverage because of the demand.
When she started writing about film, her idea of cinematic awe was “pretty modest.” Hornaday recounted other experiences of art that she categorized as being awe-some, like seeing Bruce Springsteen perform live, watching “Fantasia” as a child, sitting in a room of Mark Rothko’s abstract, large-scale interrogations of color, and seeing a Tom Stoppard play on Broadway that she found particularly striking. She took it upon herself to learn about the technical artistry of film when she started receiving assignments to write about it.
“That’s when I really developed a deep appreciation for just how difficult it is. It’s difficult to make a bad movie, let alone a good one, let alone a great one,” Hornaday said. “The vision that it takes — the singular vision, usually of a director, often the writer and director working in tandem — but that vision that is then executed by so many people working at the very top of their game not only to create something of beauty and of technical prowess, but of meaning: That is awesome, and it’s always amazing to me when it happens. I never take it for granted.”
She showed a selection of iconic shots from various films including “Singin’ in The Rain,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Goodfellas.” Many of these shots were cut expertly or were “tracking shots,” which is a technique in which the camera moves in a continuous movement and is unedited, therefore taking in activity as the shot progresses.
In doing so, she explained the immense complexity of successfully executing complicated and innovative film shots, and how much coordination is involved on so many levels to fully execute a good movie.
She said that at the start of her career, she very well may have categorized shots like these as being awe-some. The technical feats the directors accomplished are widely renowned and recognized, but she looks back on them as being more about the technical aspect, rather than the emotional one, of filmmaking. Now, she would probably be more inclined to label them as astonishing or worthy of admiration.
“Are they creating awe?” Hornaday asked. “Are they really creating wonder, or are they just creating amusement? Are they just creating a kind of astonishment?”
Hornaday said early in her career, she felt as if superhero movies were beginning to take over; now she feels like “we’re being completely swallowed up by the comic book franchise world.”
As special effects are becoming more computerized and artificial intelligence is becoming more commonplace, she is turning toward simpler, smaller delights for feelings of awe.
“Even though (new special effects techniques) are diverting in the moment, and they might be awesome in the moment, they’re probably — or, at least for me — often more likely to make me feel more numb than engaged, and more alienated from the world around me than immersed and more in love with it,” she said. “Put simply, my standards for awe — cinematic awe — have really changed and evolved, and they’ve actually become much simpler and smaller.”
She showed some clips, including from Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy,” Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight,” William Wyler’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” and Bill Forsyth’s “Local Hero” as examples of quieter, tender moments that, for her, inspired awe.
Hornaday ended the lecture by explaining her evolved criteria for an awe-inspiring film: human connection.
“What all of these scenes have in common for me is human connection,” she said. “These are all either examples of people connecting, or they are memories of having connected. They’re about the fragility of the space between us and broaching it, reaching and connecting across it. That is just so much harder to do than a big special effect.”
She acknowledged that special effects require immense skill and effort, and can be incredibly complex, but she believes “human emotion might be the hardest special effect to get right.”
Hornaday said she sees the awe evoked in these films as an antidote to the alienation that is ever-increasing in an isolated, technologically-dependent world. She described the films as having a “healing power” that transcends our current understanding of the world.
“Awe: It can be astonishment, it can be amazement, it can be admiration, but another ‘A’ word that I really think about is ‘alone,’ as in ‘less alone,’ ” she said. “(These are the kind of) movies that make us feel less alone.”
Hornaday cited the Barbenheimer double feature — comprising “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — that took the United States by storm last summer as being an event that forged community bonds and brought people together in a shared cultural moment.
While the double feature concept isn’t novel or uncommon, what made Barbenheimer unique is the sense of community it brought and, as a result, the swaths of viewers who made their way to theaters to experience both films — not just for their artistry, but for their element of bonding with others over shared experiences.
She ended by noting the communal nature of seeing films in theaters, as opposed to at home via streaming services.
Hornaday referenced Dacher Keltner’s lecture on Monday, saying “awe really cannot be found on an iPhone.” Hornaday said she understands and respects that people may still be hesitant to return to in-theater viewings but, to her, communal and collective experiences of emotion can ignite the power of film in a way that solitary experiences cannot.
“Astonishment is never as astonishing as when you hear a collective gasp,” she said. “Amusement is never as amusing as when you’re all laughing together in the dark, and awe is never deeper than when we’re humbled and elevated as one being, one body alone together in the dark.”
