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Like jazz or pop music, cinema is a popular art form meant to communicate with many people, often at once. Just as a film’s illusion is a complicated thing, made up of various and sundry parts that somehow draw together into an integrated whole, the audience is a composite that ranges from the wide-eyed and rapt to the distracted and preoccupied. So some films are like roller-coasters, in that the director attempts to mold viewers into a single-minded audience and takes that audience for a ride, controlling its experience in whichever way he or she desires. That’s fair enough. After all, viewers paid to climb onboard and know more or less what to expect. Although the filmmakers here avoid roller-coaster filmmaking that forces viewers into single-track, superficial, reflexive reactions to their films, in a sense, all is fair in love and cinema, and a filmmaker should be able to use any cinematic tool to his or her advantage. Genre films—westerns, thrillers, romantic comedies, and horror films—might be outrageous and stretch the limits of credulity, but their finest examples are venerated by such masterful filmmakers as Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), one of the great films of American cinema, leads the viewer around by a ring in the nose, but the viewer is not aware of being manipulated. And that’s the point. The viewer should not feel manipulated, of being made to wheel this way and that as a single body in response to the film’s messages of fear, longing, sadness, or delight. So even a roller-coaster film can provoke the viewer to sift out any deeper meanings. If the viewer is enticed with familiar film structures and elements, the film can take off in unexpected 8 The Viewer 187 CINEMA TODAY 188 and surprising directions, not all of which have to be immediately clear. In fact, some filmmakers prefer involving viewers through their emotions, because intellectual understanding can result from emotional experience, even if the intellectual information arrives long after the viewer saw the film or fails to arrive at all. This often is the case in real life: we glimpse situations that elicit our emotions even when we don’t fully understand what’s going on. The experience can provoke one person to make up some story about what’s going on and what will happen in the future, whereas others may pass by the same scene, note what is happening, react briefly, and promptly forget it. Still others may not be moved at all. Many films, even great films, draw the same range of responses. And the best films leave room for viewers to relate individually, even to the point of questioning their lives or refusing to engage in the film at all because they may not be prepared for what they believe will be that filmic experience. In creating a film that affects people as deeply or almost as deeply as their real lives—that is, in succeeding—a filmmaker inevitably alienates part of the audience. Of course, this is true of all art—music, painting, sculpture, architecture, mathematics, literature, and poetry. So, where does the film take place—in the mind of the viewer or the mind of the filmmaker? The only way to determine how much to tell or not to tell viewers and how to say it is to put one’s self in their place. So the filmmaker is the first viewer, and it could be said that filmmakers wind up making films for themselves, sometimes with help from colleagues and audiences at test screenings. They can only hope that viewers’ tastes will correspond to their own. And that’s just a hope, after all, and one that is not shared by all filmmakers, because if a film is truly worthwhile, it continues its creative work by inspiring viewers to draw from the film whatever they may, rather than whatever someone intended, even if that someone is its creator. A film’s final maker is the audience, and the finer the film, the more it opens itself to all kinds of readings. This is why the filmmakers here believe that art filmmakers should work deeply and, to a degree, ambiguously, despite mass interest in conventional roller-coaster cinema. This issue also relates to the reason most filmmakers prefer that audiences see their films in movie theaters, where they are surrounded by sound...

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