When I was a kid, like a lot of kids in the ‘80s, I had a View-Master. I had a few View-Masters, actually. You may have seen them before—they were these little red camera-looking things, with what looked like a visor in the middle and a little orange lever on the side. They were a kind of mini-photo projector. When you bought them, you also got a bunch of little round cards dotted along the edges with slides. The card fit into a slot, and every time you pushed the lever, a new slide would pop up with a new image. It made a satisfying click sound. I remember having an E.T. one, but they also had cards for television shows and toys. Mine were all movies. It wasn’t like watching the film, but it was kind of 3D and it was better than reading a short interview in some teen magazine, which is all you could really get in those days if you were a kid looking for more engagement with your favorite movies (VHS tapes rarely had special features). The images passed by one after the other, as you flipped through, retelling the story in distinct parts. It was full of holes, but it hit important notes, like Gertie kissing E.T. over that flower. Your memory of the movie itself filled in the blanks.
View-Masters first came out in 1939, on the back of high-quality color photos. But they weren’t that different from Eadweard Muybridge’s projected discs of The Horse in Motion from 1878. Considered to be the first bit of proto-cinema, the photographer’s glass discs, dotted with images of a horse in various stages of gallop, were cycled through an early version of the movie projector that he called, for obvious reasons, a zoopraxiscope. The whole thing came less out of artistic aspiration than scientific inquiry—a man just wanted to know what position a horse’s feet actually went through when it moved really fast, which was hard to see with the naked eye. Muybridge captured the motion, but also the parts that made it up; movement through time was important, but the individual images were too.
I bring this up because a few of my recent trips to the movie theater have felt more like a date with the View-Master. I’ll get to examples in a second, but it’s enough of a trend that I can explain it in generic terms first. These are the movies which often have a plot so thin it’s hard to make out, and characters so vague they are hard to hold on to, so instead what you get is often talented filmmakers—or at the very least, filmmakers who are putting a lot of thought into their individual shots—producing beautiful images that play like a reel in front of you, one after the other, but with no real build, no major momentum. If you’re lucky, the ambience can float you through, but usually in the end you’re just left thinking: nice imagery.
I got thinking about all of this in earnest while watching Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’s long-incubating remake of F.W. Murnau’s silent 1922 vampire film. I think because some of the images are SO beautiful—my favorite being an empty, ghostly carriage, driven by nothing and no one, coming to rest at the foot of the solicitor (Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter) making his way up to the vampire’s lair to bring him some contracts (the banality of this always makes me laugh), its door swinging open on its own. All I could think of was Emily Dickinson’s poem: “Because I could not stop for Death –/He kindly stopped for me –/The Carriage held but just Ourselves –/And Immortality.” Another image, one of the candle-lit homes in a village Thomas comes across during the same journey, looks like the live version of a glowing Rembrandt. Eggers’s past work in art departments makes him a master at producing these kinds of exquisite, semi-dynamic paintings.
Nosferatu unravels around a psychic erotic connection between Thomas’s wife, Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp), and the vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, unrecognizable, his monstrous form only fully revealed at the end). The original story is embedded in Victorian shame around female sexuality. In the film that amounts to close-up after close-up of Depp’s beautiful expanse of a face in various stages of desire and distress, of Dracula in the shadows, of Hoult acting terrified, of Victorian era era-ness, none of which seemed to be particularly threaded together. About halfway through, I turned to my friend and said, “What’s the point of this?” (As Nicholas Russell wrote, it’s a lot of waiting around for nothing much.)
There was a noticeable lift in the theater when Willem Dafoe appeared on screen as Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (fittingly, the only one who understands what’s going on between Ellen and Orlok). And I don’t think that was just because it was Dafoe. He was playful in a way that the other actors didn’t seem to be, bringing the same vitality to this Eggers film as he did to 2019’s The Lighthouse. Eggers’s work, despite being incredibly lovely to look at, seems to need the dynamism of its actors to push it through—his stories aren’t particularly animated outside of that. They are little more than meticulous mise-en-scènes. That Nosferatu is a horror film is fitting.
The horror genre seems particularly susceptible to privileging images over momentum, unsurprising considering how much it relies on atmosphere. Two horror films that came out in the summer, Longlegs and Cuckoo, like Nosferatu, left me equally baffled (and they didn’t have classic source material to fall back on). I saw Cuckoo over the holidays so I should really be able to summarize it easily, but frankly I mostly remember what I could have just gotten from the trailer: Hunter Schafer looks confused and ethereal in some retro resort in the Alps as she is chased by a creepy-looking woman. The movie never coheres into anything solid, and never explains anything particularly well. The point is Schafer being chased.
Longlegs was worse. Watching it made me feel like I was babysitting a kid who kept trying to scare me by putting a sheet over his head and standing in the corner of the room—again and again. I literally do not recall anything else about that movie except for Nicolas Cage’s papier-mâché prosthetics (he’s Longlegs). Apparently, it’s not just my terrible memory that’s the problem. “As the film drudges on, it’s difficult not to feel trapped in a loop of a horror fancam on Instagram reels,” wrote Justine Peres Smith in Cult MTL, who noted Longlegs’ references to classic horrors like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. “You’re going round and round in circles, elated at first by the memories of a film you loved, but slowly beaten down by the core emptiness of the presentation.”
Smith’s invocation of Instagram was apt. Follow enough movie accounts on social media—if you don’t know what that is, just imagine a Twitter account forever posting four frames from an Eggers film with the caption, “He was cooking!”—and you’ll start to suspect that something small has changed about how movies are made and how they are seen. If a fragmented populace is watching so much in fragmentation, doesn’t it make sense for story arc to become beside the point?
I don’t need a traditional three-act structure—setup, confrontation, resolution—and I don’t need a hero’s journey. Plenty of great films don’t have those things. But I do need some kind of point, a raison d’être, no matter how minor. I need something guiding the film, anything. Nosferatu, Longlegs, and Cuckoo do not seem like they are being led in any particular way. They seem to lack any sense of cognitive completion by the artist themselves, which translates to the screen. They read instead as sketches, as elevator pitches, as high concepts an executive got excited about without much concern for the follow through—Nosferatu in color! Hunter Schafer in the Alps! Nicolas Cage doing whatever the fuck! You could stick shots from these films into a View-Master and I imagine it would be an improvement.
Maybe this is the new form of cinema: a pastiche of imagery never reaching fruition. The idea of what cinema exactly is has always been in flux anyway. Experimental filmmakers and various film movements have forever questioned conventions like character and story. Some of their films are abstract to the point of illegibility. Still, the best of them are not montages with no point behind them—their intent is coherent, they are going somewhere. La Jetée by Chris Marker, for instance, is an experimental black-and-white short made up almost entirely of still images about time travel in which a man witnesses his own death. It shows the limitations of both film and of photography, a kind of confrontation that reaches back to Muybridge and the View-Master. As Catherine Lupton writes in her Criterion essay:
It is certainly not the only film to be composed out of still images, but its triumph is to harness them, using the classic grammar of the narrative fiction film, to the ultimate spare, stripped-down storyline (a mere twenty-seven minutes in length): a post apocalyptic science-fiction tale of tragic heroism and lost love, which turns on the fatal attraction of images and the price paid for that desire. The use of still photographs distills the essence of cinema’s appeal and its impossibility: the desire to fix that which is forever in motion, the desire to possess the presence of that which is forever absent, the willful suspension of disbelief that will create the illusion of reality from a projected stream of immobile representations.
The last scene of La Jetée is a montage of stills showing the protagonist running towards his own fate, and it has more dynamism than the entirety of those horror films I mentioned combined. It shows that the driving force of the movie is the story itself, that even as the images stay still, that must go forward, just as time does. As the narrator says before the protagonist is killed, “He knew there was no way out of time.”
