Ida

Taking a day off from noir films, watching one of this year's Oscar winners, Ida, a Polish film about a beautiful young woman about to take her final vows, having been raised in a Catholic orphanage during the Nazi occupation, not realizing she is in fact a Jew.  A stunning film in exquisite black and white cinematography.  While watching it I begin to sense how bit by bit I am gravitating toward the sensual basis of art--and life itself perhaps, I don't know.  I can't help but think about Roger Ebert's comment about how the subject of the film is less important than its tone, its atmosphere, its style.  This is simplistic and Ebert, for all his quality, had a certain anti-intellectual quality, draining films of their ideological content.  But I find myself in the midst in my work on noir to be drawn in this direction.  And Ebert's definition of the essence of film is very much in sync with what some of the finest noir writers and scholars assert.  Not a genre, though there are some who continue to blow this old horn, but a way of seeing, a sensibility, a mood, an indelible and unique atmosphere. A look and a feel unique to itself. As Paul Schrader writes in his brilliant Notes on Noir, this style becomes the means of resolving the thematic levels inherent in the films. Style and content seamlessly identical.  So there's apparently no escape.from noir and its shadowy harmonics.