One Question Interview: Michael Guillén
A semi-regular series, One Question Interview examines the nature of "good" things in fields as disparate as art, advertising, business, film, food, music, and prose, via one question answered by someone in the know.
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One Question Interview: Michael Guillén
This week's One Question Interview features writer and international film critic Michael Guillén. Guillén is a freelance film journalist who focuses on film festival culture. He has published with several print and on-line venues, is a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, and is the editor of The Evening Class. Guillén travels again and again to San Francisco to watch films and then returns to Boise to write about them.
Joel Wayne: What's good film?
Michael Guillén: There would have to be as many answers as there are good films. In gist, however, I would have to say that the eye is what makes a good film; both the eye of the filmmaker who envisions and manifests the film, and the eye of the spectator who watches the film, invests time, and innervates the experience, and--of course--the image that is placed between them. A film is at its best when that image is something of a permeable membrane that allows perceptual movement to and fro. This is the true "moving picture", not just the movement captured on the screen. This movement between filmmaker and spectator, negotiated through the image, characterizes the "good film." They interact--sometimes collaborating, sometimes at odds with each other--in an imaginal specularity that renders the human experience transparent unto itself by way of the lensed image. So I would have to reiterate that it is the experience of film that makes a "good film."
"...the eye is what makes a good film; both the eye of the filmmaker who envisions and manifests the film, and the eye of the spectator who watches the film, invests time, and innervates the experience, and--of course--the image that is placed between them."
To paraphrase the well-worn conundrum of the falling tree in the forest, is a film good if it is seen by no one? That social negotiation of the image is requisite to the filmic experience, and can be affected by so many idiosyncratic considerations. Does one approach a film in a formalist fashion? Conjuring descriptions from a thicket of intellectual jargon? Or does one rely on the cinema of attractions and wallow in the pleasure derived from sheer visual stimulations? Enjoying a melodramatic romance, let's say, or a swashbuckler or a horror film precisely on their own generic merits? Perhaps it's more accurate to consider that an individual's appreciation of film is always a portfolio response?
The moving picture is visual storytelling at essence, whether through visual strategies that gain traction and momentum by either narrative or non-narrative approaches. So I would have to add that a "good film" is the one where the story is best shared.