Going to the movies, missing the big picture

In 1907, the first permanent movie theater opened in Franz Kafka’s Prague. It showed little one-reel films, some fictional and some not, and the writer, at the time largely preoccupied with finding his unique literary voice, occasionally attended it as well as other “Kinematographs� all over Europe in the next few years. He sometimes wrote about what he saw, in letters and in his diary, pretty much in the dispassionate spirit of the flaneur, an idler keeping a bemused, intelligent eye on the passing scene. Hanns Zischler, a German actor-director-obsessive, makes too much of what little Kafka had to say on this topic in “Kafka Goes to the Movies.�

By 2001, the “progress� of popular culture having trumped (not to say swamped) most other forms of expression, it was possible for Kevin Murphy, late of the cult television program “Mystery Science Theater 3000,� to embark on an odyssey during which he saw at least one movie every day of the year. He, in turn, makes too little of what he saw in “A Year at the Movies.�

It is perhaps not hard to guess which of these writers’ experiences was the more Kafkaesque. It is possibly harder to imagine which of their books is, finally, the more interesting, but here’s a hint: It is a taste for the obscure, telling detail that makes any writing about the movies worthwhile.

You have to give Murphy credit. The range of venues open to him was far wider than Kafka’s, and he manfully traveled the world to experience as many of them as possible. He went to the movies in a huge igloo in Quebec, at the world’s smallest admission-charging theater (it’s in some guy’s home in Australia), at the Cannes, Sundance and Midnight Sun festivals, in drive-ins along Route 66, at the Silent Movie on Fairfax Avenue. On Thanksgiving Day he smuggled an entire turkey dinner into a ‘plex and consumed it while watching “Monsters, Inc.�

Murphy can be very funny on some of these subjects. His riff on airline movies is terrific. So is his outrage over shelling out cash to see a movie and then being forced to watch paid advertising shorts before it begins. But, frankly, a little of this goes a long way. He too often stops talking about the movies and fills his pages with lengthy reflections on the width of the seats, the need for adequate armrests, the rude behavior (and smelliness) of his fellow patrons, and, most obsessively, the quality of the popcorn or the state of his own digestive tract as he confronts the snack bar’s other queasy offerings.

Murphy’s annoyances are everyone’s annoyances. But his is, unfortunately, a populist heart, and a somewhat geeky one at that -- drawn to sentimentality about his family and friends and about those earnest souls who, at some cost to themselves, keep cinema’s flame burning bright in variously eccentric venues. But he is too much the perpetual teenager, braying his contempt for the way movies are exhibited in postmodern America while too often missing the point of his exercise, which is the picture on the screen.

Each of his chapters is ostensibly devoted to a week of moviegoing, and each begins with a list of films seen within that time frame. Many of these are movies that demand a certain complexity of response -- “Pollock,� “The Widow of St. Pierre,� “Moulin Rouge,� “My Night at Maude’s,� “The Big Red One� -- but about them (and more) he remains silent. For instance, when he sees “The Shining,� he devotes himself instead to his annoyance with the pop-up ads on the movie Web sites.

This is too bad, because when he engages with torpid, critically overhyped products like “In the Mood for Love� or “Breaking the Waves,� his populist contempt is well-judged and smartly stated. But one gets the impression that he is afraid of his own intelligence. Musing on the ghastly remake of “Planet of the Apes,� it occurs to him: “A movie was just something to go to, and ten bucks worth of snacks were just something to do while there. The dangerous complacency of the average moviegoer filled me up to my beard which smelled like popcorn oil.� How true. But how sad that Murphy is more often part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, which has to begin with authentic and passionate critical engagement, despite the greasy tacos and unkempt restrooms.

One does not imagine that Kafka’s primitive Kinematographs were any more salubrious than, say, the Mall of America multiplex. But what did he care? “We are happy,� he writes, “when we do what is almost superfluous but fail to do precisely what is almost necessary.� Movies, obviously, fell into the former category for him. Only once did they fully engage him. There is a little sequence in a movie called “The White Slave Girl,� in which the heroine is abducted for unspeakable purposes. This he conflates with a real-life meeting with a woman on a train, whereupon, writing with his faithful companion, Max Brod, he tries to turn these shards of memory into the only extant chapter of an unfinished novel they briefly planned to write together.

For the rest, trying rather desperately to pump up his very slender volume and support its intriguing title, Zischler must content himself with even-tinier fragments. Worse, he retells, occasionally in excruitatingly detail, the plots of movies -- and even a stage musical about them -- which someone mentioned to Kafka, though there is no evidence of his actually having seen the work. There is even a strange passage in which Kafka muses not on a film but on its poster, which features the German actor Albert Bassermann, whose Hamlet the writer admired but whose appearance in a movie called “The Other� filled him with foreboding: “ ... I felt sorry for B., as if he were the most unfortunate of men.... [A]ware of the most extreme uselessness of the expenditure of all his great powers ... he becomes older, weak ... sinks away somewhere in the grayness of time.�

Poor Bassermann, making his actor’s living, trying quite soberly, as a quotation from an essay he wrote at the time makes clear, to master a new medium. And, of course, quite unaware that he had come under Kafka’s gimlet gaze.

This is what finally makes this book -- it should have been a magazine piece -- so curiously seductive. Kafka brings so much neurasthenic energy to bear on such trivial matters -- so much quivering intelligence at war with so much dither -- that he becomes quite an engaging, sympathetic and even faintly comic figure, particularly since during this period (roughly 1908-13) he was writing (and destroying) the first draft of “Amerika,� finishing “Metamorphosis� and engaging in his largely epistolary, entirely ambiguous, courtship of Felice Bauer.

This material -- probably just a subtext for the narrowly focused Zischler -- becomes, at last, his text, and a portrait takes shape not of a cinephile but of an intelligence, an oddly determined sensibility, emerging from the conventions and distractions of ordinary middle-class, middle-European life, beginning its immortal assertions against the conventions and distractions of ordinary literary life. Watching Kafka emerge -- forgive the absurd comparison -- is worth a thousand disquisitions on popcorn culture. I’m not saying that writing about films can ever achieve that level of intensity. But the aspiration should nag at us. It’s not much crazier than daring to write a story about a man turning into a giant bug.