We’re working our way through the 2022 Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll of the Greatest Films, with a few seasonal detours into horror and the occasional side path that sparks our curiosity. 

Join Us After the Credits – Every Other Sunday Evening at 7:30

The Furniture of Silence

On film club awkwardness, Godard’s refusals, and the discipline of attention.

The silence on a Google Meet is qualitatively different from the silence in a physical room. In a living room, silence has furniture. It has the low hum of an air conditioner, the tiny percussion of a mug set down, the soft choreography of bodies deciding whether to lean forward or settle back. It has the ordinary permission of being together without needing to justify it.

On a video call, quiet feels less like a shared pause and more like a blank screen. Not because anyone is muted. In our club, nobody uses the mute button. The microphones stay open like a small act of trust, and you can hear the room as it actually is: a dog’s tags clinking somewhere offscreen, a dishwasher finishing its cycle, a child calling from a hallway, the soft intake of breath before someone speaks and then decides not to. The gap is not engineered. It is chosen, moment by moment, by people deciding whether they want to risk saying what they really thought.

The first voice is not just a voice. It is a decision about what kind of room we are in.

This week, I’ve been thinking about attention in a more personal way than usual. Forrest’s birthday was January 14th. He would have been 74. I find that birthdays after someone is gone do not announce themselves with drama. They arrive the way a weather change arrives. You notice you are holding something you did not mean to pick up.

Forrest was not an intellectual showman. He wasn’t a “film person” in the way the world rewards. His gift, at least as I experienced it, was steadier and rarer. He paid attention, without turning attention into a performance. He was the sort of person who could sit with something unfamiliar and ask, quietly and sincerely, what it might be trying to do. I keep returning to that when I think about what I want this club to be, and what I fear it can become.

This Sunday night, after we’ve all watched Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris) on our own time, I can already picture the opening minutes of the call. The quick greetings. The small talk. The familiar settling-in, as if we are all dragging our chairs closer to the same invisible table. I’ll start with a rambling background on The French New Wave and then the question I always ask, the one that makes my shoulders tighten slightly before it leaves my mouth.

“Alright,” I say. “So… what did we think?”

I know what comes next because it always comes next. The pause. The held breath. The moment where the film, which each of us watched alone, has to be translated into a sentence that can survive being said out loud. The deference to someone who might have a “better” opinion.

In those first seconds, my mind runs ahead to a very specific moment in Contempt, a moment that feels like it was designed to produce this exact kind of hesitation. Georges Delerue’s score arrives in a rush of tragic beauty, swells as if it intends to carry you, and then stops in the middle of a bar. Not a fade. Not a gentle retreat. A hard cut, like someone yanking a cord from the wall. Thirty seconds later it returns. Then it disappears again. The effect is so blunt it can feel like an error.

It invites a modern question.

Is the file corrupted?

There are different kinds of quiet, and if you run a film club long enough, you start to learn them the way a sailor learns wind. There is the bandwidth pause, when someone’s voice glitches and a sentence arrives chopped into pieces. There is the diplomatic one, when everyone is deciding how honest they’re allowed to be without hurting anyone, or embarrassing themselves. There is the canon hush, when a film carries such a reputation that nobody wants to be caught having the wrong response. There is the thinking pause, rarer, when people are genuinely processing. And there is the host pause, which is mine, the beat where I decide whether to rescue the room or let it become what it is.

Technically, I “choose” the films. Practically, I do not. We are moving through the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films list, with minor detours, and the list sits in the meeting with us like a third presence. Sometimes it feels like a compass. Sometimes it feels like weather. Sometimes it feels like an alibi. It gives us permission to watch the “important” thing even when we suspect it won’t be fun, and it gives us cover when it isn’t. We did not invent the canon. We merely showed up to it.

But a list like that also creates a pressure that doesn’t need to be spoken aloud: are we here to enjoy ourselves, or to become the kind of people who enjoy this?

I don’t want the club to be an exam. I don’t want anyone to feel that boredom is a confession of ignorance, or that irritation is a sign of moral failure. I want it to be a room where someone can say, “I didn’t like that,” and still be taken seriously. I want it to be a place where taste is not a competition, where nobody has to perform intelligence to belong.

Still, we do not arrive as blank slates. Each film we watch leaves residue in the room, a kind of afterimage that changes what we now expect from cinema and what we now expect from each other.

After Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the discomfort was social. Fassbinder shows contempt as something a community administers politely, like a corrective. The cruelty isn’t spectacular. It happens in hallways, in glances, in pauses that suggest a decision has already been made about who belongs. The film makes you aware of how quickly disgust can disguise itself as concern. The room afterward felt alert, not only to the film’s world, but to the way judgment travels in our own.

After Rear Window, the air felt slightly charged. Hitchcock doesn’t just entertain. He implicates. He makes spectatorship feel like a behavior you can be caught doing. The film’s pleasures are engineered with almost insulting precision, but it also turns the engineering into a moral question. Looking becomes a posture, and by the end you’re not sure whether you’ve enjoyed yourself or been diagnosed.

After The Piano, the conversation softened. The film asks you to listen to a woman who refuses speech, and then to notice how everyone around her narrates her in her absence. It is lush and romantic and full of the kind of melodramatic force that should, in theory, make things easy to feel. Instead it makes desire and harm occupy the same frame without offering a clean moral cue. The room after that film felt careful, as if people were handling something sharp.

After Killer of Sheep, the mood was quieter, but in a different register. Burnett’s film refuses the usual narrative escalations. It offers days, fragments, exhaustion, small jokes, small kindnesses. It doesn’t build toward catharsis. It simply stays. The question afterward wasn’t “What does it mean?” so much as “How do you talk about a life that won’t shape itself into a plot for you?”

And then there was Stalker, which in our club functioned less like a meeting and more like private correspondence. Only Chris and I watched it, which changed the entire logic of response. Tarkovsky’s slowness can feel like a dare, but it can also feel like a doorway into a different kind of attention, the kind that requires you to stop demanding payoff. That night, the quiet wasn’t awkward. It was shared. It felt like two people admitting they’d been somewhere they couldn’t quite map.

I think about those afterimages as we approach Contempt, because they describe a pattern: every film doesn’t just give us a story. It tests a different expectation we bring into the act of watching.

We rarely say it this way, but every movie comes with a contract. Not a legal one. A psychological one. We expect continuity: of tone, of sound, of emotional pacing. We expect efficiency: that scenes will move, that attention will be rewarded, that meaning will arrive without too much delay. And we expect dignity: that the film will not make us feel foolish for wanting what we want, especially not in front of other people.

Different films break different parts of that contract.

Fassbinder breaks comfort by showing contempt as an everyday social reflex. Hitchcock breaks dignity by showing you the shape of your own appetite for looking. Campion breaks continuity by making tenderness and violation share the same air. Burnett breaks efficiency by refusing to turn ordinary life into a machine for plot.

Godard breaks all three at once, and he does it with a kind of deliberate insolence.

Contempt is not only about a marriage. It is also about cinema itself refusing to pretend it is whole. It is a film about translation, distortion, and humiliation, about the way meaning changes hands and loses fidelity. It is also, quite plainly, a film about money. About what happens when art is asked to become a product, and when people begin to treat each other as instruments in that transaction.

The story, in outline, is simple, but the pressure inside it is not. A writer is hired to rewrite a film adaptation of The Odyssey, oddly topical. He stands between an American producer’s money and an old master’s seriousness. The producer treats art like something he has purchased. The director, Fritz Lang, plays himself with the calm authority of someone who believes cinema is still capable of grandeur. The writer’s wife watches the compromises gather, watches her husband adjust his posture around power, and something in her begins to harden. The film becomes the slow anatomy of that hardening, the way disappointment turns into contempt.

Even the film’s language feels like betrayal. Sentences pass through intermediaries. Meaning arrives slightly altered, slightly delayed, as if the film is showing us that contempt is not only what we feel. It is what happens when the human signal loses fidelity.

The first time Delerue’s music is cut off mid-bar, you feel it in your body before you interpret it. Annoyance arrives first. Distrust. The faint sense that the film has broken a promise. A good score is supposed to behave like a guide. It is supposed to carry you across emotional terrain you might not cross alone. Godard lets it carry you for a moment, then drops you.

It’s hard not to take that personally.

There is a certain kind of irritation that feels uniquely modern. It’s not outrage. It’s not even anger. It’s the feeling you get when a service stops working the way you assumed it would. The interface stutters. The spell breaks. Something you were consuming demands that you participate.

A few years ago, if a piece of media glitched, you might have blamed the disc, the cable, the player. Now we tend to blame the world. We have been trained, culturally and technologically, to expect smooth delivery. Autoplay takes away the moment where you might decide to stop. Algorithms smooth the edges of choice. Streaming interfaces teach us to expect immediate legibility and clean delivery. When something stutters, when something drops out, we don’t interpret it as meaning. We troubleshoot. We assume it’s a bug.

Godard treats the bug as the point.

He cuts the music to remind you that music is a tool. He interrupts the mood to remind you that mood can be manufactured. He refuses continuity to keep you from sinking into the kind of passive absorption that makes everything feel “natural” even when it isn’t. He wants you to hear the score as an object, not just feel it as a wave. He wants you to notice the machinery.

This is where I need to admit something about myself, quickly, before I become the very figure I’m trying not to become. The moment someone asks why Godard does this, a reflex wakes up in me. I feel my throat clear. I can hear the mansplaining cadence warming up, ready to begin the kind of sentence that starts with “What Godard is doing here is…”

Part of that reflex is genuine enthusiasm. Part of it is the desire to be helpful. Part of it is anxiety about being a good host. And part of it is the cultural inheritance of being a white, middle-aged, educated man who has been rewarded for having interpretations and delivering them confidently. I know how easily that posture disguises itself as generosity.

I think about Forrest here, not because he was above interpretation, but because he approached it differently. When something baffled him, he didn’t rush to master it. He would look for the human hand first: the set, the color, the craft, the historical texture. He had a way of staying with what was in front of him without turning it into a contest. That steadiness is a standard I do not always meet.

I’m trying to notice my reflex as it rises, and to practice a different kind of hosting. Less explanation as control. More curiosity as structure.

So before we meet, I want to offer something simple. You do not need to like this film. You do not need to admire it. You do not need to respect it. You are allowed to find it tedious, pretentious, cold, irritating, even ridiculous. Those reactions are not a failure of seriousness. They are part of what the film produces. They are information. They are proof that the film reached you, even if it reached you like a provocation.

What matters is not whether you approved of it. What matters is whether you noticed what it did to your expectations.

There’s an distinction in Kant that helps name what’s happening here. The agreeable is the kind of pleasure that satisfies appetite. It’s the pleasure of being carried, of having the film do the work for you. The beautiful is a different kind of pleasure, one that asks for attention rather than consumption. Not because it is more virtuous, but because it is less automatic. It makes you awake.

This distinction can turn smug if you wield it like a verdict. That isn’t what I want. I’m not interested in shaming anyone’s taste, including my own. Some of the most meaningful experiences in my life have come from films that guide you firmly, that cue your feelings with confidence, that manipulate you with such skill you’re grateful for it. The point is not to reject that. The point is to remember that it is not the only contract cinema can offer.

Godard refuses to be that kind of guide. Or maybe he offers a different kind of guidance, one that doesn’t feel like comfort. He doesn’t want to carry you. He wants you to walk.

My mind always tries to translate this into another language I know too well, the language of high-fidelity audio.

In audio, people argue about “musical” systems and “analytical” systems. A musical system flatters what you play through it. It adds warmth. It rounds off harsh edges. It makes listening hospitable. It’s what people love about vinyl. An analytical system is more ruthless. It reveals the seams of a recording: microphone placement, hiss, compression, the thinness of certain mixes. It offers detail and separation and clarity.

Both can be a form of hiding. You can hide in warmth. You can hide in detail. You can turn listening into comfort or into critique or into status, depending on what you need.

Godard, in this analogy, behaves like an analytical system. He exposes the noise floor of cinema. He refuses the flattering mix. He makes the seams audible. He does not want you to confuse cinema’s beautiful machinery for life itself.

That is why the music cuts matter. They are Godard refusing to let sound do the work for you.

The same refusal shows up, more quietly but more relentlessly, in the film’s long apartment argument between Paul and Camille. The scene unfolds with stubborn patience. The camera tracks them through a sleek modernist space. They drift apart and circle back. They speak in half-accusations and half-confessions. The scene refuses narrative compression. It refuses to summarize their breakdown into efficient plot.

If you come to cinema expecting efficiency, this can feel like dead time. Your mind begins to ask why the film is not hurrying toward a point.

But if you stay with it, the scene changes shape. The CinemaScope frame becomes a diagram. The couple ends up separated by furniture, by doorframes, by lamps that act like barriers. Even when they share a room, the composition keeps them at a distance. The apartment stops being a setting and becomes a collaborator. The scene says what the dialogue cannot: contempt is not only an emotion. It is a spatial fact. It is what happens when the gap between two people becomes the primary reality.

This week, with Forrest’s birthday fresh in my mind, I find myself less interested in winning an interpretation and more interested in the quieter discipline underneath interpretation. The willingness to stay with what does not immediately reward you. The willingness to let a film be difficult without treating difficulty as a personal slight. The willingness to listen to someone else describe their experience without rushing to correct it.

None of this guarantees pleasure. It does not guarantee you will like the film. It does not guarantee that the meeting will be easy.

In fact, the easiest failure mode of a canon like Sight and Sound is not difficulty. It’s dishonesty. It teaches us to nod when we want to wince. It teaches us to translate discomfort into polite admiration. It teaches us to treat boredom as a moral problem rather than as an aesthetic event worth examining.

I do not want us to do that.

So here is what I’m hoping for on our call, and I’m going to keep it brief because I don’t want hope to become instruction. I’m hoping we can name our real reactions without apology, whether they’re boredom or fascination, irritation or admiration. And I’m hoping we can treat those reactions as openings rather than endpoints.

If someone says, “The music cuts drove me crazy,” we don’t need to correct them. We can ask what contract the film broke. Continuity? Dignity? Trust? If someone says, “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” we can ask what held them there, and what it cost.

And if the room goes quiet, as I suspect it will, I will try to let it be quiet a beat longer than is comfortable. I will try not to fill it with my own reassurance. I will try to resist translating everyone’s experience into my framework, which is another way of saying I will try not to confuse my voice with the room’s intelligence.

Because the truth is that the club is not a classroom. It is not a podcast. It is a group of people taking the risk of bringing private experience into public speech. That risk deserves more than my cleverness. It deserves patience.

On Sunday night, our microphones will stay open. We’ll hear the ordinary life around each of us, the small domestic noises that remind us this is not a theater, it is a gathering. There will be a delay before laughter lands, if it lands. There will be moments when someone begins a sentence and then stops, as if deciding whether it is safe to be honest.

If we are lucky, the quiet will shift. It will stop being a void and become the pause where sensation catches up to language, where honesty becomes possible, where someone risks a sentence that might not sound smart but might be true.

Forrest had a way of treating attention as something you practice, not something you possess. I miss him. And this week, I keep thinking that the best thing I can do with that absence is to take the practice seriously.

In a world designed to keep our attention moving, attention is its own kind of courage.

COMING SOON

In Memoriam: Forrest

The Quality of Attention

You develop a rhythm on a long walk, a cadence of breath and footfall that becomes its own sort of conversation. After Forrest and Polly moved to Woodstock in 2022, the riverbank path became the regular venue for my friendship with him. It was a steady, perambulatory exchange set against the murmur of the river and the dappled morning light filtering through the oaks and kudzu. Our closeness was already a given, a sturdy structure built over years of annual family vacations and the shared sweat of remodeling my first home with his patient guidance. But the consistency of these walks strengthened that bond, giving it a private, dedicated space to breathe. On a certain balmy morning last summer, however, that familiar rhythm broke. I could feel it in his silence, in the slight hesitation before he crested a small rise in the path. There was something he was carrying, and when we stopped for a moment where the trail opened to the water, he finally unburdened himself. He looked not at me, but at the current, as if the question were an object he needed to carefully place between us. “You wouldn’t be offended,” he began, the words coming out in a tentative rush, “if I wanted to join your movie club, would you? Would that be alright?” In the grand scheme of a life, it was a small inquiry, but it landed with the quiet weight of a confirmation. It was another step on a path he had been walking his entire life, a request that was, I see now, the most natural expression of the man he had always worked to become.

To know Forrest was to understand that he saw his own character as a kind of garden, a plot of land inherited from his past that required constant, gentle tending. He was one of the kindest and most patient men I have ever known, but he never saw these qualities as his birthright. They were, to him, a conscious and daily practice, a careful cultivation of the man he hoped to be. This project was rooted in a childhood that he would recount on our walks in quiet, unpittied fragments. He spoke of his mother, a woman locked in a cage of her own perfectionism, for whom no task was ever done well enough. Complications at his birth had been the end of her childbearing, a fact she would deploy with surgical precision as a constant reminder of the daughter she never had. To be raised in the shadow of a ghost is to learn to doubt your own substance. From this, Forrest made a lifelong choice for empathy. His father’s career in the Air Force had made their life a study in transience, a series of new schools and fleeting friendships that taught him a universal friendliness but left him, he admitted, with a lingering difficulty in forging deep emotional bonds. His life, then, was a quiet, determined rebellion against this inheritance: a commitment to patience, to unconditional love, and to the hard work of true connection.

His presence in my neighborhood was the result of a much more sudden and brutal rebellion waged by his own body. Until 2021, he and Polly were living out the life they had built on an old family homestead in rural Jackson, its ancient pecan trees and weathered outbuildings promising a retirement filled with the satisfying labor of his hands. Theirs was a love story of profound and sentimental devotion. Polly, paralyzed by polio as an infant, possessed a joy so radiant it seemed to generate its own light, and Forrest spent his life orbiting her, a quiet custodian of her happiness. He was the one who spoiled her, who arranged each detail of their home to delight her, who made the world accessible. Their plan was simple and understood: he would care for her, always. The sudden diagnosis of Stage IV prostate cancer was not merely a medical crisis; it was a cosmological one. They sold the farm and, in a surprising turn, found a perfect final refuge just minutes from us. It was a beautiful dollhouse of a home, full of fancy finishes, warm wood countertops, and rounded, Hobbit-like doors. It was a house that seemed to know them, a cozy sanctuary that perfectly matched Forrest’s own Hobbit nature of prizing family, food, and a well-tended garden above all else. In this new, circumscribed world, he began his final project: he would learn to be a patient. He would do it for Polly, with all the methodical tenderness he had once reserved for her.

It was in this new context that our walks began, a prescription for exercise that quickly metastasized into a kind of secular confessional. The ritual provided a steady container for the deep friendship we already shared, a private space where the barrier to closeness he’d carried from childhood had long since been dismantled by years of shared work and life. He told me about his middle school years in Japan, and how, at eleven years old, he had mistakenly boarded an express train that rocketed him through an unfamiliar countryside. Alone, terrified, and unable to speak a word of Japanese, he found the train attendant. He recounted the scene with a quiet wonder: the man’s calm demeanor, the series of gestures and patient smiles, the silent, human agreement that saw a lost American boy safely onto the right train home. He never told his parents. The story felt like a parable for his life: a quiet, resourceful courage when faced with the unknown, a trust in the kindness of strangers.

His decision to enter the movie club, then, was an act of profound trust. Our club was a biweekly affair; we would watch the films on our own time and gather online for a discussion. Knowing his history with abstract analysis, I watched with a quiet interest to see how he would navigate this new territory. He would tackle our often-baffling selections with the earnest focus that defined him, and then bring his thoughts to our video calls. During our annual Halloween marathon, he dutifully watched the lurid, hyper-stylized psychedelia of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. He admitted in our discussion that the story was silly, but he’d found his vantage. “The way they built those sets,” he offered, “all the strange angles and that incredible color… it was something to see.” He was searching for the craft, for the human hand in the hallucinatory chaos. He was even more direct after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. He sat through its cold, cosmic silence on a giant screen in my basement, and in our next meeting, with a gentle, humorous finality, he said, “I watched that out of deep respect for Blake. And that will be the last time I watch it.”

He found his firmest footing, unexpectedly, in the bleak, medieval landscape of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. While I attempted to espouse its opaque spiritual allegories, Forrest, the reader of history, saw something else. He was struck by the brutal realism of the Tatar raids. He bypassed the film’s metaphysics and instead began to speak of the violent introduction of Christianity into the pagan cultures of early Europe, connecting the film's narrative to a broader, human story of conquest and forced conversion. He had done what he always did: he had found the history, the recognizable humanity, beneath the abstraction. He was not just watching our films; he was translating them into his own language.

The walks were the first thing the cancer took from us, and the loss was palpable. I noticed it before he would admit it, a new labor in his breathing on the hills, a recovery that began to stretch from seconds into minutes. His frustration was not with his fate, but with his body’s betrayal, as if it were a student that refused to learn. We switched to flatter terrain, but the decline was a relentless, gravitational pull. Yet, he clung to the movie club. It became a last tether to a world of ideas, a biweekly appointment with curiosity even as his physical world shrank to the confines of his Hobbit-door home. The diagnosis finally came that the cancer had invaded his bone marrow. The transfusions were a fleeting miracle, a brief, blush-colored return to the world of the living that would fade within days. Our conversations, once expansive, now turned inward, toward the terrifying logistics of dying.

When he transitioned to hospice, I suggested we resume our walks, this time with the quiet hum of his wheelchair bearings as our new rhythm. He was tired, but his eyes still took in the world. “I’m in uncharted territory,” he’d say, his voice thin. “I just don’t know what to expect.” I would tell him what little I understood, that it would probably be like falling into a deeper and deeper sleep. Soon, he was too weak to leave the house, and I would just sit with him, the silence now as companionable as our conversations had once been.

His final week was a blur of medicalized ritual and profound tenderness. Polly was magnificent, a fierce and gentle guardian of his comfort, her voice a constant murmur of reassurance. I took care of the house, a silent stage manager for the final act. Forrest slept, mostly, but would rouse for visitors, summoning a startling lucidity as a final gift of his presence. His last night was a brutal vigil against the body’s stubborn refusal to let go. In the morning, after the nurses came and the morphine was increased, a calm finally descended. We convinced Polly to take a bath, a moment of respite from her long watch. I sat with him in the quiet room, the only sound the rhythmic churning of the oxygen machine. When his son, Dulane, came in, I saw on his face that the atmosphere had changed. We stood by Forrest’s side. The faint, thrumming pulse in his neck grew fainter, and then was gone. From the bathroom, I heard Polly’s voice, impossibly calm. “He’s gone, isn’t he? I knew he was going to go while I took a bath. He would have wanted me to be relaxed.”

A few days earlier, searching for a key, I had looked through his oak roll-top desk, a piece he had built with his own hands. It was a landscape of his life: knick-knacks, photographs, and handwritten notes. In one drawer, I found a stack of papers. It was every email I had ever sent out for movie club. He had printed each one. In his careful, steady hand, in the margins and between the lines, he had taken meticulous notes. They were the quiet ledger of his curiosity. But looking at them, I saw they were something more. This was the same patient attention he had given to sanding a piece of wood for his daughter’s bed, the same methodical care he gave to his garden, the same gentle diligence with which he tended to his own character. His notes weren’t a grand, final gesture. They were a quiet continuation of a life spent paying attention. He left behind a simple, final lesson, written in the margins of art he was just learning to understand: that the greatest measure of a life is the quality of its attention, and that the work of becoming yourself is never truly finished.