By Steve Erickson

Hard to Watch lays out a pragmatic path — directions for how to preserve your time and attention —  that will help just about anybody engage with any kind of art thoughtfully and purposefully.

Hard to Watch by Matthew Strohl. Applause Theater & Cinema Books, 207 pages, $19.95.

At heart, Hard to Watch, Matthew Strohl’s second volume about film. is a self-help book. To be even more specific, it is a University of Montana philosophy professor’s guide to how movie lovers can get the most out of cinephilia. His focus alternates between close readings of individual movies (Alain Resnais’ Muriel, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Julia Ducournau’s Titane, Kazuo Hara’s Goodbye CP) and anecdotes from Strohl’s life. Its most surprising attribute is the amount of practical advice this love letter to film contains. In Strohl’s view, cinephilia isn’t a nerdy compulsion, but a way of engaging with art more deeply. He even describes himself as being a kind of evangelist for cinephilia.

Strohl’s first chapter lays out what can get in the way of maximum engagement: “weakness of will.” He describes a period in his life when he lost interest in cinema, spending his spare time watching trashy TV, often because he was physically exhausted. He eventually realized that he was wasting his time, but it took David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, a TV series, to snap him out of it. The program fit into America’s experimental film tradition, and that led him to realize what he had been missing. He turned from Lynch to the French New Wave director Jacques Rivette. After that he began going through the filmmakers Rivette, who had been a critic for Cahiers du Cinema, valued. Strohl creates a new term, “stickiness,” to describe the empty but alluring seductions of Netflix fare (or, speaking for himself, the fantasy novels he consumes to relax), cliffhangers that lead to further cliffhangers without any thematic purpose other than keeping the viewer hooked.

Film is usually seen as a disposable form of entertainment in America, so philistine responses to challenging movies, particularly scoffing at those who posit the value of criticism, are ubiquitous. We respect literature enough to know that a person who’s read nothing but Harlan Coben and James Patterson thrillers would be unlikely to get much of any substance out of reading Proust or Joyce — at least without guidance and context. That ‘respect for the expert’ attitude has never been accepted with cinema, even though there’s an assumption that it is an art form with multiple levels of accessibility. For example, when Jeanne Dielman topped Sight and Sound magazine’s 2022 critics’ poll of the best films ever made, social media and op-eds filled up with accusations that it’s a boring slog or, on a more complicated level, that it’s deliberately dull in order to demonstrate the oppressiveness of sex work and women’s household chores. Strohl explores how carefully the film is set up: there’s a day of dutiful work followed by a second one where Dielman’s ability to control her work begins to fall apart. Beyond going into his own interpretation, Strohl suggests the film’s other resonances: its references to the Jewish diaspora, economics and labor, psychoanalytic motifs.

Hard to Watch serves as a useful counterpart to Strohl’s Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies. The challenges to appreciating Jeanne Dielman and the Twilight series (which he championed in the earlier book) are quite different. The prof criticizes the “it’s so bad it’s good, let’s laugh at this” sensibility, but let’s face it — poptimists don’t need any help understanding the appeal of The Room or Nicolas Cage action movies. Hard to Watch advocates for the work it takes to fully appreciate a film whose riches are barely  (or rarely) visible during a first viewing. His initial chapter defends the recent films of Terrence Malick against their detractors. He demonstrates their philosophical and literary underpinning, referring to references he discovered after 10 viewings. The question is: who has the time to consistently engage with films that did nothing for them at first? Strohl’s readings extol the merit of withholding judgment, insisting that patience and careful scrutiny have enormous rewards. Although Strohl doesn’t engage   with these conditions in a broader context, the anxiety, overwork, and exhaustion that dominate contemporary American life render it impossible to give art the attention it deserves. That’s a larger issue that goes well beyond appreciating aesthetics — but it affects our powers of reception.

He admits the obstacles, but Strohl can be overly optimistic about our ability to connect with challenging films and TV shows. His final chapter takes on what it will take, practically, to enhance an appreciation of film. For one, Strohl recommends watching a director’s entire body of work. He recalls applying that to the films of French director Claude Chabrol; he viewed all 70 of his films – in chronological order, no less – in 2022. Strohl also lays out the merits of watching minor work by a major artist: “Watching a few Errol Flynn programmers that don’t have a lot of appeal aside from his presence isn’t wasted time in the context of the project of exploring his career, because they help you understand who he was as an actor and what his screen persona was like.” He suggests consciously filling up moments of dead time by choosing a demanding project instead of settling for algorithmic junk. Granted, some of his ideas may be tied to his own personality. For me, watching a filmmaker’s entire oeuvre in order sounds too much like a rote school assignment to have much appeal. Eventually, this chapter goes beyond cinephilia, offering suggestions for how to develop a healthy relationship with social media: find voices you trust; don’t bother trying to find followers or gamify your presence; don’t establish a presence by trying to anger people with whom you disagree; be wary of groupthink. Hard to Watch lays out a pragmatic path — directions for how to preserve your time and attention — that will help just about anybody engage with any kind of art thoughtfully and purposefully.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here.