What is a masterpiece?
I remember the first time I heard that someone was converted to believe in Christ just by just looking at La Pieta by Michelangelo…and I wondered, is that really possible?
But today I am convinced that is is, because journeys toward God are many, and they are strange, and each is strange in a unique way. They may all end up in the same place, but they all come from different roads, like all pilgrimages. So the idea that a work of art caused someone to be overcome with humility, faith, hope, and charity, is no more surprising than hearing that someone came to faith through an addiction or cataclysm, because a masterpiece of art can produce the same jarring event that unmoors us from all that we thought was solid and steady.
A masterpiece does something to us. It makes us want to share it and even try to grasp it, while the fullness of it must remain ungraspable. When we discover a masterpiece, we must keep looking at, talking about it, and we are drawn to it like the sea and the sunset. Beauty and truth overlap when a masterpiece is seen, and it is exactly this merger that makes it a source of wonder and awe, and even confusion. For cinema, a confluence of art, music, and literature must happen in order to earn the label of masterpiece. For paintings or sculpture, it just happens. We are “knocked sideways.”
John Keats explains the connection between truth and beauty in the end of his poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, and while it can be dangerous to equate truth with beauty, when both are there, it’s an accurate statement. We are drawn to both truth and beauty like moths, especially beauty. What is seductive can make us forget all other arguments, the inductive or deductive, yet a masterpiece must fulfill all three of these. True beauty will lead to truth, and truth must lead to beauty, otherwise it cannot be true.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Thus, a masterpiece is a work that brings the full eclipse, the overlap of truth and beauty, into a satisfying unity, even a feeling of peace from its wholeness and timelessness. A work of art, whether in cinema or Greek pottery, locks an image into time and space, freezing it. What Keats is describing in his poem is a timeless work of art that reaches across the ages. The urn he speaks of cannot be re-thrown and painted again in the same way. It is one of a kind, true and beautiful. Similarly, La Pieta by Michelangelo as a work of art cannot be remade any more than Macbeth could be re-written by Shakespeare. In a completed act of creation, the creator sits outside of the time and space of the artwork itself, yet somehow the artist speaks to us through the work, such that even if the artist’s name is lost, the wholeness of time and space connects the creator, the work, and the viewer across multiple dimensions. A masterpiece stretches its hand across time to tap us on the shoulder. For this reason, the artist matters as much as the work and as much as the viewer, as not only does the work bring a sense of wholeness in the present consumption of it, but also bridges the whole of human experience all the way back to the artist and the influences that prompted its creation.
The greater the work speaks to our human lives, the longer we must discuss and observe the work. The closer to the mark of perfection, the more it draws us. This ability to draw us toward an uncontained height, toward the ungraspable, seems to be a distinct feature of a masterpiece. In Keats’ urn, the man will never “catch” the woman he is chasing. Likewise in a film like Casablanca, Rick can never reunite with Ilsa, no matter how much we may wish it. When Keats’ writes, “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?” about the man and woman on the urn, he is commenting on the reasons he cannot stop looking at it. Similarly, Rick Blaine will forever be in his struggle in the film Casablanca, just like the characters on the urn.
In film, the image can do more than an urn because it is a moving picture. Thus, we can become far more verbose in reviewing, criticizing, breaking apart, mapping flaws, tracking plot points, and so on, because unlike an urn, a film passes thousands of images in front of our eyes. An art history class reviewing an urn or a Caravaggio painting observes the work of art similar to how Eastern Orthodox believers look at Icons; they venerate icons out of reverence for what the icon depicts. To gaze at a national flag with reverence, or to pray over the Pantocrator icon, or to be “knocked sideways” by a Grecian urn, or to stop in your tracks upon sight of a Caravaggio painting, is to revere these works for what they represent, what they have captured. But far more so, we do this gaze because of what the work does to us.
The work impacts us in a strange way. These images reach into the depth of our souls, as what we image in the eye becomes part of us, and we even become a part of the image. The image does not change, but we may very well feel modified and rearranged. Films like Casablanca or Vertigo obviously have this effect on viewers, because people continue to watch them and talk about them long after they have been created and stamped into eternity as a work of art. But while the critics declare these as masterpieces, enough time has not passed yet to prove it, whereas the book of Genesis and Gospel of Matthew are discussed daily, by millions, because they are undeniable masterpieces. These masterpieces are alive in people’s daily lives. Time does not diminish them. Interpretation of them never ceases. I would suggest that Casablanca has far too much propaganda in it to last another century, but it could very well hang on for a while, yet never become essential to life like the Gospel of Matthew or the book of Genesis. Film is still a young art form. Another five centuries will be the true test for Casablanca and every other film. But works like Genesis and Matthew have been tested through the ages, as the empires come and go.
This effect cannot be forced either, and any argument from popularity like “Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” will prove itself true or false within a few generations. All works of art are timeless in the sense of being frozen in time and space, but only some pass the test of time in terms of who is still imaging it, who is still looking at it, and the question then becomes: why are they doing so? For a work that is called a masterpiece for a time but later loses the label, a zeitgeist was likely present, applying the label that favored a popular contemporary ideology. Fittingly, zeitgeist means “time-ghost” or “spirit of the age,” so any true masterpiece cannot be such if future reigning ideologies reject it – but this requires passing through many different eras to prove the value, as time will burn away the dross from that which is truly silver. In other words, a masterpiece must transcend earthly power.
A work of art, if it is a masterpiece, is always new. It is new to every generation, so that from age to age the truth and beauty of the work shines through whatever power structure, zeitgeist, or ideology is presiding. The Iliad, the book of Genesis, and the Gospel of Matthew are constantly rediscovered, in every generation. A masterpiece rises like a warm air mass, slipping away from any human attempts to suppress it. While being frozen in time and space, a masterpiece lives and speaks to all times and spaces. Perhaps there is no better example of this than La Pieta by Michelangelo, as the woman holding her dead son, in such fine detail and emotion, can knock sideways a Christian or an unbeliever who has never heard of Jesus of Nazareth. Everything that needs to be known about the work is there. The completeness of the work is obvious. Like the sunset, it doesn’t even need a description, or a name, or words.
A sunset is a perfect example of what I’m trying to get at. On a clear evening on Clearwater beach in Florida, the sun drops into the sea, passing through a series of glorious oranges and yellows, as the pelicans fly over the water. Were someone to observe this and then declare, “It’s not beautiful,” this person would either be a contrarian trying to stoke a reaction, or the person would not understand beauty. The third option is that the person is blind, which is a separate issue altogether. But for anyone with functioning rods and cones in their eyes, who is a human (and not something like a bat whose experience would be different), to deny the beauty of a sunset over the Gulf is to reject beauty and therefore reject a truth. We can make a universal judgment in that “a sunset is beautiful” – not all sunsets are as beautiful as others, but without question, many are stunning and produce a transcendental effect in us.
This is what a masterpiece does to us. And the greatest masterpiece, from which all art must fall underneath, is Creation itself. What we try to capture on canvas, film, or in sound can never come close to the fullness of nature, so clearly designed to show beauty, by an inexplicably powerful Being. This is why a sunset on a beach or a baby in a room full of adults causes all heads to turn and suddenly have focus; because they are beautiful, true, and good things.
For timeless works made by humans, a recipe can be followed, but may not produce the desired result. The tale that is told, the human characters, and the work of the artist all matter immensely in drawing endless imagers toward it. The story must cut deep into the human experience, plumbs the depth of the soul, carry a person through the universal journey of spiritual physics.
What is that journey that cuts so deep? It is this: that you must go down in order to go up, that you must die to be reborn. Without suffering, there is no glory. And joy is not guaranteed, but the struggle is a must. The main story must walk the path of Christ. Even Hamlet must face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and through the test of fire find redemption in the suffering. The alternative is to roll over and die. And that is no story, that is a suicide - which is why we don’t talk about Cato falling on his sword any longer.
Truly, without the struggle, we are flatlined – dead – and this world has no story to tell. Without redemptive suffering, without ups and downs, meaning disappears. We do not desire that kind of world in our hearts, because our hearts are alive. We cannot have the wild joy of a Hail Mary touchdown pass without the losing team crumpling on the grass in tears. The caterpillar can never become a butterfly without a massive, painful transfiguration of itself. Suffering and redemption must be present in any masterpiece because that is what life looks like with its beginnings and end, its highs and lows, its births, marriages, and deaths. Coincidentally, this up and down pattern matches the shape of a heartbeat measured on an EKG machine, as when life is happening there is motion, and when the line goes flat there is none. In many “masterpiece” films, this trajectory into the valley of death must come before ascending into the mountain.
Film can do what pottery and literature cannot, and that is involve multiple senses and multiple images. On Keats’ Grecian urn, the man and woman are caught in a snapshot of anticipation, of wonder, but we cannot see the fullness of the tale. In film, we can see and hear the artwork simultaneously, which neither painting nor book can do. Film captures us on both entry points of the soul at once.
The visual and audio effects of a film may be what draws us, but there must be more meat to bite down on, more nourishment, otherwise a laser light show would be enough. But we are not moths who just need light. A setting is needed, a place – a structure, preferably something exotic to entice us into adventure. Then that space must be filled. First, we need characters to give life within the walls and worldviews of binary opinions for the characters to collide into and create natural conflict. We need a story that must arch over the visual, while the visual must support the story. The camera must do more than just catch light, but act like the bass guitar in a rock band to subtly move the song along without being too noticeable.
Consider the boring shots of a TV soap opera, where characters are always passing through a downward and upward story path, yet it is hard to care about the characters because the camera work is not beautiful. A contrived story and uninspired camera work cannot stir our hearts for long. Beauty alone does not keep our attention. Truth alone cannot either. Even when both are present something else can still be missing. No one gazes longingly at Caravaggio’s paintings of fruit, which have both beauty and truth, but they do stare long at “The Calling of St. Matthew.” There is an entire recipe that must converge, from the story, to the lighting, to the characters, to the point of view, to the setting.
But there is mystery in why one painting, book, or film strikes us so hard. No one is discussing the other movies nominated alongside Casablanca for awards from 1942, because they have become like so many painted bowls of fruit – lovely in their own way perhaps, interesting to consider, but not striking enough to dust off and spend a few hours pondering Rick and Ilsa’s dilemma in North Africa during a time of global war. Somehow in Casablanca there is the setting, characters, story, lighting, music, and mix required to woo us as a whole. With the right leitmotif, the perfect song, the film becomes a flowing river, and when endearing side characters are added like a bow on top of a gift, we are invited deeper into the story. A masterpiece becomes like a fairy tale, easy to remember and re-tell, to be used even as a reference point outside of art. The very idea of Sam and the sound of his piano playing “As Time Goes By” can call us out of our world right back into Rick’s American Café just as the simple mention of Little Red Riding Hood or Cinderella can present a whole world and story in an instant. La Pieta shows Mary holding Jesus’ in her arms, and in a single statue tells the whole story of birth, life, motherhood, death, God, father, son, pain, love, loss, suffering, hopelessness, hopefulness, and the promise of redemption.
But there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of movies about suffering, love and redemption, so why do certain ones last and others do not? The same question could be asked of why doesn’t the Aeneid get as much veneration as the Iliad, or why doesn’t an athlete like Lebron James get as much respect and adoration as Michael Jordan? Is it bias? Unfairness? Is it just being first, the one that breaks the mold? It may be all of these, but at the root of it, inspired beauty is a gift that cannot be replicated. Lebron James may do things physically that Michael Jordan could never have done, but Jordan is the Michelangelo of basketball, and Lebron is not. Even Dr. J, Julius Erving, fell in stature with the coming of Jordan. The Aeneid is like a spinoff of an earlier drama, and it’s not Virgil’s fault. It’s surely not any technical failure on his part as a poet, but in being commissioned by the Roman state to write a Roman epic, it lacked the inspiration of the Iliad.
This happens repeatedly, even in sitcoms. Happy Days is no masterpiece, but it was at least original and inspired, while every profit-driven spinoff was not. Candlebox could never be Nirvana in the grunge world of 1990s music. The original matters, and the genesis of the original is strange or even mystical. In film, the masterpiece seems blessed in a way. There are probably films more sophisticated and technically crisp than Casablanca and Vertigo, but they are not discussed because something is missing, something subtle, something inspired that cannot be added or forced into a work of art. For whatever reason, we will choose one offering over the other, for reasons unknown, like Abel’s offering being selected by God over Cain’s offering – and we never get the answer as to why. It exceeds understanding. Whether it is timing, providence, genius, or some combination of these, we know when we see a masterpiece, yet still cannot know the complete reason.
To define what makes a masterpiece, particularly in film or literature, seems to rely on several elements. The story must cover the heavy ideas that contemplate the fullness of life, and must take a character from incompleteness to wholeness, or if not wholeness, then a reason why they are still not whole. Love and death must be central elements, even if abstract. But more than this, there must be a vagueness to what is missing, an element of mystery as to why this character cannot be content or at rest. An object of desire must be central to the conflict, even if what is desired is the wrong thing. A ring of power at the middle of the story is needed. The main character needs to have something just out of reach, out of grasp, that drives the behavior, a kind of yearning for a desire that can only be fulfilled in one way. The character must have blinders on, a rage to master the desire, and in the search for fulfillment, the character needs to come to face the weakness within, the great weakness, that cross that must be carried. A personal dragon must be slain, or it must slay the character. The character will either come to kneel in humility in surrendering to the weakness, or he will be kneeled in humiliation by resisting acceptance of the weakness. Through this path of suffering or way of sorrows, the character must come to see the yearning or suffering as redemptive. A journey of sorrow should level-up the character to a higher place (or lower, if the ending takes the route of a fall like Vertigo). Only through this downward and rising action can the rebirth of the new person come. This model requires a kind of play between despair and presumption, failure and success, until the dragon within the human heart can be exposed, faced, and slain. Obsession over the desire, to either escape or control it, it essential to driving the story into the dark, down into the pit, where the weakness has no place to escape. The weakness must paint the character into a corner where running is not possible without an outcome, good or bad.
For film, setting matters greatly due to the visual aspect. The settings of the classics can tell a story within the story. Vienna in The Third Man, San Francisco in Vertigo, or Rick’s Café American in Casablanca all have elements that enrich the story. Furthermore, a sense of the “exotic” makes a great assist, like Middle Earth or the Inferno. Cinema can add so much that something like sculpture cannot, and the setting can do much to enhance the subject. For La Pieta there is no apparent setting, just two bodies in space. But for film, setting enriches the whole. In Vertigo, the city of San Francisco is featured in every shot as a beautiful place. For moviegoers and readers, art is an escape, and to be taken from ordinary life to a seemingly exotic place draws the viewer into that new world. The plain of Troy, Jerusalem, Middle Earth, Rome, San Francisco, a Scottish battlefield, Normandy, North Africa – cinema can transport us out of ordinary life into a kind of temporary fantasy, an escape as if we had traveled to a new place without leaving the theater or living room. While the story must tell of a character’s yearning to find the missing piece of their own puzzle, so can the setting suggest a yearning to the observer.
Music and lighting must enhance the recipe for the masterpiece to deliver. While Michelangelo could work on a sculpture alone, in film this is not possible, as many artists are needed. The collection of art in one place makes the artist not only subject to his or her own ability, but to that of various others as well. In this sense, the achievement of “masterpiece” must come somewhat from skill and somewhat from chance, as the right blend of talent must merge into harmony. The Third Man artists clearly made choices in light and music that worked well together, swirling dark humor, shadows and upbeat zither music with dour themes. Casablanca finds the right shadows to go with the tune “As Time Goes By.” Moreover, the music can beg the dialogue to come forth or hold back, like Sam at the piano who protests playing that song, making us want to hear it all the more. He even appears pained to play the song, and so we all want to hear the song, the one that defines the movie. Sam fights it – anything but that song! Then we hear the song, and we hear it again, and again, and eventually we hear it while mowing the lawn or making breakfast. That song must go with that movie, or we don’t want the movie. The song, like the character Sam, is part of the work of art, integral, central. The song can no longer be separated from the artwork, no more than dye in paint can be un-spun back to the base white. This goes for lighting as well, as we cannot imagine Ilsa without the closeups, without the camera seeming to love her face.
Finally, the film must be onion-like, as any masterpiece of literature is, in that the themes must speak out but be not entirely apparent on the initial viewing. In this way, the great books never stop speaking, and as empires come and go over the centuries, like fads, the work of art remains. Such is the depth of a work that can be read across centuries and meaning be found for each generation. While the technology and ideology changes, human nature does not, and the themes must draw from a long list, of crossing patterns and ageless problems. Many of the masterpiece films tackle multiple themes, which makes the art more nourishing food than the candy of Westerns or Marvel movies. The films that last must give cause for chatter and thought. On the surface it must be a timeless plot, but when inspected deeper a new layer must open, and after that another layer. The fact that Hamlet still has critics arguing over its themes and meaning shows that it cannot be just a simple story about a boy avenging his father’s death, and yet that is the story – at least on the top layer.
In the postmodern films, the attempt to refute expectations and tell disordered or surreal stories hamstrings the lasting power, because the abstract lacks cohesion and unity. The vague goal of what a character is grasping for is best delivered in a coherent, seamless plot, otherwise the art becomes esoteric, which is why I think a declared masterpiece like Fellini’s film 8 ½ will not be called masterpieces except in small circles of film buffs. A masterpiece must be exoteric, available to all, obvious, without special training or inside knowledge. While 8 ½ tells a story similar to The Divine Comedy, and does so with striking imagery, the abstract nature of the art limits its appeal and audience. If a child of twelve and a 90-year-old cannot both understand and appreciate a film, then it is too limited to be called a masterpiece. 8 ½ is like an age-group winner in the Boston marathon rather than the overall winner. Everyone appreciates and marvels at the virtuoso of running, who crosses the finish line in a flourish. A film like Casablanca or The Shawshank Redemption or Babe needs no training, no special tour guide, no advanced degree to understand, no special vocabulary, and all ages can experience the deepest feelings without knowing why it touched them so personally and even transcendently.
To break out of film and consider this idea, a masterpiece like La Pieta by Michelangelo requires no degree, no instructions, no group discussion – it needs no explanation at all. The full drama is laid out plainly, yet it speaks a million words to the viewer. In 8 ½, the circus of life is laid out before the character, and there is much depth there, but the simpler tale of Casablanca will still make sense in one hundred years to anyone who sees it on first viewing, and given the proliferation of media, the battle for attention will increase.
Dante has created a masterpiece that doesn’t speak to all people. The poetry of Dante may not be easy for the average reader, but the story of traveling down to hell in order to go up, which is the story he is plainly telling, hits home with millions of hearts who have lived this path. But this route cannot be understood until enough life has been lived, similar to the book of Ezekial, which I am told should not be read until age fifty or it will be difficult to understand. (In a few years, I can tackle it again, as I will be half a century old.)
Dante’s masterpiece has lasted for many centuries, outlasting a great deal of other poetry. Anyone who has sinned and repented, loved and lost, understands Dante’s journey. Thus, the real masterpiece must speak plainly to all levels of education, or the label of masterpiece is suspect. To know what is true, good, and beautiful does not require a degree in literature or film to recognize, any more than the sunset over the beach does, which brings a round of applause in the beach-facing restaurants every evening. For the young and the old, the sunset is like La Pieta, in that no explanation is needed. Casablanca fits this description in that the story of lost love and redemptive suffering can be seen and felt in plain view in the film. Appreciation for esoteric films enriches those with greater capacity for intellectual insight, but a masterpiece cannot be only for a few, or it has failed to reach the glorious obviousness of the beach sunset or La Pieta.
Films that speak to truths must cover the wholeness of life, even if it focuses on only one aspect of life, one obsession, one age. Cinema is difficult because it is not one picture, but a moving picture, of thousands of images happening in a single work, thus a film must be considered in its totality rather than a snapshot or single scene. In the same manner, we do not observe a person by looking at his big toe, but by the wholeness of the person, much of which is invisible to anyone who is not the person. (I’ve never gone to a wake or funeral and saw a picture of his or her big toe placed on the casket, because we don’t look at people as parts, but as a whole.)
This mirrors life, in which we know aspects of other lives, but not all of their story. Our own story is written, perhaps like Macbeth, or Hamlet, or Abraham, or Harry Lime, or Rick Blaine, or Dante. If we speak of defining absolute truth, it is often easier to speak of what it is not, rather than what it is, but we can recognize elements of it when we see it, and we cannot look away from it because what is absolute draws us like moths to a porch light.
Without a doubt, the label of masterpiece will be conferred and removed from some works or art as the nations, tastes, and opinions of culture change, but whatever dominant narrative attempts to dictate the honor of masterpiece, every generation takes another look back and does its own evaluation. What is classic today may not be tomorrow, as many award-winning films and books have proven.
Given the undying joy of rebellion against the past, particularly in the West, what the film elders call “classic” today will be reviewed again, and again, so that the appraisal never ceases. The churn is always happening, but the gems always seem to shake to the surface. Those works that appeal most will likely rise on merits that transcend world power, because that which is truly inspired needs no help from critics. A masterpiece will bubble up on its own merit, like Hamlet or Michael Jordan or the Gospel of Matthew. A masterpiece cannot be held down for long, because like a beach ball held underwater it takes great effort to suppress it and keep it hidden, and eventually it will pop up to the surface for all to see again. In one hundred years, will we revere Casablanca or Vertigo? Perhaps both will be, perhaps neither. Time will tell, and as time goes by Rick will still never be joined with Ilsa any more than the Greek man in pursuit of the Greek woman on Keats’ urn will reach her. They will be forever grasping at that inscrutable desire, which is just out of our reach.
And in fifty years, or a thousand years, the real masterpiece will remain. Everyone will be talking about it yet. It is the Annunciation, the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection story will be packing churches on Christmas and Easter, because it is not from man, but from God. What we hunger for is the story of our redemption and the beatific vision of returning home to our Creator. The one, true, good, beautiful, and unified story of creation, the fall, and salvation is the masterpiece of all masterpieces. All other creators must take a knee before the Author and Artist of all things.