Widescreen

The award-winning new British film My Summer of Love starts with a young red-headed girl lying in a field. We see a huge upside-down close-up of her eye, then, again upside-down, what she is looking at. A posh girl on a horse. Immediately this visual couplet - an example of field-reverse field shooting, in film parlance - positions us as the looker.
More than any other art form, cinema trades on empathy. People pay a fiver to be Luke Skywalker or Scarlett O'Hara. Certain directors, like Ken Loach in his latest film, Ae Fond Kiss, use minimal lights, camera moves, music and acting rhetoric to reduce the aesthetic hurdles between audience and screen and further facilitate identification. The Japanese former documentarist Hirokazu Kore-eda employs similar techniques to almost pointillist degree in his forthcoming masterpiece, Nobody Knows.
Moralists have rightly been concerned about cinema's magnetic appeal, particularly in the area of politics. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, in which we empathise with the crowd, usually carries a warning before screenings. Braveheart tipped the needle in favour of the Scottish National party for a bit. These oft-quoted examples make the obvious point that in unscrupulous hands movies can spread lies or half-truths about the real world. More subtly contentious, however, have been those films in which empathy is used to make a well intended point. Think of the cycle of 1980s anti-apartheid movies whose general form was that of a white person in the foreground of the story entering the world of black South Africa and discovering its injustices. We coat-tailed them and were expected to have our eyes opened.
Two recent movies represent interesting twists to this formula. The first, The Motorcycle Diaries, could unkindly be summarised as a rich guy, Che Guevara, learning that there are poor people in the world. As such, it is only a journey of discovery for those who, like Che, do not know this in the first place. Walter Salles is too talented a director to rely solely on such a template, so he uses the changing light and landscapes of South America in his film to vary the tone of Che's journey. Still, the strategy of empathy in the end fails him, I believe, because we already know what his main character doesn't. Only when Che realises that he wants to do something for the poor - as the film is finishing - do his thoughts and feelings become compelling.
If The Motorcycle Diaries was a kind of Bildungsroman in reverse - rather than learning the values of society, its main character unlearns those values - director Antonia Bird and writer Ronan Bennett's The Hamburg Cell, which was shown on Channel 4 recently, was even more so. An account of one of the 9/11 suicide bomber's induction into terrorism, its main character, Salim, was a gnomic, middle-class, Catholic-educated Lebanese man who is taught by radicals to believe in jihad, the evil of America and the paradise which awaits those who sacrifice their lives for Islam. Bird usually hurls us into the lives of her central characters, but this time she and Bennett stood back somewhat. In terms of filmic empathy, this was interesting. Salim was one of the few characters in recent cinema whose journey was virtually unfollowable. Raised in the ambivalent political climate of Lebanon, he was something of a void at the start, but the mental steps he took were not ones we could completely understand. Speaking as an atheist, I find few films about religious conversions intelligible. (The exceptions are von Trier's Breaking the Waves, Dreyer's The Word and Bresson's Pickpocket.) Their characters' gradual abandonment of logic makes me gradually abandon interest. What made The Hamburg Cell unusual was that Salim's religious conversion was coupled to an increasing disregard for life, a double barrier. Bird's and Bennett's film became a sober essay, then, in the limits of filmic empathy.
Cinema has occasionally gone against the grain of its impulse to identify. Citizen Kane was about an essentially enigmatic and unknowable man. John Ford's equally famous The Searchers centred around a racist outsider - Ethan Edwards - whose journey we watched but did not quite follow. Most intriguing of all was Luchino Visconti's vast film of the 19th-century Bavarian king, Ludwig. For the first hour or so we are invited to share the aspirations and opulent lifestyle of the monarch. As Ludwig begins to go mad and build his fantasy castles, Visconti seems to accept that no member of the audience will see things as his character does. So, remarkably, he uses him less and less. The king gradually disappears from the film - an anti-climactic dead end, if Visconti had not had a brilliant ace up his sleeve. As the king goes, the castles become characters. Ludwig is dispersed into architecture.
David Lynch did a similar thing in Lost Highway, where one character morphed into another. Both movies were rejections of cinema's bent towards identification. They flaunted the norms of filmmaking - particularly political filmmaking - and were the better for it. That may be the danger of filmic empathy. It can take you almost anywhere, even places where you shouldn't go. The small group of good films which refuse to do so more than merit their reputation.