FILM / On Cinema

Words, words, words. British cinema is awash with them, has always been awash with them; it's impossible to imagine that the medium was once silent. And not just any old words. Not the slangy, lived-in, everyday words of American cinema, but literary-cum-theatrical words, calibrated to the tiniest inflection. Even when the environment is rough - for example, in London Kills Me - one can still feel the tender loving care that's gone into the self-consciously colourful dialogue.

In fact, that's all you feel. Such formality can murder emotion, leaving only a sort of icy admiration. It certainly makes a habit of undermining visual panache. Different as they are, both David Lean and Peter Greenaway's painterly epics come bogged down by portentous thoughts, portentously expressed. Their impulses aren't primarily optical, as commonly assumed, but bookish - and quaintly 19th-century bookish too.

There are reasons, of course. Our arts establishment traditionally values the literary above all other things and our acute class sensitivities make us exquisitely aware of language and its precise application. . . how cruelly a simple mispronunciation can expose us. Yet the formalism is now so fossilised that the soundtrack in David Hare's The Secret Rapture (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, below) is just dead air. No one uses words better, yet they ring as hollow as the careless vocabulary employed by the ramshackle, ram-raiding Shopping (opening 24 June). Each believes it's saying something about British culture, and so they are, though not in the fashion intended. It's a conundrum: advertising-trained directors like Ridley and Tony Scott put the image first and their films can seem empty. A genius like David Hare cherishes the power of the word and his films can seem emptier still.

(Photograph omitted)