The cinema is the great compensatory art, the one that natural-born artists who lack any particular technical skill, craft, or knowledge gravitate toward, because it’s the one where the equipment itself supplies most of the needed technique. The artists need only bring their being—because being is the cinema’s very stuff and subject. That’s why it’s wrong to call movies a visual medium; it’s a shorthand that I’ve indulged in, too, but there’s actually no such thing as a beautiful image. If a director happens to be endowed with a visual gift (such as Stanley Kubrick, who started as a photographer), so much the better, but what makes an image beautiful is that it’s infused with a beautiful soul. That’s why there’s no formula for recognizing or identifying a beautiful image; it’s not definable as a geometric or formal quality, but »