Having survived (more or less) 2013, we stand atop it, staring 2014 in the face. We channel Janus, looking both ahead and behind with challenge in either direction. Television tonight is providing a retrospective of America’s movies, showing us Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” and the ballet from “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” along with much else. That’s all history now; American art died in the 1960s as Aleksander Solzhenitsen remarked in 1978. A signal, he said, of a dying culture. Movies now seem more about computers and special effects than about people.
