The other night, Richard and I watched Paper Moon (1973) on Kanopy, directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The film is brilliantly shot, written, directed, and, most transportingly, acted—by Tatum O’Neal and her father, Ryan O’Neal.

Tatum was eight at the time of filming. The first shot is her face, filling the screen, as she stands beside her mother’s grave, in the grainy light of black-and-white, dust bowl Depression America. The first shot is Tatum’s face, and in a sense the movie is a biography of that face. Tatum’s character is called Addie, and she quickly hooks up with a grifter named Moses, played by Ryan, who may or may not be her father.

There’s a softness about Ryan O’Neal. It’s in his eyes. He has a light touch. If he placed his hand on you, the hand would ask how much pressure you wanted. He has the eyes of a dog wondering if it’s time to go out, and this yearning helps him pull off his grift of selling Bibles to grieving widows he finds in local obits. He’s not great at this work. Addie is a natural, Addie with the genius of little girls before they learn about their gender assignment and lose all hope for their lives.

Think of the fierce and implacable Lyanna Mormont, the child ruler played by Bella Ramsey in Game of Thrones. Think of the hunter Arya Stark, played by Maisie Williams in the same show. Think of Beth Harmon, the chess whiz in The Queen’s Gambit played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who can work out whole games in her head by visualizing them on the ceiling.

Tatum’s eyes are the film’s camera, a silent-movie camera. She takes in all the information needed for the plot. In nearly every shot of her, she’s watching something and planning her next moves. You can see, almost frame by frame, how much Bogdanovich learned from studying Hitchcock—who of course started as a silent film director—and how little dialogue is necessary when montage creates the narrative. There’s not a single line of exposition in the film. We don’t even learn how Addie’s mother died. We’re plunged immediately into the middle of a situation—no analysis, no summary, no backstory—and because it’s a great love story about a lost man and an abandoned child, and because it’s a great road movie with adventures along the way, it will always never arrive.

The past few days, I’ve talked to people about the film, saying I thought it was pretty much a perfect movie, in love with its characters and its movieness. People kept saying Madeline Kahn’s role was memorable. She plays Trixie Delight, a sexy broad without talent who Moses picks up at a carnival. She’s a package deal, meaning that wherever she goes so does her “maid,” Imogene (P. J. Johnson), a fifteen-year-old Black kid whose family has no money to feed her. Kahn plays a scheming bimbo with a heart of lead, a cliché in a movie that has no clichés except this one. The girls gang up ingeniously to ruin her chances with Moses and free themselves from her. Does anyone want Trixie to continue on in the film?

When Richard and I hit the Play button on Kanopy, I didn’t know we were in store for a work of art as tender as it is beautiful. It was made in the seventies, during a gallop of creativity in film, and set in the thirties. Watching it now, more than fifty years after it was made, the seventies feel as distant from us as the thirties felt to the makers of the film, and yet none of that is distancing, because great works of art, made specific by their time, are independent of their times. They are paradigms of the way pleasure and freedom, more than anything else, drive the making of art. When you are transported, it’s not back in history—it’s to the glass case holding the Grecian urn.

Bogdanovich applied what he learned from Hitchcock’s storyboards and camera angles and bent them to create an entirely different sensibility. Bogdanovich wants to love things and to recapture a past that isn’t real. He’s willing to slather on the schmaltz. Hitchcock is a shark doing stand-up comedy. All he wants is to sustain suspense.

From the first shot of Tatum, staring out against a forlorn sky, and from the second shot, looking down at the coffin in her mother’s grave, I felt a rush of pleasure. It was the pleasure of giving myself over, the pleasure of receptivity, and it’s mysterious where it comes from and why you can’t always feel it. I see myself as a person who wants always to be seized, wants a seat by the footlights. Apparently not. The sensation of being a reed, open at both ends, is sudden, not a trend.

Is there a perfect time of receptivity that allows you to enter a movie, or thoughts about the world, or feedback about your life? Does a work of art—or new information—enter you because it mixes with thoughts that have already been laid out, like ingredients for a meal you hadn’t planned to cook? Do I wish receptivity was more available? Maybe. And maybe it feels so good because it interrupts the other parts of life. What are “the other parts of life”? The parts where you are anywhere but in the moment.