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Grupo Kane Interview |
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Introduction: This massive interview (with my good self) was conducted via email over
several months (from August 2009 to January 2010) by Pablo Acosta Larroca for
the Argentinian collective Grupo Kane. When I was first contacted by this cinephile
gang, their main project was a book on international film criticism, based on
many interviews. That book never materialised. Later, in 2013, I (among many
others) contributed to an extensive Grupo Kane website project containing short
pieces on topics including “The Forbidden Film”. This website remained online
for at least 4 years, but exists no longer. As Grupo Kane itself and all its
plans seem to have evaporated entirely, I present the original interview, for
the first time, here on my website. [June 2020]
A. What is Film Criticism?
1-
What’s the origin of your passion for film? Which were
your influences and, then, your professional training?
I came to
cinema through a teenage passion for science fiction literature. Part of the SF
reading culture involved (this was the mid 1970s) the absorption in fanzines:
little, domestically produced magazines where fans would write reviews, post
lists, etc – a forerunner of today’s Internet culture. Well, one part of the
fanzines (some of which were very intellectual) was comprised of people’s lists
of their favourite SF films: Alphaville (1965), La Jetée (1962), Solaris (1972) and so on. As a fan, I
had to see these films – and once I did, I switched my personal investment
completely to cinema and never again read another SF book! I was already
reading a lot about cinema – magazines and books – by the age of 16; and
watching hundreds of significant films that I would seek out from my own
compiled lists. When I entered university-level classes in cinema at age 17, I
already knew more than some of my teachers! So, I am largely an autodidact – I
taught myself.
2-
How did you begin to write critiques on films? Why
attracted you about connecting with this art?
I began to
write film diaries, notes on every film I saw – I still have some of them –
when I was 15 years old. I have always had a passion for writing and, rather
than writing stories, I enjoyed writing critiques, often in a mimicry of what I
was reading in Sight and Sound, Films and Filming, and the like. At age 16,
I started sending my film reviews to Australian magazines: I still have the
rejection letters from editors, too! But, by the age of 19, I had already
practised a lot, and I began to be accepted and published. And, since the age
of 16, I have just kept writing about film almost every day, always getting a
little better, I hope … It is, quite simply, the most enjoyable form of writing
that I do.
3-
In your own view, what is a film critic? What are
their goals and/or function?
Big
question! In the first place, the role of a critic is to write, and to write
well. To present a case, to tell a story about a film. To get beneath its
surface, to get inside its logic, somehow. To maybe draw around it a context,
or connect it to other things in the world. But there are no rules in
criticism, no definite procedures. Every piece written by every single person
must captivate and persuade. Criticism should be surprising! It needs to
include both thought and emotion, both experience and reflection.
4-
What is it that criticism must talk about? What is the
task of the critic?
The critic
must talk about the film at hand! Pay attention to it, describe it (or parts or
aspects of it) well. And then connect this sensuous description to ideas, to
processes. It is important to respect the art and craft of cinema (many critics
do not, often because they do not really understand or appreciate it – every
critic should try to make at least one little film!). But it is also important,
at another moment or level, to get beyond cinema, and use it as a pretext or a
tool or an aid in the art you yourself create as a critical writer. Because
criticism, too, is an art form. Maybe a lesser art form than cinema, but it is
creative writing, nonetheless!
5-
Should the critique be a reflection of the thoughts of
the critic? Is criticism a way of knowing?
A critique
can only be a reflection of the
thoughts of the critic, no other kind of thought is possible! Yes, criticism is
always subjective – it begins from what is personal to the critic. But then, it
can move out to include the world outside the critic. It must do this! For me, criticism is not just a way to help me
understand myself, but also other people, and the wider social and natural
world.
6-
What is the place of the viewer within specialised criticism?
Does a film with a higher number “stars” (i.e., in a star rating) get a bigger
public than other kinds?
The viewer
is the audience one talks to, that one addresses. You are always trying to coax
them, persuade them, seduce them. You are trying to incite their desire, as the
saying goes. Their desire to see certain films they otherwise might never see –
or their desire to re-see what they have always-already seen, but now hopefully
they’ll see it differently. You are trying to incite people’s thoughts, and to
feed (or goad) their sensibilities. In the best possible sense, you are trying
to teach. But teachers must also be entertaining! Giving star ratings to films
has become a necessary evil in our contemporary journalistic culture. It is a rather
loathsome practice, but just try getting away from it – you won’t have a job
for much longer, at least in the mass media! It becomes one method (not the
best one, I hasten to add, and open to every kind of exaggeration or abuse) for
enticing people to see a film. Personally, I would rather that people actually
read the words I write, not just note the star rating. Having said all that, I retain
my past star ratings in the reviews processed on my archive website Film Critic: with so many pieces, and in
this format, the ratings become just one useful way for people to sort through
the information. Except that criticism is never just information, so-called
data …
7-
How do you see the situation for critics in your
country (Australia)? And at the international level?
I do not
share the widespread current panic about the crisis and/or death of criticism.
True criticism will always be marginal, ignored, struggling, polemical, and
often ephemeral. No institutions last forever. True film culture (it took me a
long time to realise this) is always a losing game in the context of the wider
social world: I mean the world of government bureaucrats, newspaper publishers
and editors, university chancellors, middle-class cultural gatekeepers and rich
financiers. Every one of our victories is small and fleeting – that is our
curse, and our glory, as cinephiles. Do we really expect Rupert Murdoch or
Richard Schlagman to ever become a fan of Hou Hsiao-hsien or Luc Moullet or
Pedro Costa or Chantal Akerman or Peter Tscherkassky? (1) Film criticism has
nothing to do with common sense, basically. It dreams of another world, and it
does whatever it can to bring that Utopia into reality. A losing game, therefore,
but the only game in town for those of us who care about it.
8-
There is a question that I haven’t got clear yet, and
I’d like your opinion on it. I sometimes find a great difference between what
should be a specialised critique and what is published, most of all, in the
mass media – such as newspapers, which are often restricted by a matter of space,
but where, most of the time, the creative freedom of the critic appears to be
absorbed by the media he or she belongs to, as if there was a previous very
strong editorial way of thinking that hides “secret publicity”, or (the other way
round) as if it were a commissioned critique.
I worked in
newspapers as a critic for 15 years, but I would never to choose to do so
again, at this point of my existence. Time is too short, and life is too
precious! The era (now and then, here and there) when serious critics received
good, respectful space in newspapers was fleeting, a mere historic interregnum,
and now it is rapidly closing. We should all have seen it coming! Newspapers
are not the natural home of criticism; they are, in fact, its natural enemy.
The public sphere does not care about criticism; it only cares about capital,
about consumption, about lifestyle, about greasing the wheels of the system.
Hence the truth of what you say about advertising, for instance – which totally
rules newspapers. Almost the entire mainstream publishing world is profoundly
mediocre in its vision, cripplingly conservative. Did we really ever expect it
to be any different? True criticism is always an outlaw activity, always
smuggled in (successfully or not), contraband, subterfuge, a passing
sleight-of-hand. Some of the greatest critics managed this, for a while. But it
is not in the nature of the institution to allow it for long!
9-
Another thing that strongly catches my attention are
the imposed tendencies, for instance when everybody talks about Asian films and,
suddenly, it seems to be the only thing that exists. They boast about some
filmmakers, and maybe the following year nobody talks about them. What can you
say about that?
It’s crap,
that is what I can say about it! Cultural or intellectual fashion is seductive,
sometimes it is a game you must play to get people to listen to you for a
moment or two – the number of times, for instance, I have been asked to contribute
to some idiotic “symposium” in the popular media on the subject of
postmodernism, maybe 15 years too late! Film culture – especially on the festival
circuit – is ruled by the fickle thrusts of fashion. We have to be ceaselessly
vigilant to fight against it – to keep film history, in all its dimensions,
alive. In my experience, teaching can be good for this, when it works, when the
conditions for it are good.
10–
Cinema and
ideology. I consider two cases, par excellence: The Birth of a Nation (1915) by D.W. Griffith, or Triumph of the Will (1935) by Leni
Riefenstahl. Is it right to consider a film through its cinematographic
achievements, its forms, without taking into account its ideological content,
even if it is opposed to one’s own ideology?
This is a
question that will always divide everyone involved with cinema. My response, in
short, is that ideology and form are always imbricated in each other,
interdependent. How could this not be
so? Forms happen in history, they come out of and respond to the social world,
just like politics and ideology! At the same time, one has to break apart the
notion that certain forms are necessarily, and for all time, ideological in a single way. History, once again,
keeps re-allocating particular forms to particular contents and ideologies, or
particular sensibilities (as I prefer
to say). We can take Riefenstahl’s spectacular form or Griffith’s classical
form: is the former always Nazi, is the latter always
racist-sexist-imperialist? Of course not. I use clips from Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1936 – the incredible high-diving
montage) to teach first-year film students about framing, rhythm,
expressionism, lyricism. I am not intending to subliminally instil in them the
Aryan ideology! Although, of course, we can extrapolate from Riefenstahl’s
grand vision of bodies in space to the ideological sensibility of her moment
(and implication) in a particular historical movement. All styles and forms in
cinema are open to many, wildly contrasting ideological uptakes or
appropriations. Soviet montage had a radical purpose, but by the time Stallone
uses it in Rocky
IV in 1985 – a film in fact full of virulently anti-Russian
sentiment – it means something else entirely! Tracing these sorts of changes is
part of the adventure and challenge of film criticism. And when it comes to
films opposed to one’s own ideology (as you put it), I think it is important to
confront them, analyse them – not reject them out of hand – because then one
can be a part of the whole movement of actively changing the political meaning
of a form or style, not just passively observing it.
11–
What kinds of
films interest you the most for analysis? What elements do you value in a film
when it comes to writing a critique?
Well, I have
a very wide-ranging set of interests, and I try to stretch myself to study many
kinds of films. I guess I have a bias towards highly lyrical, stylised, poetic
and fictive film-forms, more than (for example) documentaries. I am most
excited by concrete, detailed micro-analysis of film scenes, segments or
moments, and there are certain directors who richly reward this kind of
approach: from Boris Barnet and Vincente Minnelli to Ritwik Ghatak and Jean-Luc Godard, from Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang to Costa and Raúl Ruiz, from Mikio Naruse and Stephen Dwoskin to Jacques Rivette and Tscherkassky, from Max Ophüls and Otto
Preminger to Claire Denis and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I am always looking for
the cinema effect, the magic fusion
of image, sound, gesture, performance – the achievement of a certain energy or
intensity in film. I am always looking for the secret of how great or good
filmmakers manage to do that – because it’s not easy! I probably favour
dynamic, kinetic, flamboyant films, where you receive the thrill of a cut, a
movement, a blast of music or sound, a decisive turn of fiction, etc. If I can
manage to describe, evoke and communicate some detail of all that, I feel I am
doing my job well as a critic!
12–
Critics are
always related to releases or novelties, i.e., they always work with the latest
news. Let’s suppose, as in a game, that you haven’t seen a well known film, for
example Cat People (1942) by Jacques
Tourneur or Dead
Man (1995) by Jim Jarmusch, just to mention a few. Is it worth it to
write a critique on an already released film from a “virginal” point of view?
Why are there no critiques of already released films?
I am with
you here! One of the greatest struggles in film publishing is to get to be able
to write on “old” films – and, these days (as you indicate) even Dead Man from 1995 is considered old!
And for me, personally, the most important thing of all is to enable comparison
or networking of films from all
times, places and movements: not just to say “that old film influenced this new
one”, but to discover what has been called the secret, true history of forms in
cinema – how techniques, impulses, experiments, leap from one mind to another
(without, sometimes, anybody consciously knowing it!), one film to another.
That is the great adventure of cinema worth observing and testifying to. I find
it frustrating that critiques of already released films are tied mainly, today,
to the DVD release market. That opens an opportunity, but also seems to limit
and circumscribe it. Only rarely can we write with total freedom about an old
film of our choice. Everything is subject to market considerations, it seems,
to a certain value of timely currency: what’s on at festivals and museums, what
Criterion is releasing this month … In my editorial involvements, I’ve tried to
be a little more untimely about it (as Nietzsche said), to follow the whim of interest
and passion, but any such venture is also subject to what is out there to see
at any given moment. Critics need to be (as we said above) people who incite
desire to see films – not just people who follow an already-primed desire!
However, to return to your idea: is it good to write on an old film from an
innocent viewpoint, not soaked in cinema history? Yes, definitely! Sometimes,
too much historical knowledge is a burden, and leads just to the same old
analyses and opinions (such as on neo-realism, for instance …). A fresh eye can
suggest – however naively – a totally new perspective, a new lateral connection
between a film of then and the world of now. No one should censor themselves from
writing, based on the thought that they have not yet read all the film history
books – most of those books are not terribly good or comprehensive, anyway.
Each of us writes (and lives) our own personal History of Cinema, so start
today!
13–
Some of the
most prestigious Cahierists, such as François
Truffaut, Godard or Éric Rohmer (just to mention a few), left critical writing
and theory for good, and went into filmmaking. Nowadays, there are also some
critics that have entered the field. For example, during BAFICI, I had the
opportunity to see Kent Jones’ Val
Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007), Sergio Wolf’s Yo no sé qué me han hecho tus ojos (2003) and Thierry Jousse’s Invisible (2005). Do you think it’s
possible to perform both activities? Have you ever wanted to direct a film?
It’s
possible, but strange! Mainly, I believe that critics, if they remain critics,
are not really ideal filmmakers; and that most filmmakers who are ex-critics
(such as, today, Miguel Gomes) have had to truly break with the critical
mindset of writing about the films they see – even if, you talk to them, they
are still full of opinions and ideas (often very elaborate ones) about all of
this. That is why some ex-critics-turned-filmmakers – plus some filmmakers who
never were official critics – become great interview subjects, because that
becomes their forum for criticism (see, for examples, José Luis Guerin, Olivier
Assayas, Jean Eustache, James Toback …). Or they express themselves in the more
special and private, quite protected space of teaching (like Abraham Polonsky, Alexander
Mackendrick, Miloš Forman, Pascal
Bonitzer, Chantal Akerman … ). I do not wish to be hard and fast about this;
there are no rules, in this as in anything. And I leave the door wide open for
interesting, even rich hybrids of film and critique, like the pedagogical
cinema of Hartmut Bitomsky, or so many intriguing documentaries about
filmmakers made by critics down the years … It’s a whole substratum of cinema
we have yet to document, or appreciate. But the grand cinema is Michael Powell
& Emeric Pressburger, Renoir, Barnet, Akerman, James Gray, Tsai Ming-liang,
Michelangelo Antonioni – and these people were not (or not for long) film
critics. Which, as far as I am concerned, proves my point!
Have I ever
wanted to direct a film? I have helped write some films (mainly unproduced: that is the hidden river of cinema
history, all of its planned and unrealised projects, literally millions of them
…); and I have been around the edges of many others, commenting, advising,
script-editing, and so on … In fact, that is an interesting, seductive, but
also difficult possible role for a critic: to be able to offer their critiques before a film is finished, and hence to
influence it, maybe even improve it (well, that happens in film-training
schools all the time). Some filmmakers welcome and encourage this input, such
as Australia’s James Clayden. Of course, I think this means such filmmakers are
smart: they know how to work that edge, get that advantage from criticism.
(Perhaps Italian cinema has long realised this: Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci,
Sergio Leone and many others regularly transformed their preferred critics into
their partner-screenwriters! In the Hong Kong industry, something similar has
happened. And Truffaut paid Rivette to rip his scripts to shreds!) But people
like Ruiz are truly the exception among filmmakers: most of them mistrust us,
or hate our guts, and sometimes quite rightly so! Because we don’t really
understand their craft, or their processes; and because what we write, finally,
is often completely irrelevant or useless to them right now, or in the future
for what they will go on to make. That is why filmmakers often retreat behind
the old anti-critic clichés: “They have never made a film, and never could!”
Sometimes (perhaps oftentimes) this is quite correct! So we return to the
autonomous, occasionally overlapping spheres of film and criticism (see my
response to the next question), and that I believe is the reality of the
situation.
But I dodged
your question! Yes, I have dreamed of directing a film. I have several in my
head, in fact. And I am only 50, the digital technology is light and cheap
these days, so who knows, I still have “world enough and time”, as E.A. Poe
said … Ask me again when I am 60! But I do believe that directing a film would
necessitate a divorce from critical thinking, in order to make the creative and
craft process work. For I dream of making not an intriguing hybrid (as we were
describing such objects beforehand), but a real film! It’s like going into
psychoanalysis, I reckon: to really abandon yourself to free association on the
couch, you cannot go in remembering or pondering too much Freudian-Lacanian
theory, trying to second-guess or outflank your appointed analyst! No, you have
to let it flow. And making a film would be another way of letting it flow … That
would be the challenge of it for me: not to totally turn off my critic’s brain,
but to somehow rewire it for art’s sake! Can I do it? Only time (and
experimentation) will tell …
B. Cinema and Theory
14–
Somewhere, Béla
Balázs said that “no art has achieved greatness without theory”… Can cinema
exist without theory? And without criticism?
Cinema
often, regularly, maybe usually, exists without criticism and theory! But, by
the same token, criticism and theory will always exist (I hope!). Theory and
practice are two independent, autonomous streams that sometimes cross, and more
often part ways. That is not how it should be, perhaps, but that’s the way it
is. When they cross, meet, even collaborate, it can be great – but that will
always be a fleeting encounter, in my opinion. They are two different
activities, they come from two different parts of the human brain, the human
person. Art can never emerge wholly from theory – when it does, it’s monstrous!
(And monsters can sometimes be interesting.) And theory or criticism cannot be
tied exclusively to the craft or the industry of filmmaking – that kind of
incest can also lead to disaster! Of course, we all know the wonderful, ideal
cases of interesting critics who became great directors (like Godard), or
filmmakers who continued to dabble brilliantly in reflective writing (like Sergei
Eisenstein or Pier Paolo Pasolini, Víctor Erice, Ruiz or Chris Marker). We also
have the less-than-ideal cases of so-so critics who became not terribly good
directors (Paul Schrader, or lesser Cahiers lights) … and good directors who were never terribly prolific or distinguished
critics (Claude Chabrol) … and very many filmmakers who, once they cross over
from theory to practice, militantly never go back across that Rubicon (Jean-Marie
Straub, for example). But there can be no rule, no program about this. Maybe
some German directors, especially from a particular period – Harun Farocki,
Bitomsky – best achieved some intriguing synthesis of essay-filmmaking and
criticism/theory/pedagogy. But that is a special case, not a general model, god(ard)
forbid!
15–
Is it important
to know the background information about a film or the work of the filmmaker to
write a critique?
It can help
– and it can also hinder. Too much prior baggage, too much information from
Internet or press kits or from the annals of film criticism, can overly
influence or clutter up what you write. In general, though, such knowledge is
simply the research that one must do, and that you need to have at your
fingertips. But use it as a tool – don’t let it guide you. Some
auteurist-slanted writing that bangs on and on about the director – their past,
their career, their personality, their drives, their signature, their recurring
themes and motifs – can be boring and super-predictable, like it was written by
an auteurist computer, or a very diligent first-year university student very
eager to please his or her teacher! Sometimes the director is what you have to
leave behind, or displace into the shadows for a few delicious moments, in
order to write well about a film.
16–
What, in your
opinion, is the function of a researcher or film historian? What is their
importance within the field of filmmaking and, in particular, for criticism?
Film historians
are crucial for the field of film criticism – and, perhaps most particularly,
film archiving and restoration, the entire museological function of cinema,
which is becoming increasingly important in our 21st century digital
age, as a certain kind of popular cinema experience is becoming more remote.
Film historians have a creative, visionary role – look at Henri Langlois
yesterday, or Peter von Bagh [1943-2014] today
– and they also have an extremely practical role: to find, preserve, restore,
screen and circulate rare prints of many thousands of important films! The
usual kind of critic, like me, does not do (much of) that kind of work; we lack
that particular, special expertise. In a way, I would like historians, critics
and academics to talk more with each other; our total field of film
appreciation would only be stronger for it. It happens, at certain junctures. Contemporary
filmmakers, on the other hand – with notable exceptions, from Martin Scorsese
to Bertrand Tavernier – are not as interested in film history as they should
be. They tend to know little of it, and are not curious about it. This is
something that needs to be addressed at the level of filmmaking education. I
spoke recently to an audience of young Australian filmmakers in training who
could not see the contemporary relevance of studying the stunning mise en scène of Douglas Sirk’s films –
can you believe that? Filmmakers always have the latest fad in their mind,
because they have to keep up with the trends: that means they worship David
Fincher or Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton or Michael Mann – and no one else! If
they know art cinema, it is only as far back as Kiešlowski – who is a kind of Polish Kubrick to today’s
filmmakers, all channels firing at once. Even people like Godard, Fassbinder
and Pasolini are often unknown to them. Robert Bresson seems entirely weird and
alien to them, “anti-cinema” as he was described to me by one student! That
poor Bresson guy, he’ll never make a buck in this profession! But – even on a
practical level – I point out: if you want to know how to make a very
low-budget movie look and sound good, study what Godard, Fassbinder or even Peter
Greenaway (whose work, in general, I loathe) have done with little money – not
the American indies, who make talkative films with three people improvising
badly inside a room or a house!
17–
Who are the
theoreticians and/or film critics that you have most interest in, nowadays and
historically? Which of them has influenced your own views on cinema and
criticism?
A long list.
I have a complex family tree of critical influences, with many different
branches. On the one hand, the patient, lucid, elegant, rationalists: Victor Perkins, Robin Wood, Shigehiko Hasumi, Gilberto Perez; I would even add Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books here, which are a giant
taxonomy of cinematic forms. Then all those who practise inspired creative
criticism (as I have called it), criticism as literary art: Manny Farber,
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vachel Lindsay, Walter Benjamin, Parker Tyler, Lesley Stern, Petr Král … And then everyone in-between, who mix the different
modes in brilliantly judged, ever-shifting doses: Serge Daney, Meaghan Morris,
Chris Fuijiwara, Frieda Grafe, Raymond Bellour, Yvette Bíró, Judith Williamson,
Jim Hoberman, Bill Krohn, Raymond Durgnat … I, too (I hope), am in-between: I
try to merge the logic of rigorous analysis with the inventiveness of creative
writing. I am still working at this combination, 30 years on!
18–
What works or
films are compulsory if you want to enter the field of film analysis and
criticism?
Nothing is
compulsory! There is no canon worth a damn – except for the one you compile and
use for yourself (like I did when I was 15) to search, watch and think with, as
you explore cinema. But you can start anywhere, and go anywhere. Cinema is a
rhizome, it’s true! I don’t care if you reach the theory and practice of
montage through Eisenstein or Russ Meyer or Jean-François Richet or music video
– the only thing that matters is that, somehow, some day, you reach it! To appreciate
animation, I don’t mind if you come through Tex Avery or Jan Švankmajer – except I might hope that, eventually, you
would encounter and come to love both! I don’t care if you come to dance films
through The
Red Shoes (1948) or through Center Stage (2000) … and so on and on. There
is always, everywhere, too much snobbery in film culture, too much cultural
capital (to employ Pierre Bourdieu’s famous term). But you can use anything and
everything to knit together your personal history and vision of cinema. And
that is what we are after, finally: our own, secret cinema, the one we have
built for ourselves, in our heads and hearts. The critic is the person who gets
to share, slowly and sometimes slyly, a word at a time, that secret cinema. (I
have spent 30 years so far dreaming about writing a book called, precisely, A Secret Cinema. Maybe it is the book I
will live, rather than actually ever write down …)
19–
Do you think, as Noël Burch asserts, that “the great
theoretician of postmodernism is Godard”?
Did he
assert that? If so, you know more about Burch – and maybe also about Godard –
than me! Seriously, I cannot quite figure out what Burch means (or once meant:
he changes his mind and his intellectual orientation so often!) by this
statement. Maybe he is referring to the Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) – which is
not really theory, or rather it is crazy, living theory-in-action,
theory-in-motion, in other words, nothing much (finally) like theory at all. If
Burch is talking about Godard’s early critical writings from the pre-postmodern
‘50s, then I understand him even less! So, I guess I must respectfully disagree
with Burch, or at least with the statement you have quoted. But is JLG the
great filmmaker/artist of postmodernism? I tend to think of him as a great modernist artist across the whole span
of his career, and postmodernist only for a specific and very rich moment: the
years of religion/faith interests, classical art (re)immersions, and returns to
grand mythic narratives, from Passion (1982) to Hail Mary (1985), and a bit
further on through to Hèlas pour moi (1993). That is, for me, the
only postmodern period – or postmodern condition! – I find truly interesting:
when there is crisis of faith, both a pervasive sense of loss and a sudden,
desperate overinvestment in religion and great art, played out in the cinema,
mainly in the ‘80s. Look at what Jean-François Lyotard said in a Flash Art interview of 1985 about Wim
Wenders’ Paris,
Texas (1984), it’s all there … (2)
20–
I would like to
mention a few names and let you choose from three to five to say briefly what
you like [a list of 50 names followed].
Just three
to five?! OK, here goes, and very freely and spontaneously: first, Siegfried
Kracauer. For a long time we all misunderstood him, we thought he was the naïve
realist of Theory of Film (1960).
But, thanks to Miriam Hansen and many others, we have rediscovered his early
writing of the ‘20s and ‘30s, his popular culture criticism, and this has
completely altered our (certainly my) view of his entire trajectory. His theory
is rich, open, yet very systematic, quite coherent from the first to last work
he did. There is a poetic richness in his vision – based on cinema’s
transformation and redemption of
everyday life – that we can still mine
and understand far more deeply. Next, Yvette Bíró; what an extraordinary path
she has had, her first critical/theoretical works appear in Hungary in the early 1960s, and her work as a screenwriter begins in the mid ‘50s, eventually including collaborations with Miklós Jancsó. Her long-term work
as a teacher of screenwriting has had a huge effect on several generations of
filmmakers, including Debra Granik and Lodge Kerrigan. Into her 80s now,
she writes about the films she sees in Paris, where she lives. Her book Turbulence and Flow is a masterpiece,
the fruit of lifetime’s intellectual and poetic reflection. Lastly, Raymond
Durgnat: he is a real model and inspiration for me. He always worked at the
level of furious brainstorming: always making connections, links, speculations,
drawing associations between very distant things … and he wrote in the same
haste: the prose is not always perfect (and his memory is sometimes faulty,
particularly pre-VHS and DVD), but the thinking is always fertile and
surprising. I can truthfully say there is not a single piece by him, no matter
how short or scrappy, that has not taught me something, or led me along some
new path of reflection.
21– And from Argentina?
I know the
work of too few Argentinian critics. I am aware of and like Quintín’s
provocative, lively work, partly because some it has appeared in English (and
he writes in English sometimes, too). There are a number of writers, of several
generations, in El Amante that I
admire, from Eduardo Rojas to Javier Porta Fouz. On the academic front, I have enormous respect for
David Oubiña. There are people, like me, who move in a fertile way between the
university, criticism and journalism, between books, reviews and essays. I have
met many passionate Argentine cinephiles and teachers at BA FICI and elsewhere.
I follow predominantly student-based websites such as El ángel exterminador [which lasted to issue 56 in 2017];
and I am excited by Diego Batlle’s Otros cines site [still
running in 2020], which keeps me informed of many
key developments across many sectors of cinema. And in the world of bloggers
and film-culture movements, I tip my hat to Roger Koza and his “eyes wide open”
[also still running in 2020]. But I
realise there is an entire history of Argentinian film criticism that I have
yet to know. My ability to read Spanish is improving every day, however, thanks
to all the translations of my own work in Chile, Argentina, Spain and Cuba!
22–
A must: Cahiers du cinéma.
A must? In
1953, 1966, 1978, 1984, 1995, maybe … but today? It is suffering every crisis
and convulsion possible at present; by next year, or “this time tomorrow” (as
The Kinks sang), it may not exist. (3) And if so, it was not meant to go on
existing. We want too much these everlasting, eternal monuments in film
culture, when in fact the best sites, the best explosions of activity, are
always ephemeral … In recent years, the now-vanished French magazines Admiranda or Cinéma have meant more to me than the mythical Cahiers (despite this or that terrific moment, piece or
intervention in its pages, in any of its periods) – because the myth and the
reality have been far apart, for a long time. Still, I hold out some hope for
its future, there are some good people that I like very much involved right
now, a young-but-not-too-young generation like Stéphane Delorme, Charlotte
Garson, Cyril Béghin, Vincent Malausa, Nicolas Azalbert who has made films in
Argentina …
23–
And De Filmkrant and Rouge?
Hey, I like
that Rouge website! And De Filmkrant is one of the many brave
little ventures around the world – like Ekran (Slovenia) or Ray (Austria) or Moviement (Italy) or Cahiers España [renamed Caimán since the start of 2012] (4) – I
write for all of these and more – that still believes in hard print, real
copies in your hand (and, hopefully, in the world’s libraries), that reach for
that tiny claim on literary history and posterity. I salute them all, and all
my friends who are in charge of them – even if I tend not to believe, finally,
that old-fashioned, ink-on-paper publishing is the best way to serve, today,
international film culture … or the best way to run a railroad, in terms of an
economy of scale of money spent and people reached. However, history may prove
me wrong, and perhaps I will one day return full-circle to my teenage SF days
and co-produce (in my old age) a photocopied fanzine, in an edition of only 50
copies! Come and get it, if you can …
C. Cinema and Virtuality
24–
What is the
cultural breakdown produced by virtual reality? What could be its contribution
to art?
Fucking hell,
what a question! Is it a cultural breakdown? Well, culture is always breaking
down – it was designed to constantly break down – but I am not sure we can
blame that, exactly, on virtual reality (or Reality TV, or computers, or mobile
phones, or Britney Spears … ). The way I see it, digitalisation is not a
radical break in culture: rather, it should best serve to refocus our attention
on a neglected aspect of what cinematic art (indeed, most art in any medium)
really is: artificial, plastic, graphic. Not the photographic index of reality,
which for me is a terribly overblown and over-invested notion, a kind of
corruption of Bazin (who always had a more dialectical view of this, and of
everything). Daniel Frampton’s book Filmosophy (2006) also argues this: that film is not the trace of reality, it has always
been a manipulable image-bank, always artifice. There are always going to be
cameras, and people pointing them at things, on the one hand; and there are
always going to be ways of downloading and treating that raw material, on the
other hand. The technology has changed a lot, but not (entirely, anyhow) the
conceptual processing or sequencing of these stages or steps. Michael Snow did
an audiovisual gallery installation in 2009, Serve, Deserve, comparing cinema to getting food served to you at a
restaurant: everything is always in the process of being “delivered”! Meaning
that it is captured, worked over, transformed, and finally packaged … That is a
wonderful homely metaphor or analogy that bridges film and digital, art and
life. We are still dealing with what Godard named the problematic of the world and its double, even if you
double it on a shitty little mobile-phone image-capture …
25–
In what way
have Internet and DVD influenced film lovers? In criticism, is there a before
and after the digital era? Isn’t the freedom these formats give, through
repetition of the same information in thousands of systems, somehow illusory?
This I agree
with: that the freedom is illusory. Because every freedom is illusory, “the
dove is never free” (Leonard Cohen) … Today, we are dealing with both the
reality and the myth of access. The reality: yes, there are many, many films I
can experience today that I could not experience twenty years ago – unless I
happened to be in the right city in the right country on the right day at the
exact hour of projection! The myth is that of total access; we often assume (quite
wrongly) that everything is out there. But I was thinking recently of the case
of a truly great filmmaker, the ex-American independent-experimentalist Jon
Jost: because he is not currently the darling of programmers, and because very
little of his career is on DVD at the present moment, (5) he is almost
completely forgotten, unknown. And he is a figure on par with Abel Ferrara, Snow or
Godard! The reality of access hits me when my students go on YouTube and watch
things like Guerin’s In Sylvia’s City straight after I mention it in class … and the myth of access hits me when I
realise how few people outside of a few European cities today know who Carmelo
Bene is. In film culture, we are always struggling to get below the upper-surface-layer
of the currently circulating and promoted names and titles. Because – it’s true
– we all need guidance, a pointer, a helping hand. It has always been this way.
Simply saying that everything’s out there to be downloaded in an exclusive
Internet club does not really change this situation; it’s like saying “the
world’s your oyster”: you still have to decide, somehow, what is worth your
time and energy to visit!
Is there an
“after” the digital era? We cannot know! I tend to believe the prophesies of
the great thinker-essayist Vilém Flusser: that we have entered the age of
techno-images and thus of techno-imagination (so different to the age of
writing and its attendant form of imagination), and that we will likely not be
dealing with anything else in our immediate lifetimes. As they say in pop
culture: learn to live with it!
26–
In this sense, how
do you see cinema nowadays (35mm vs. High Definition digital)?
This I know,
and have always sensed: that cinema is just image-and-sound, audio-vision. It’s
slides plus a tape, an art gallery video installation, the thing on your
computer or your phone – as well as everything at the movie theatre or on your
TV set. It’s representation, figuration, through the looking glass, wherever
and however it is happening. We can go still further. In about 1982, I heard
the artist Marcus Bergner say (and it really affected me): “I can make a film
by doing a painting, or making a gesture in the air ... ” – and he was
absolutely right! Because cinema has always been as virtual as it is actual: it
begins, and takes place, and expands, in our imaginaries; that is its true and
ultimate reality, as mental audio-vision, or as lived memory (which is all
you’ll retain of it at the moment of your death, that’s for sure) … The 35mm
film print has no ontological primacy whatsoever. I do not share the widespread
archival/curatorial nostalgia for celluloid – if you want to actually hear films, for instance, and study
sound design, DVD is infinitely better. The real gain, and the real loss, is in
the question of audiences: to have or have not! I heard the great scholar
Thomas Elsaesser say at a museum event in Barcelona in 2006: “If there’s no
mass audience, then there’s politics in cinema” – the scene of the political
then shifts to some different, more subjective plane (which is also social, but
in a different way to the old-fashioned public sphere of the movie crowd). But
even these once obvious matters of clear-cut publics are becoming less easy to
determine: do we really need an agglomeration of bodies in one room to
constitute an audience? Are we really only just, these days, fish passing each
other mutely in an aquarium (to use Thierry Jousse’s image)? (6) Maybe not.
27–
In the past,
Godard, Daney and Susan Sontag announced the death of cinema. How do you see or
imagine its future?
Cinema has
not died, is not now dying, and never will die! As long you can watch
audio-vision in any form or format, cinema lives. Or as long as you can store
that experience in your human memory-banks – even if all the technology broke down
tomorrow! In this age of digital new
media, I do not believe that cinema is dying – despite what many people have
said. (But they didn’t always really mean what they said, or have been taken to
say! Sontag, for instance, was lamenting the death of cinephilia, not of
cinema; of course, she was dead wrong! For Godard, the death of cinema is
eternal and recurring – he has been saying that since 1965! – and it is a kind
of poetic trope for him that enables his creativity, which is fine with me.) In
any medium of audio-vision – whether a big screen or a mobile phone – the
problems of creation are exactly the same as the ones Griffith or Eisenstein or
Alfred Hitchcock faced: how do you stage, how do you frame, when do you cut, what
sound goes with the image? Mise en scène,
montage, rhythm, the use of bodies in performance, the creation of a total form
for your work: none of this has changed, especially from the viewpoint of those
who produce – today, we spend maybe too much time looking at these questions
from the viewpoint of those who consume (who are, of course, always restless,
fickle and looking for the Next Big Thing – and they like to judge the entire
world within their framework of their exacting consumer desire). The support (in the material sense) changes
– digital signal instead of celluloid film print – and the modes of consumption
change; but not the essence of the audiovisual medium itself. Cinema is not
just celluloid, it is the combination of image and sound! And remember, there
was cinema before celluloid too, such as in our nocturnal dreams … I like
Bazin’s idea of a Myth of Total Cinema, as long as we accept that this total
cinema has always existed as a virtuality in our minds, it does not arrive on
the Last Day of a technological Apocalypse!
28–
What would be
your advice or legacy to those young people starting in the field of film
criticism?
Get a
wealthy patron! Seriously, no one ever gets rich being a film critic. It is not
the path to media celebrity – its fame (if you’re very lucky) is tiny, secluded
and fleeting. History is unlikely to be kind to you; you will be forgotten even
before most of the films you wrote about are forgotten – remember, even Serge
Daney’s collected writings were considered outdated by a certain prestigious British
publisher, hardly three years after his sad and untimely death – and there
wasn’t much he could do to fix that situation from the grave! The inestimably
great Carmelo Bene said it right in his marvellous 1983 book I Appeared to the Madonna: “It only
takes turning your back for a moment, and you no longer exist. You never did”.
(7) Criticism is always bound by its time and place, its currency: once again,
that is its curse and its glory … We are, each of us, stuck with the slice of
cinema we were born with, grow with, die with. We have no other story to tell,
only that given, contingent history and what we make of it. For me (for example),
that means I am destined to live to tell (as Madonna sang) what it was like to happily experience thousands of teen
movies, thrillers and horror films during the 1980s – and all that alongside
the new narratives of Godard and Ruiz, the film-essays of Marker and Robert Kramer,
the sensuous minimalism of Akerman … while, all around me, people currently
declare that the ‘80s was, in cinema, a null and void decade! “Hope I live to
tell the secrets I have learned / ‘Till then, it will burn inside of me”: that
is the dream, the wish, the secret biography of every true film critic.
© Adrian Martin August 2009 – 7 January 2010 |
