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Introduction. This essay, published here for
the first time (it incorporates and revises material from an earlier piece of
2001, “Light
My Fire”), was commissioned by Simon Field for a book of essays on a “What
is Cinema?” theme-event scheduled for the International Film Festival Rotterdam
in January 2002. The event went ahead; but the book was cancelled. It may make
for curious reading at the dawn of 2020, almost two decades later, in the wake
of renewed debate about the role of lists and list-making in global film
culture. [1 January 2020]
I will not be somebody who
tries to bring dignity to cinema. I am sure cinema does not need such a thing.
– Raúl Ruiz (1)
Today, there is renewed argument in all the arts about the need to
establish a canon, and about the role that such canon-forming processes play.
Pushed partly by the protocols of high art, and partly by the ceaseless demands
of the film industry’s self-promotional machine, proposed canonical lists for
the cinema are appearing everywhere: in books and magazines, in the press
releases of Film Institutes, in the programs of Cinémathèques, in film festivals,
even on television.
Yet there is also something undeniably alienating about this
entire enterprise. Many of us, in our professional capacities, may grasp the
opportunity to contribute to such canon-forming, perhaps out of a sense of
civic duty. But, deep inside, we probably all share the reaction of filmmaker,
critic and historian Bertrand Tavernier: “I don’t much like these [canonical]
lists: too many beautiful and important films are missing, and they leave out
the texture, the richness and life of cinema by not including all those ‘imperfect’
films which are more meaningful and alive than frozen, dated ‘classics’.” (2)
For film canons are odd creatures. They exist beyond us as
individuals, coinciding with no list of best, favourite or important films that
you or I might actually ever choose to make. Let’s go further, and propose that
the list, in all its individualistic glory and variety, is in fact
diametrically (and dialectically) opposed to the canon. Lists are personal,
idiosyncratic, eccentric, perverse, infinitely changeable – just as we are.
Canons, by contrast, exist as grey eminences. They can often strike one as
stuffy, boring, dead. Or just a lazy, easily impressionable, manipulable skim
off the top of reigning middlebrow taste. This is why it is dispiriting to see
films like The Godfather (1972) or Nashville (1975) forever clogging international canons, however much we might be drawn to
them as individual works.
It might be argued that canons do indeed also change over the
course of time – albeit more gradually and stealthily, with less public
comment. What is really mysterious, however, is our continuing tolerance for
canons. We tacitly agree to regard them as somehow objective, inviolable. Or
perhaps we judge them to be, at the very least, necessary: canons help to
institutionalise cinema, to bring dignity and social legitimacy, to place it on
a par with more established and respected arts.
But
what price dignity? When a canon has settled – when it is adopted as a
long-term program for acquiring or curating or distributing, restoring or
discussing films – the fight is over. Out of the multiplicity, the confusion,
the high-and-low richness of cinema in its daily phenomenality, a handful of
works, of “greats”, rise to the uppermost surface and are anointed.
Paradoxically, canons, in search of consensus opinion, are in fact usually
sifted from many individual lists. But we end up with the ironed-out
regularities of taste, not the kinky differences. Only the lofty peaks of
cinematic art – never the obscure, undignified valleys.
Great masterpieces do indeed exist. Why deny it? There is no point
in taking cheap pot shots at classics like Vertigo (1958), Citizen Kane (1941) or Rules
of the Game (1939), just because they have suffered the misfortune of being
embalmed in a conservative canon. (There is more point in taking aim at Lawrence of Arabia [1962] or the bloody Star Wars [1977-∞]
cycle.) The problem is in the constant, worldwide recycling of a mere handful
of titles that – in their particular constellation – embody a rather
old-fashioned ideal of what cinema is, what it can be and do.
Today, we need new canons – plenty of them, canons that behave
like lists. Partisan selections, provocative juxtapositions, reconnaissance
missions. Because, quite simply, too much of cinema is missing from the present
canons. Where are the documentaries of Humphrey Jennings or Fred Wiseman, the
experimental shorts by Martin Arnold or Maya Deren, the comedies of Jerry Lewis or Albert Brooks, the best multimedia assemblages somewhere between film, video
and installation, or the careers (like those of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kira Muratova,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Ritwik Ghatak, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Tsai Ming-liang) that are not reducible to a single masterpiece? Where are any
important, challenging films beyond circa 1980, like Rosetta (the Dardennes, 1999), The Puppetmaster (Hou, 1993), Beau travail (Claire Denis, 1999), Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996) or The River (Tsai, 1997)? Canons are geared to a blockbuster mentality in the
quality-arthouse sphere, such that directors like Raúl Ruiz, Chris Marker or
Chantal Akerman – who have slowly, gradually, prolifically set about
reinventing the medium in ways small and large, and whose influence moves in a
capillary, often subterranean way around the globe – are rendered invisible.
Many
canons today unknowingly reflect a nostalgia for a certain idea of world film
culture (and of cinephilia itself) that has been in its death throes for quite
some time. This was the culture in which world cinema was essentially European
and American in origin, with an occasional peep from a lone, exotic master
whose works were imported from Japan or India. It was an era that preceded the
“rise” of Iranian cinema, the various Asian cinemas, and so much else into the educated
filmgoing consciousness of people – or, at any rate, those not already living
in those countries or conversant with their cultures. But every time the map of
world cinema is redrawn, the challenge is always far greater than simply
acknowledging the existence of some exceptional filmmakers; each nation or
territory brings its own popular traditions, its own subcultures, the knotted
and contested history of its own attempt to forge a film culture.
What if we imagined a global film scene inspired by a culture of
lists rather than ruled by the gravity of a canon? What do lists have to offer?
Between the promiscuous, value-free flux of everything that it is possible to
encounter in an audiovisual culture, and the stingy, schoolmasterly solemnity
of a canon, a list tries to stake some kind of provisional order, tries to make
some kind of sense, however scatty or surreal. Above all, it poses a position,
an argument. The key question that has to be asked of any film culture these
days: is there still room for a good fight? I mean the kind of war that is
heated and polemical, but also (this is not necessarily a contradiction)
joyous, surprising, open minded – the experience where you defend your own
ground but not quite so zealously that you never manage to wander into your
interlocutor’s space and be transformed by what you find there.
Imagining a film
culture driven by lists rather than canons also entails thinking through a new
notion of authority and its uses. Our time has seen a massive crisis in the
notion of authority and its associated terms, like expertise, professionalism,
specialisation, training, and so on. We rightly applaud the postmodern
undermining of certain claims to authority, when those claims are oppressive
and exclusionary. Who wields authority, and over whom? These questions have
been posed down the past decades by much “identity politics”. Any form of
unquestioned authority, bequeathed from on high, has become the enemy.
Transferred to the
realms of art and culture, however, the anti-authoritarian reflex wavers
uneasily. Alongside the vague, niggly yearning for the certainties of an
old-style canon is a dogged anti-aesthetic impulse: we banish the evaluation of
films on any level from our university and media courses, and regard the
hard-and-fast opinions of reviewer-gurus with suspicion. Meanwhile, Cultural
Studies in the universities, with its workaday dismissal or avoidance of
evaluative hierarchies, often ends up paradoxically affirming, through its
rituals of critique, the same old hit parade of classics.
But, in the sphere of film culture, a certain exercise of
authority is not necessarily a bad or oppressive thing. There is another way to
regard the authoritative (not authoritarian!) activity of a critic or
programmer, and this goes to the heart of what both list-making and film
culture are all about. Serge Daney lamented the fact that “the media no longer
ask those who know something (or love something or, worst of all, know why they love something) to share that
knowledge with the public”. (3) Loving and knowing film – and being bold enough
to proclaim that fact – always amounts to a brazen act of pedagogy; an act that
aims to teach, to persuade, to rally people around the cause of a film, an
artist, a body of work, an idea. Cultural work of this sort aims to highlight a
film and surround it with an aura of desire – hype, in the best sense. This is
a public, cultural gesture, a way of declaring: here is the pleasure you have
missed or underrated, the challenge you must now confront!
In such gestures, hardline cinephilia is never far from polemic,
even manifesto (hopefully more supple and interesting than the Dogme
manifesto). The multiple new canons of our time should be cast as arguments
with the old canons. It is not a matter of doing away with authorities, opinions
or judgements – but interrogating, defending and revising them. Critics,
programmers, film festival or Cinémathèque directors must assume the authority
of being public teachers, as they stand up and shout: this is what you, the
audience, must see, what you must know, what you must experience. That has
sometimes been the case with the most visionary practitioners of these arts.
This is the kind of authority that has to be won anew, every time,
in the ongoing contact and contract between a cultural activist and her or his
audience – it is not simply granted from somewhere higher up in the social
hierarchy. Another of Daney’s phrases about the impact of cinema on its
spectators – a “popular elitism” which can “work for everybody” – rings true
also for the pedagogical drive in film culture. James Naremore has provocatively
argued: “We are now at a point where we need less theory and more canon
building. The monuments erected by such activity are not engraved; they exist
discursively, in critical debate, and they do not necessarily honour Dead White
Men. Without canons, Hollywood wins; we are left with no values – only facts,
box-office statistics, and quasi-scientific explanations of ‘systems’.” (4)
All the same, film culture needs to be careful and diligent about
how it maps and tracks its object – the vast expanse of films around the world,
past and present. Many magazines, critics, filmgoers and film festivals alike
are obsessed (it is an inevitable trap) with the new, the latest, the fresh
batch of names and titles: from Cannes through the entire year’s event calendar
around the globe, we track the buzz feed ... only for that fertile ground to be
ploughed under the following year. We live in cinema’s eternal present, which
is not a bad thing per se – at least
we may be attune to signs of freshness, life, innovation, provocation.
But cinema has a geology as well as a geography, an ever
developing and mutating history of forms as well as a forward march. The past –
as Godard and an army of found footage artists have shown us – has not even
passed, it’s still growing and mutating, having itself rewritten and rewired
all around us, even (or especially) when we are not bothering to notice it.
There is no such thing (at least, there shouldn’t be) as old cinema, films as museum exhibits, understood and annotated once
and for all. The cinema is all about
connections, seeing things anew; surely one of the tasks of any decently
progressive Festival – beyond its function as a showcase of the latest and the
best – is to provide the possibility for seeing and making such connections.
Again, polemics and pedagogy are paramount in this ongoing
adventure. For example, film culture can never cease trying to overcome its own
prisons of taste. The lines that segregate worthwhile from worthless,
interesting from uninteresting, useful from useless, are springing up around us
all the time, while we are unaware. Cinephiles have long combated the reign of
middlebrow taste. They champion extremes, voting for the highest and the lowest:
the most difficult, severe, rigorous, minimalist, experimental films; and,
equally, the often despised, maligned and overlooked products of popular
culture like vulgar teenage comedies, gross horror, trashy exploitation,
ultra-violent action, even pornography. At both extremes, excess and intensity
are honoured, no matter in what strange form they manifest themselves. A piece
of this aesthetic credo is summed up in the words of Paul Willemen [1944-2012],
who once proposed “frenzy, madness, neurosis, extravaganza, monstrosity, etc.”
as “positive values” in a work of art. (5)
Yet these critical battles are never won or settled once and for
all. Horror films, for instance, have now been recognised by many. But where is
the progressive horror cinema eulogised and illuminated by the intelligentsia
of the ‘70s? When such cinema is left only to the devotional non-critics in
fanzines and on slavish websites, the real work of excavating the genre and
enlarging its cultural significance falls into disrepair. And the same could be
said for many once-overlooked popular forms. The much-vaunted democracy of
cyberspace is not enough to make a cultural revolution; what we need are the
pedagogues, the autodidacts, the visionaries.
To flip the example, let’s consider experimental cinema. The
avant-garde is always in danger of being marched into the museum and entombed
there as the glorious, outlaw exception to mainstream film. The more that its
subversive marginality is extolled, the less connected it seems to the rhizomatic
history of cinema’s forms. But for all its proud conceptualism and
intractability, experimental cinema is a laboratory for primal, instantly
accessible energies and intensities. The transmission of film history – in
courses, retrospectives, on TV – needs to liberate the long-dulled electric
voltage of the old Luis Buñuel and Jean Vigo classics, route that energy
through the fractured narratives of Samuel Fuller, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese,
and clinch the circuit with the hand-painted abstractions of Stan Brakhage, the
montages of Abigail Child or Ulrike Ottinger, the rock-musical structures of
Sogo Ishii. We need new diagrams like these to help us perceive and celebrate
the medium’s sensual materiality and its capacity for action.
It seems to me that even the most advanced or informed types of
cinephilia must stay vigilant against their own rigid taste barriers.
Everywhere, in every intense cell of film culture activity, severe lists of who-is-in
and who-is-out reign. This is fine, and even necessary – as long as the process
remains fluid, and is consciously revised rather than blindly followed. But the
cinema landscape is littered with victims of fashion, filmmakers who are
suddenly, brutally judged to be untimely, no longer of interest. Perhaps the
final frontier in any film argument today is the middlebrow itself: isn’t there
something, even there, that cries out to be revisited, reclaimed, seen anew? We
dismiss Pedro Almodóvar, Agnès Jaoui, Roberto Benigni or Jean-Pierre Jeunet at
our peril. A cursory look at the canons of old will show that there is always a
vast, buried territory in world cinema: films we missed or dismissed or didn’t
even know existed, directors who we did not yet have the tools to understand or
value. As Beau travail reminds us:
“Viewpoints count – angles of attack”!
Angles of attack count in another way as well. “It is never with
arguments that one wins over a person”, wrote Andé Bazin in his text “In
Defence of Rossellini”. “The conviction one puts into them often counts for
more”. (6) This reflection, from one of film criticism’s most reasonable,
rational and logical practitioners, is revealing and inspiring. Conviction is
passion. And film culture is fuelled, at a profound level, by a fully
irrational passion. Love of the cinema, of a film or a director, is a fantasy – which is not necessarily either
a negative or positive thing, it is a fantasy simply in the sense of being an
emotional and psychic investment of energy. Investment leads to the formation
of belief systems, feverish defences and attacks, elaborate rationalisations.
Most theory and criticism, even when avowedly materialist, is the result of
such rationalisation.
But I do not mean by this that anything we say about cinema, or do
in its name, is thereby mad, deluded, useless. Quite the contrary! Conviction
and passion drive us, in our imaginations, to create – and endlessly re-create
– the cinema that we love, just as it drives filmmakers to produce the work in
the first place. True cinephilia is precisely this: a prodigiously inventive
passion. The love of cinema – and the will to publicly champion and fight over
it – is a magnificent obsession. It is also, necessarily, undignified, because of the intensity, the raw nerves, that are
constantly surfacing within debate.
One of the abiding problems with the established canons is that
they resolutely erase this heart and soul of cinema, our passionate experience
– both love and hate – of it. Canons offer one construction of film history –
clean, linear, progressive, teleological, sorted into good and bad, great and
mundane – while cinephilia, with its constant list-making, offers another. Not
one history, but many histories – or stories. The passionate encounters that
each of us have with cinema – personally discovering this film or director,
being struck by a comparison or an interpretation – form the potentially
infinite number of stories we make public as critics or programmers. These are
histories of cinema without a set map, itinerary or timetable.
Remember Godard’s observation to Daney, that what drove the agenda
of Cahiers du cinéma, and later the Nouvelle
Vague, was a highly creative and resolutely unofficial sense of the
formlessness of film history, nurtured by Henri Langlois’ militantly mixed-up
programming at the Cinémathèque: “When [Éric Rohmer] saw Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life [1956] and a film by
Murnau, I’m not sure that he talked about them with the clear notion that [Nicholas]
Ray came after [F.W.] Murnau”. (7)
It is from such confusion that connections are made, relationships
forged, secret affinities revealed. Any film festival or cultural event worth
the name strives to set the agenda of such creativity, but it cannot dictate
its ultimate outcomes – that is up to spectators, in their infinite, unruly and
impassioned variety.
1. Raúl Ruiz, quoted in Adrian Martin, “Never One Space: The
Cinema of Raul Ruiz”, Cinema Papers,
no. 91 (January 1993), p. 30. back
2. Bertrand Tavernier, in 360
Film Classics, special supplement to Sight
and Sound (1998), p. 36. back
3. Serge Daney, “Falling Out of Love”, Sight and Sound (July 1992), p. 14. back
4. James Naremore, “An ABC of Reading Andrew Sarris”, in Emanuel
Levy (ed.), Citizen Sarris: American Film
Critic (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2001), p. 177. back
5. Paul Willemen, in Claire Johnston and Willemen (eds), Frank Tashlin (Edinburgh Film Festival,
1973), p. 17. back
6. André Bazin, trans. Hugh Gray, What is Cinema?, Vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1972), p. 101. back
7. Serge Daney and Jean-Luc Godard, “Godard Makes “Hi(stories)”,
in Mary Lea Bandy and Raymond Bellour (eds), Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974-1991 (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1992), p. 160. back
© Adrian Martin November 2001 |
