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Phantom Europe: |
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Any kind of nationalism is a fiction
in the worst sense of the word. I believe in some kind of cultural identity;
that is, in the variety of identities. You do not need only one identity; you
need many if you want to become yourself.
-
Raúl Ruiz, 1992
1.
Conomos
wanted to make a film, forty minutes long, inspired by the work of the great
French director Jacques Rivette. It is called Waiting in the Wings. It takes enchanted motifs from Rivette –
entrancing libraries full of secrets, ‘phantom ladies over Paris’, skating in
the streets, hidden conspiracies, disco dance clubs, handsome conjurers, etc –
and spins them into a free-form, dreamlike fiction.
I
spent much of the shoot (which was as prolonged as Michael Cimino’s Heaven's Gate, spreading over two years,
until the very day I had to leave Sydney) wearing a smart pair of pink pajamas
embroidered with a skull icon derived from Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961). Where are those pajamas now, I
wonder? I played a film critic (typecasting!) obsessed with Rivette, to the
point of literally entering his imaginary world. John and his collaborator,
architectural philosopher Mark Jackson, essentially mixed elements from the
plot of Céline and Julie Go Boating (1975) with quotations from classic Surrealist texts.
Several
months into this gruelling process – John had put up his own home (containing
several small children at the time) in order to raise the money to hire and
maintain a large set/studio, far outrunning the roughly one-thousand dollars
gifted to the production by the Australian Film Commission as part of its No
Frills Fund – I realised something odd. John had, in fact, only ever seen two
Rivette films, those I have already mentioned. Two out of, by then, at least a
dozen. The obsession of my character was also, of course, his own, personal
obsession … but what was it based on, exactly?
I
have seen many more Rivette films in the two decades since, and (I imagine) so
has John. Rivette has changed – from improvisation, wild sound directly
recorded, sprawling modernist narrative structures – into something more serene
and classical, though no less achieved or rich. And all of us involved in Waiting in the Wings have changed, too,
in one way or another. But when I look back on the experience of that chaotic
amateur-artistic film in Sydney, I am struck by the realisation (which nagged
at me even at the time) that what animated its maker was not so much a direct,
analytical engagement with the work of Rivette, but rather an absorption or
investment in a fantasy of Rivette:
an enticing myth, woven together by many hands around the world, over the
course of many years.
Fantasy
or myth: sometimes, at some particular moment in some particular part of the
world, that is all we have of the culture (or the cinema) that we love, that we
desire, that we aspire to emulate: like John wanting to give form to his dream
of Jacques Rivette, no matter how lopsided, how lacking of the actual adored
object, that dream was – as dreams perhaps often are. This essay is about one
specific fantasy cinema, which I call Phantom Europe; I conjure it through a
mosaic in four layers.
The
outsider’s perspective is not often one that is respected within film pedagogy,
particularly with the explosion of multicultural studies – often keenly and
instructively political – within academic and critical circles today. Haven’t
we had enough of phantom cinemas – the Orientalist East, darkest Africa, exotic
Eastern Europe, mythic America, down under Australia, ancient Japan, and all
the rest? Haven’t we had enough of all those Primitives or Sophisticates, these
timeless traditions or avant-garde metropolises, these centres and margins?
Just so many useless, sedimented, tired clichés. After all, this is supposed to
be an age of pervasive exile and disapora, the ceaseless movement and exchange
between cultures and nations, the time of hybrid identities.
In
fact, this is what my Rivette story is also about. The collective Australian
identity that comprised the production team of that zany little film was many
things at once: Greek, Anglo, Spanish, Asian … And our mental space was,
likewise, an amalgam of ideas from
France,
America,
England, Japan.
Everything inside and outside us was re-routed through a map of the world; our
supposed outsider, non-European vantage-point was already impure, contaminated,
porous. And, anyhow, is it really such a crime to embark on a practical,
creative love of cinema on the basis of a fantasy of otherness, another
country, another culture, another world?
In
any such fantasy of otherness, as Bérénice Reynaud once suggested, there is
something enabling (not to mention exciting): the de-familiarising mirror of
the Other. And better that there is this spark of desire for the Other – which
feeds and leads back to new thoughts and experiments in the place where one
lives – than either a bland reduction of all cultures to the Same, or the
hands-off, excessive respect for the Other. As Slavoj Žižek often tells us,
such an exaggerated code of politically correct tolerance leads to nothing
good, and often hides a brutal, murderous kind of envy.
2.
Sometimes it seems as if no single
article, conference or café discussion on contemporary European cinema can even
begin without an agonising disquisition on definitions and limits: what is
Europe? What is a European film? The disaporic, hybrid
trend begun by Michelangelo Antonioni with Blow
Up in 1966 – Italian director, British location, American money – has
caused a growing headache for critics and commentators ever since. I once heard
a cultural studies scholar make a hilariously convoluted attempt to capture
these complexities in a few magic keywords: alongside what we think of as the global and the local (he explained), we must also grasp the glocal and the lobal, in
other words, the global that is inside the local, and the local that is inside
the global …
The headache continues. Now, many attention-grabbing films flaunt
their multinational, multicultural status: whether Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate (2007), with its plot and
cast moving around Europe and Asia; or the intriguing case of Sofia Coppola’s
largely European-financed (but still very American in sensibility) Marie Antoinette (2006), with its wild
cast-list from all corners of the globe.
In
a way, what we are seeing is the retread of an older, even venerable form of
fiction: the international crime-spy-underworld story (to which the plot of Boarding Gate returns), in which money
is the lingua franca, and there
exists a fluid parallel globe for low-key gangsters, dealers, mercenaries and
terrorists to appear, intermingle and disappear. This is not only a form of
popular fiction (James Bond, The Third
Man, etc), but also a vision of cosmopolitan identity romanticised in the
music of John Cale (songs like ‘Córdoba’), and radicalised in the cinema and
writing of Robert Kramer (Guns,
1980): Antonioni’s later The Passenger (1975) is, in this sense, the harbinger of our current pan-European cinema.
This
cinema comes to us today not just with its own look (courtesy of
cinematographers such as Chris Doyle), but even its own rotating cast of indie
stars: Asia Argento, Vincent Gallo, Béatrice Dalle, Mathieu Almaric, Jeanne
Balibar, Maggie Cheung, or (from a slightly earlier era) Patrick Bauchau. 2006
gave us the weirdest imaginable appropriation of this cosmopolitan style (again
in its criminal-terrorist variant): Spielberg’s globe-crossing
Munich,
with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Hanns Zischler and several Australian actors.
For
a long time, the greatest contemporary Asian filmmakers seemed to remain
structurally aloof from this dizzy pan-European cosmopolitan cinema: “As long
as he can’t speak English”, one Taiwanese cultural expert said to me of Hou Hsaio-hsien, “then he’s safe … “; and one could say the same (at least so far)
of Jia Zhang-ke. But even Hou, or Tsai Ming-liang, have been drawn in recent
years into European co-productions, like Hou’s Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) with Juliette Binoche. This
continues the line of unlikely cultural conversions we have seen in
international cinema over the past twenty years, like Krzysztof Kieślowski
swapping his Polish realism for European fantasy-mysticism, or the seemingly
intractable Suwa Nobuhiro becoming a highly French, intimist filmmaker in A Perfect Couple (2005), or – strangest
path of all – Michael Haneke transforming himself, after his hard-edge Austrian
beginnings, first into a chronicler of French bourgeois malaise (in The Piano Teacher and Caché) and then remaking his own Funny Games in the US in 2007.
Against
the powerful and alluring forces of globalisation (not always a bad thing!) sit
the gestures of localisation – cinemas that are regional rather than national.
In Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of
World Cinephilia, critic and Austrian Filmmuseum director Alex Howarth
remarked: “I am much more interested in filmmakers who speak in concrete words
and voices, from a concrete place, about concrete places and characters” –
making works which, as Howarth expresses, have dialects that are “way too
specific to fit into the global commerce of goods”. He takes the example of the
Dardenne brothers: “I like the image of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, standing
somewhere in the middle of industrial Belgian suburbia, looking around and
saying, ‘All these landscapes make up our language’.” (1) And in Howarth’s
distaste (typical among today’s progressive critics) for the ‘European Union’
or Pan-Asian visions of Zhang Yimou, Tom Tykwer, Pedro Almodóvar, Ang Lee or
the latter-day Kieślowski, a long debate is being replayed.
3.
What Can
Travel?
Stepping
sharply back now from this kind of giddy cinematic (or cinephilic) Utopia – truly
a worldly vision – I will explore another way to grasp how European cinema is
seen and understood outside Europe. This way is to ask: just what films are
distributed and screened? What travels,
in all sense of this word: what moves, what translates? Of course, under this,
the real question is one of power within the cultural industry: who gets to
decide what translates and, hence, what will be chosen to travel?
The
largest audience for European cinema in
Let
us be brutally to the point here. What kind of European cinema are we talking
about? Brides (2004) from Greece
(advertised with Martin Scorsese’s name as Executive Producer), The Lives of Others (2006) from Germany, Volver (2006) from Spain, The Singer (2006) from France, the
almost-complete works of François Ozon … Films that win American Oscars, films
with the few non-Anglo transnational stars that exist today (like Gérard
Depardieu or Penélope Cruz); domestic or romantic comedies, social-issue or
big-history dramas, epic humanist tearjerkers (the model being Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso), perhaps an
adaptation of an international best-seller (the model being Alfonso Arau’s Like Water for Chocolate). Sometimes the
system bends enough to include a Cœurs (2006) by Alain Resnais or a Il Caimano (2006) by Nanni Moretti. But the essential flavour of this type of selection is
always clear: it is appallingly conservative, and will likely never make room
for a José Luis Guerín or a Philippe Grandrieux, a Werner Schroeter or a
Stephen Dwoskin, an Amos Gitai or a Harun Farocki, a Nanouk Leopold (Wolfsbergen, Netherlands, 2007) or a
Kornél Mundruczó (Johanna, Hungary,
2005).
Indeed,
now more than over, the Film Festivals proper are regarded as a kind of ghetto
in which what are uncharitably called Festival Films – meaning difficult,
challenging, innovative films – can be relegated, to be watched by the very few
people who actively seek them out. The smaller, nationally-slanted, event festivals,
on the other hand, aim to be crowd pleasers, with all the condescension,
opportunism and lack of aesthetic ambition that phrase suggests.
Is
it any wonder, in this context, that conventional, mainstream film critics/reviewers
– the kind who do not attend real Film Festivals, let alone conferences on
European cinema – often make world-weary pronouncements, in their year-end
surveys of the cinematic globe, that ‘nothing much is happening in Italy’ or that
‘Greek cinema is moribund’? They make this judgement on the basis on one or two
often safe, banal films! This is truly – but in a completely different sense to
those already described – a Phantom Europe.
I
will now tell another Australian story, about a specific incident: the Spanish
Film Festival. Whenever there is an event devoted to a national cinema, local
audiences simply have to take on trust that they are getting a representative
selection of the best and most interesting work available. In the case of the
Spanish survey, I decided to test this assumption. In 2005, I contacted a group
of top Spanish critics associated with the most progressive film magazines –
publications with which I regularly collaborate – and showed them the screening
list of this local festival-event. Their responses were eye-opening.
José
Manuel López of Tren de sombras stated that “flat comedies and prefabricated dramas” are the norm in Spain
today, and that these dominated the Melbourne event. Álvaro Arroba of Letras de cine commented: “There have
been several good Spanish films over the past two years, and none of them are
in the list.” Fermin Martínez, also of Tren
de Sombras, admitted: “I don’t watch many Spanish movies, because they just
make the same, silly thing over and over again.” And Carlos Losilla, who sent
me his eight-thousand word manifesto “Against This Spanish Cinema” published in
the Archivos de
What
is happening here? The truth is a sad, awful business: how European cinema is
seen abroad is determined by sales agents and national promotional bodies. The
locally-based programmers, in Australia as elsewhere, who quickly want to
gather their representative sample of marketable foreign films, get their
access to – as well as their knowledge of – national cinemas filtered, frankly
determined by these promoters and agents. And trips to the actual nation, when
sponsored by these same interest-groups, reinforce rather than complicate the
situation.
We
might, on a good day, believe that we live in a time when World Cinema truly
travels the world. But look at the scary facts of arthouse distribution in
Australia: two films apiece by Jean-Luc Godard and Hou have achieved slim arthouse
distribution in Australia over a course of a quarter of a century! And, in
recent years, even the most progressive television channel, the explicitly
multicultural SBS (now with its cable spin-off World Movies), has retreated to
largely recycling the popular fare that appears first in the touring national
cinema events. It no longer screens, as a policy, the films of Edward Yang,
Sergei Paradjanov, Miklos Jancsó or Youssef Chahine; instead, we get the latest
confections of Cedric Klapisch or Gabriele Muccino, with only an occasional
blast from Emir Kusturica or Tony Gatlif to break the monotony – but mainly
because their films foreground exotic music and dance styles, not for their
provocative politics or aesthetic innovation.
What
is to be done about any of this? In large part, cinephilia here wages a
perpetual, losing war against the changing face of capitalism and its ruthless
shaping of consumer desires in ever-smaller, micro-managed niches of the marketplace.
The middle-class middlebrow is everywhere triumphant. Has it ever been any
different? The battle will continue only as long as we believe in its high
stakes.
4.
Film
theory and criticism find themselves at a crossroads today, poised between two
paths, two approaches. The noblest path presents itself as the legacy of the
great French critic André Bazin. This is a criticism which argues in favour of
the ethics of the image and against
the culture of the (audio)visual. The
Bazinian legacy stresses ‘real presence’, the importance of recording,
registering and imprinting something real (even if it is only a tree, or a
gesture, or the physicality of an actor); it valorises the modesty, the
rightness, the moral compassion of the auteur-camera’s gaze or regard upon the world; it defends the
continuing practice of a holistic mise en
scène over the manipulative fragmentations of montage.
This
forms a major debate in European cinema today: the champions of the holistic
regard alight on masters like Victor Erice or protégés like Mercedes Álvarez (The Sky Turns, 2005); or on the messy,
complex rawness of post-Pialat, post-Cassavetes figures like Abel Ferrara and
Xavier Beauvois – and they reject all in cinema that is slick, glossy,
pre-programmed or pre-visualised, dragging all such artifice down to the level
of Baz Luhrmann, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Alejandro Amenábar or Luc Besson. Iran’s
Abbas Kiarostami, because of what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes as the evidence of film in his work,
constitutes the veritable Godhead of this widespread Bazinian gesture in
contemporary theory/criticism.
Yet
much of the proselytising in this area today has an aura of nostalgia, a
once-upon-a-time longing for things lost or passing away: disappearing from the
world itself, as well as from cinema. The digital audiovisual age – and a renewed artificialism that finds its
historic inspiration not in Roberto Rossellini or Jean Renoir and documentary,
but in Michael Powell or Jean Epstein and animation – does not necessarily have
to go the way of the Hollywood special-effects blockbuster. Raúl Ruiz (who
jokingly calls himself “the only anti-Bazinian in France”) is a stirring
example of a mixed-realm artist who sits outside our tidy critical systems and
options.
The
challenge today, as Nicole Brenez put it in her prophetic 1993 essay “The
Ultimate Journey”, is to maintain a “Bazinian exigency … in the heart of a type of non-Bazinian analysis that
no longer takes the real as second nature or as the second nature of film and
which, in every way, does not have the same conception of the real: to find the
way the cinema discovers human experience […] and the way the cinema sets that
experience forth naked, in its radical strangeness, in that which is unnameable
in it.” (2)
I end with another
theoretical/critical citation from an influential recent book: Thomas
Elsaesser’s European Cinema: Face to face
with Hollywood. It navigates dexterously between the currently circulating,
rather ominous image of a Fortress Europe and another new Europe which, in
every respect, seems scattered to every end of the globe, involved and
entangled with every imaginable cultural Other. Elsaesser, like Brenez, comes
to reject the idea that the most appropriate gesture for cinema today is to
simply film or present (however eloquently) the evidence of reality.
In the digital filming of Heddy
Honigman’s A Good Husband, A Dear Son (2001), a documentary about survivors in Bosnia, Elsaesser finds a new
possibility for cinematic evidence, and its redefinition in a medium of ghostly
artifice – in the context of a post-postmodern reality that has created another
kind of Phantom Europe, shifting in and out of focus and solidity right before
our eyes and under our feet:
This is what the future of the past, the future of memory, is going to
be all about: to mark the sites, but now no longer in their pristineness, but
precisely in their layeredness – only sites that are ‘archaeological’ will be
perceived as authentic, remediated sites if you like, multiply inscribed, like
video-overlay, or multiply occupied, like land claimed by several owners. An
authentic historical building will be seen as a fake, where a ruin, with
bullet-holes and shot to pieces will strike us as authentic, because it is a
material representation of its multiple existences, its realities as well as
its virtualities. (3)
That’s what Jean-Luc Godard
discovered, too, among the buildings and streets and people of Sarajevo,
waiting in the wings: Notre musique (the title of his 2005 film), our music, or the ‘material representation of its
multiple existences’ – within Europe and beyond it.
1.
Alexander Horwath, “Movie Mutations: Letters from (and to)
Some Children of
2. Nicole Brenez, “The Ultimate Journey: Remarks on Contemporary Theory”, Screening the Past, no. 2 (1997). back
3.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Our Balkanist Gaze: About Memory’s No
Man’s Land”, in European Cinema: Face to
Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 368.
© Adrian Martin May 2011 |
