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A Streetcar Named the Movies, or: |
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This script was broadcast on my regular program (1995-1997), “The Week
in Film” on Radio National (Australia), on 13 May 1995, to mark the centenary
of cinema celebrated worldwide that year.
I find myself strangely uneasy and skittish on the
occasion of the centenary of cinema. Of course, I do not begrudge any
opportunity to publicly shout about and celebrate this medium that I love. Let
us celebrate the centenary of cinema every damn year, if it means that more old
movies will be shown, that more serious books on film will be published, that
there will be more discussions, events and general awareness of this Seventh Art.
So what is my problem? It has something to do with a
word I just uttered: art. This
centenary seems to me to mark a moment when the cinema is supposed to be,
finally, a completely accepted and legitimated art form. Just as popular
newspapers and magazines have been busting a gut lately publicising Harold
Bloom’s canon of the world’s greatest literature, now we are seeing lists
everywhere of the greatest films, the greatest filmmakers, the greatest
artistic achievements of the medium. The roll call is undoubtedly impressive:
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), Yasujiro
Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) … Chaplin
and Keaton, Garbo and Dietrich, Cary Grant and Brando … all the usual suspects.
In passing, let’s note an immediate paradox: the
matter of considering cinema’s achievement hits not only the objection that, as
a medium, it is (relatively) too young – but also the conviction, held by an
increasing number of pundits, that it is in fact dying young – a twentieth century phenomenon that may not last much
into the twenty-first, given the enormous technological changes now taking
place on the fields of audiovisual production, exhibition and consumption.
Let’s bracket this futurological media speculation, however; we are sure to get
it wrong, anyhow.
When I say that the cinema is (despite, or perhaps
because of, its vaunted decline) being currently legitimated as an art, I mean
High Art, or perhaps Fine Art – just in the way that painting, music, theatre
and the rest are considered High and Fine Arts. However, I cannot help
wondering if this show of accepting film into the great canon of culture in
this centenary year is, in fact, a kind of ruse – a display that hides a less
comfortable truth. This truth is that the cinema has never really been accepted
as a legitimate art form by the folks who make these sorts of decisions, ever. It
has been accepted enthusiastically as a popular art form, as entertainment, as
popular culture, yes – but that acceptance is of a very different order.
People who hear this lament or complaint of mine often
buck at my initial assumption. How can I really say that the cinema has not
been accepted as a legitimate art form? There are organisations and
institutions everywhere devoted to cinema in a lofty, ideal sense. Newspapers
and magazines are bursting with coverage of film. In the universities and in
intellectual forums, there is a crossover between film and literature,
philosophy or the other arts like never before. There are new multi-screen
cinemas opening every other week. There are more specialist film societies and
film festivals, more eagerly attended than ever before.
Furthermore, the home video revolution has created a
vast pool of film fans who are specialists in all kinds of arcane movie genres.
The idea that film directors are auteurs, expressive authors who create and
express themselves through this medium – this used to be a truly radical,
avant-garde idea, mocked all throughout the popular press (“Hitchcock, Samuel Fuller, Jerry Lewis – these are artists? You’ve got to be kidding me!”). Now,
we can never read enough about sacred contemporary names like Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion or Quentin Tarantino. Even the lowliest Movies on TV guide screams at us that the old John Wayne on the box
at 3am in the morning is an astounding classic directed by some immortal
Hollywood maverick.
Again, I can’t begrudge any of this, because my life
as a filmgoer is enriched by all of it. My very presence on Australian national
radio, delivering this little sermon – me, who likes reading abstruse theory
and watching avant-garde epics as much as I enjoy musicals, action films or
trashy comedies – depends on each and every one of these enlightened advances
in our public, cultural sphere.
But let us tote up a few cold, hard facts concerning
the relation between cinema and high culture – at least as it is lived in a
small country such as Australia, or (to be more specific) any capital city in
Australia, as distinct from New York, Paris, Vienna or London. Art galleries
and museums will still have almost nothing to do with film. They embrace video
art on banks of monitors, they’ll go ape over multi-media interactive computer
pieces, they will even show old 16mm reels of famous painters talking about their
famous paintings until those decidedly infamous reels break apart and rot –
that is, if they can still hunt down a rare 16mm projector in working order. But
they will almost never show that astounding John Wayne classic that was on TV
at 3am.
You will even have trouble getting to see the Welles,
the Kurosawa, the Dreyer and all the rest of the great film canon at your
nearest major art gallery. These sites of culture are, usually, simply not
equipped to show movies in a proper context. They have decided, in a gesture of
pragmatism, to leave the job to others. But nobody else, no other worthy
organisation or institution, really has the resources or the energy to do that
job, either. So, as a result, the ongoing celebration of film as art is a very
piecemeal, periodic affair in many countries – there’s a special event here, a
retrospective there, an occasional classic restored and reissued – but nothing
at all substantial or consistent, nothing that really adds up and keeps going.
Some countries – those countries with a tradition of
support for such things, as in Germany – do, of course have very fine
Cinémathèques and film museums devoted to the restoration, circulation and
promotion of all types of cinema. But we are speaking about the countries that
lack such a tradition; and Australia, in this regard, is the proverbial sticks.
I have been hearing, for much of my adult life, about the high hopes for a
grand Australian Cinémathèque project as part of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary
Art; I hope I am still alive to see it, one day, launched. [2018 Update #1: 23
years later, still waiting on this dream.]
What about the universities? You can learn about the
film all over the place, in many kinds of academic departments – fine arts,
literature, languages, cultural or media studies, social sciences. I have met
many teachers and students alike totally into film as a lifestyle, an amateur
passion or a scholarly pursuit. But the academy, like the art gallery/museum,
is – deep down – nervous about film, and does not really know what to do with
it. Cinema studies in Australia went from being a boom area in tertiary
education to a marginal elective, in hardly more than a decade between the mid
1970s and the mid 1980s. There is not, I believe, any single department named
anything like Cinema Studies – I mean just cinema, not ‘Cinema, Media,
Television and Screen Studies’ or somesuch combination, in Australia today: the
discipline has been adopted, then shoved back out onto the streets, by various
umbrella-like, administrative conjunctions of the arts, humanities and social
sciences in the years since the mid ‘80s. And the only nation-wide professional
association of educators who could have stood up for it went belly-up in 1986,
with the merest rumour of its ever-imminent resurrection circulating now and
again. [2018 Update #2: there is, at least, as of 2010, a Screen Studies
Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.]
So why is there so little respectability for the
movies? I think about this a great deal,
and it brings out deeply ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, I become sad and
angry that film, in all its forms and genres, does not have the respectability
it deserves. What cinephile on the planet has not, at some point felt this
same, rising anger of indignation, whenever and wherever they are? But, on the
other hand, I am perfectly happy, in a wicked and somewhat perverse way, that
film is an unrespected, undigested, often ignored form. Why so?
Cinema is a scandalous art. It scandalises categories,
canons, historic notions of what a proper art should be and what it should do. It
is a hybrid art, an impure art. One of my favourite filmmakers, Raúl Ruiz, made
a brave declaration of this type that I admire without limit: “I will not be somebody who tries to bring dignity to
cinema. I am sure cinema does not need such a thing”. (1) Another filmmaker,
Jean-Pierre Gorin, went even further: the cinema has “always been fucked by
everybody … It’s lying out there in the ring of the circus, being fucked over
by the clowns, by the acrobats, by the performing seals …”. (2)
What kind of image is that for our glorious, one-hundred-year-old art, our child of the
twentieth century? A true image, I believe. The cinema is a necessarily
compromised and sullied art, first and foremost because it has always been a business
at the same time as it has been an art. It is this indissoluble bond between
dirty money and creativity in the movies that makes High Culture so uneasy in
its presence.
Of course, there is money involved – sometimes a great
deal of it – in many public productions of High Art. But the accounting tends
to be successfully kept in the back room, away from the public eye. Movies,
like pop songs or kids’ toys, scream marketing, merchandising, consumption,
production values, big salaries for the stars. It is a naked aspect of the
cinema, this exploitation factor. Even the so-called art cinema cannot conceal
its heavy marketing aspect (on the film festival circuit, for instance) in the
contemporary world.
Another aspect of cinema that prevents it from
becoming a fine art is tied up with its life as an entertainment form, as
popular culture. The cinema is spectacular. It is more like the circus or
vaudeville in this regard than chamber music recitals or paintings hung in
solemnly lit gallery spaces. Cinema plays to an audience; it is
exhibitionistic. This show-off performative quality is at the heart of most
movies.
This fact is obvious – more than obvious – but it is
often denied. I recently stumbled upon an article about the French director
Jacques Rivette, who made that very artistic (and indeed very great) film La Belle noiseuse (1991). This article suggested that
“because (Rivette) is so true to his medium, because he is so little a showman,
his films have a seriousness and an integrity”. (3) Seriousness, integrity: we
hear these words a lot in highbrow discussion of film. But even the most
purist, most minimalist, most self-consciously artistic movies – like those of
Robert Bresson or Andrei Tarkovsky, Marguerite Duras or Paul Cox – tumble into
moments where they play with the audience or wink to it, sliding in a gag or
some ostentatious bit of business with expert, showbiz timing. And how I adore
these moments – it is suddenly like we are all in the circus ring, you and me
and Herzog, with those naughty clowns and acrobats and performing seals. With
spectacle comes vulgarity.
The late and great film critic Andrew Britton once
speculated that the cinema “has its decorum, but it is the decorum of an art
form which was, and was felt to be, intrinsically indecorous”. (4) Britton
chose to celebrate (as I would, too) the advantages that movies – particularly
popular Hollywood movies – have enjoyed “as a result of being considered beneath
the contempt of cultivated bourgeois taste – and thus not answerable to its
canons”. (5)
Besides, there is another good reason why it is very
hard – impossible, finally – for anyone to cut a decent canon out of the
movies. Cinema history is one big ruin. This also comes from the fact that it
is a business, sometimes a fly-by-night business. Nobody really knows the
extent of the movies made all over the world in the last one hundred years. So
many are lost, buried, forgotten. So many have never even been re-screened
since their first releases. We fling around names like Kurosawa or Satyajit Ray
like we really know what the crème de la
crème of world cinema history is. We believe we already have come to know
the identities of the fittest, the greatest, who have risen above the great
dross of common movies. We believe this just as we believe that art galleries
show us the greatest art, the art that deserved to survive – the masters that
Robert Hughes calls the “unwearying tribunal of the dead”. (6) But cinema
history laughs at us (and our very weary tribunals) all the time. It keeps
turning up great directors like embarrassing corpses in our backyards, from
countries and periods we never thought twice about. We suddenly discover that
there was Ritwik Ghatak in India who was greater than Satyajjt Ray, that there
was Miko Naruse in Japan who was at least the equal of Ozu. We suddenly learn
to respect traditions and genres – like Italian comedies or Hindi musicals –
that we had blithely dismissed for decades.
The cinema will never be an ideal art, a pure art,
such as we fool ourselves that other arts are ideal and pure. We can never
properly get a fix on the movies. Idealists of the cinema – again, people such
as Bresson or Tarkovsky in their written meditations on the medium – always
held out the hope that the best of the cinema could be cleanly separated from
the worst of cinema, not to mention the vast middle ground of cinema. Even more
idealistically, they held out a hope for a future cinema – a truly artistic
cinema, unfettered by commercialism and vulgarity – which would one day realise
all the rich possibilities of this form. We read this again and again in the
classic textbooks, that the cinema is not yet an art, not yet a language, not
yet free. Yet what Bresson feared in his worst nightmare is true: the cinema is
all here and now and, we are “obliged to like in a lump all that is projected onto the screens”. (7) Only the
philosopher Gilles Deleuze dared to put a happy face on this situation: “The
cinema is always as perfect as it can be, taking into account the images and
signs which it invents and which it has at its disposal at a given moment”. (8)
For me, the unique character of cinema as a mongrel
art is faithfully reflected in the writing, reviewing and criticism of cinema. This
world of criticism, too, has its circus of compromises, and its vulgar turns. What
unkind people say is perfectly true: film critics are parasites and voyeurs,
lost souls who live ghostly half-lives. They can also be, at the same time,
romantics and poets. Film criticism has a scattered, irrational quality. As a
matter of fact (and of principle), I treasure the putdown once made by Ira
Konigsberg in relation to the critic Michel Mourlet: “A gem of a 1960 French
New Wave piece … in which poetically powerful adjectives soar above taste or
reason”. (9) Sounds good to me!
Very few film critics have any kind of Olympian
distance, any kind of “long view”, on the mass of movies that they happen to
see. Jean-Luc Godard commented that, as a young cinephile, the experience of
cinema overwhelmed him because it seemed like “a place without history”; he
added that 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 Ray came after Murnau”. (10) But
that kind of fuzzy free association across times, spaces, periods and countries
is one of the things that has kept film criticism alive and crazy, not embalmed
like some doctrinal art history.
I remember well, in my personal history, why I came to
love film so much, particularly in reaction to literature, which I studied for
a few months at a teacher’s college back in the 1970s. For when I read the
great works of English literature and sat down to compose my term essays on
them, I, too, was overwhelmed by the thought that there was nothing I could say
about them that hadn’t been said better in a thousand books and articles before
me. Even if I tried to say something different or outrageous, my old-fashioned
teachers were poised to gently guide me back to the proper interpretations in
the proper textbooks.
Movies, on the other hand, were a wide open world. There
are a million movies, high and low, that no one has ever written about. You can
join these movies up in absolutely any way you please. During my first ear at
teacher’s college, when I dropped English Lit and pledged myself to the movies
forever, I met an inspiring, quite mad guy. He was obsessed with surf movies –
the beach party genre of the 1960s. He was compelled to see them all, annotate
them all. He found secret, sacred auteurs where you or I would only ever find
anonymous, forgettable hacks. All the great paintings, all the great books of
the world, became mere reference points for him, background data that might
serve to illuminate the richness and complexity of these amazing surf movies. For his literature tutor, he handed in a
comparative essay on the shower scene from Psycho (1960) and William Blake’s “The Tyger” (no kidding). Sounded good to me!
This young man wasn’t being especially perverse or
ironic: he was just a poet in love. So it’s to this exemplary cinephile, and to
the vulgar, illegitimate art he claimed as his own, that I dedicate this
reflection in the centenary week in film.
1. Raúl Ruiz, quoted in Adrian Martin, “Never
One Space: The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz”, Cinema
Papers, no. 91 (January 1993), p. 30. back
2. Jean-Pierre Gorin, quoted in Raymond
Durgnat, “Nostalgia: Code and Anti-Code”, Wide
Angle, Vol. 4 No. 4 (1981), p. 78. back
3. I have lost the source details for this
quotation, but I seem to remember it was written by an Australian literary
reviewer, or general arts journalist, probably around the Australian release of La Belle
noiseuse (1991).
4. Andrew Britton, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton (Wayne
State University Press, 2008), p. 456.
5. Ibid.
6. Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (New
York: Vintage, 2001), p. 402.
7. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph (København: Green Integer, 1997), p. 78.
8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), p. x.
9. Dennis Toth, "Stardom: Industry of Desire", Choice (February 1992), p. 905.
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