Cinematic Revolutions

                                                      (Roberto Rossellini 1906-1977)

Modern cinema began with apocalypse and moved towards and through some of the revolutions, which took place in the twenty years following the end of the Second World War.  The Italian neo-realists marked the first violent leap away from the totalitarian power of studio-based filmmaking.  The situation was possibly clearest in Italy where the people had violently and publicly disposed of their despot themselves.  Mussolini’s son had been identified as part of the Italian film industry centred around the fabled cinecitta studios in Rome.  Rossellini et al took the cameras onto the streets and into the homes and buildings of Rome and banished the fascist movie stars to obscurity and populated their films with the real populous of Italy.  Objective reality depended on the mannered freedom of the camera and the grain of the film matched the grit of the streets and their inhabitants.  The camera was free from the confines of the sound stage and the scenic designers renditions of reality, free to wander through the confines of objective photographic realism.  The camera was trapped inside the very reality it was trying to capture.  

In codifying realism yet again, the options for fantasy and the true expression of what the medium holds for human consciousness and its self-expression are denied to the camera.  Rules whether agreed upon consciously (through a joint manifesto) or not (when a fashion trend becomes dominant enough to threaten the mainstream) are the end of advancement.  The next revolutionaries are the French cineastes of the 1950s, they turn from the purity of neo-realism and art imitating life and in doing so mix it with the proof that art also, and more importantly some times, imitates art.  In their musicals, comedies, science fictions and gangster movies explored their love of and debt to the Classical film narratives made in European and American film studios.  They also brought to the screen a heightened almost confessional autobiographical content.  In terms of the stylistic development of modern cinema however, the French cineastes greatest contribution is in the elevation of Alfred Hitchcock from studio master to film artist.  In their recognition of Hitchcock offering of total cinema, they were also understanding that Hitchcock was far from a purist and culled influences and ideas from high and low places.  Cinematically however, in the final journey and shocking murder of Marion Crane we have a distillation of the two major styles of cinema, those of expressionism and montage.  Hitchcock utilizes both methods to exacting detail in order to seduce and terrorize the audience.  His methods and intentions are not simply storytelling but an exploration of purely cinematic techniques in order to elicit emotional and intellectual responses from his subjects.

What may have blinded many American critics to the experimental nature of Hitchcock was the very polish with which they were finished.  They were the gleaming ostentatious Cadillac’s of Hollywood on the outside but inside they were about the joy of technology of trickery and of sexual obsession.  Hitchcock was catholic in all senses of the word.  The lesson here for the filmmakers of the New Hollywood expressed itself in some sustaining dichotomies:  the personal and the spectacle, reality and drug induced fantasy, music and silence, plastic and spiritual.  American cinema went back on the road, inspired by Kerouac but was really just getting back to where Chaplin had left off in 1936, before Spain fell, before the War, the bomb, the death camps, before America was the unstoppable juggernaut of Western progress and world policing.  In the early 1960s in New York, the camera returned to its first and most powerful subject, the human body.  In the films of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, the mixing and expansion of gender screamed from largely static frames and mise-en-scene exploded from within. The montage techniques of Kenneth Anger were to add further fuel to the more experimentally minded members of the New Hollywood directors, especially Martin Scorsese.  

Even in the most adventurous of the narrative American filmmakers such as Scorsese, Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, their subject matter remains narrative itself and the form of it in which they work themselves.  It can be thrilling and exciting, powerful and politically progressive, but ultimately insular, a mirror turned upon a mirror.  Tarkovsky represents the near total opposite of this form.  His mirror may be something into which he inserts himself and his gaze but this is simply the microcosm, the greater subject for Tarkovsky is time itself.  Mirror explores through design how an individual experiences time as past present and future mix fluidly in the passing wind.  It is an attempt by the filmmaker to capture the impossible, to sculpt time, to make physical the experience of the metaphysical.  This is achieved in part by not adhering to any narratively conceived notions as per the lengths of shots and the frequency of new settings.  His camera lingers and glides through space at an unrealistic pace not connected to ordinary perception and expectations of narrative revelations, in order to allow us to transcend the physical and really see ourselves.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Mirror, Russia, 1975

Tarkovsky and the Mirror of Nature

                 "To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the             
                  possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to
                  construct such representations."
                                                                       Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p3

In this establishing scene from The Mirror, Tarkovsky exposes his main concerns not in a didactic fashion but in a gentle aesthetic pan of the elements which occupy his own particular existence in this world; his mother, his homeland, his literary forebears (Chekhov's story 'Ward No.6' has as its main character the doctor Rabin, whose fate is sealed by his apathetic acceptance of reality. This over-intellectualization of reality allows him to rationalize his own inaction), and his absent father whose voice and poetic words underscore the second half of the sequence.

Tarkovsky's use of polaroid photography at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s (see further at Polaroids of Andrei Tarkovsky) offer a distillation of his meditations on the relationship between physical world and metaphysical reality.  They are microcosmic in their physical composition and they offer further evidence in their careful staging of Tarkovsky's greater concerns.

Full version of MIRROR on YouTube

Jean-Luc Godard

Everything is Cinema

Jean-Luc Godard was born in 1930 and has been operational since 1950 as a critic, essayist, director, writer and performer of cinema.  Godard, along with D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles is one of the great grammarians of the cinema.  The unfortunate outcome of Godard’s Olympian quest however, is widespread ignorance of the ultimate findings of his study of cinematic language from within, as represented by the last 30 years of his output; compared with an over familiarity and concentration on his first 8 years of filmmaking.  This is put in context by Godard’s most recent biographer, Richard Brody, as the equivalent of painters, critics, collectors, the media and the general public ignoring the works of Picasso after he abandoned Cubism.

Those left listening and watching are left in an unavoidable elitism which is not only contrary to many of Godard’s beliefs but also represents a cul-de-sac ending for this great journey, reminiscent of Godard’s final feature of his early years, Weekend (1967).  The medium of cinema cannot be completely overhauled by one man in almost total isolation, and unless filmmakers critics and audience together conspire to end the dominance of narrative, lowest-common-denominator, mass-entertainment driven cinema, then Godard’s fulfilment of the nouvelle vague’s original promise to give the world a new cinematic language (la camera stylo) which would help cinema to achieve its potential as an art form that would rival painting, literature or music will be in vain for the time being.  Like an echo of the now towering presence of Friederich Nietzsche, Godard remains an almost embarrassing prophet in his own time.  

Susan Sontag in 1968 also likened Godard’s influence on his chosen medium to be similar to that of Picasso in painting and Schoenberg in music.  To this list, the former head of production at the BFI (and Godard producer and biographer) Colin MacCabe, has added the writer James Joyce whose novels Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake were to change literature forever.  Paris Match also in 1968 compared a world without Godard, to one without Bob Dylan.  This might all seem like it’s putting too much empahasis on the “great men” of each medium, but Godard did not create the cult of the great artist or the cult of celebrity, they are simply two more dialogues which he has entered into and which add yet more layers for his audience to assimilate and process.

The many layers of Godard’s cinematic output offers another Nietzschean echo, for similar to the great German philosopher, Godard has attempted from the outset to mix his media in order to radically alter the modes of discourse in the darkened if not hallowed space of the cinema theatre.  Nietzsche had come to his philosophical theories through the example and inspiration of the composer Richard Wagner’s theory of the Gesamkunstwerk, or total-work-of-art, which saw opera as the art work of the future and if produced to the height of its potential to offer a totalising experience for the audience, who could hope for spiritual, emotional and intellectual enrichment as opposed to a mere evening’s entertainment.  Nietzsche looked to many disciplines outside of philosophy to try and reconstitute human morality, having already torn down the twin towers of idealism and metaphysics.  Similarly, Godard has mixed a knowledge of classical Hollywood cinema, with a similar awareness of the european art-house tradition, a love of literature and music with an insatiable lust for all things cultural from dance to painting and sculpture, philosophy and politics, aesthetics and anthropology all the time worrying about the encroachment of American imperialism and its detrimental effect on the culture of Europe.  He is also in recent years more and more concerned with cinema’s relationship to memory and its role in not allowing certain attrocities to be forgotten, especially those perpetrated by the Nazi’s in the concentration camps of World War 2, and its role in tackling contemporary atrocities such as the abadonment by the West of the city of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.  All of this mixture is framed by Godard’s complete willingness to offer himself and his own humanity in all its strength’s and weaknesses as subject matter in his own cinema and in his own on-going creation of Jean-Luc Godard, media star, as evidenced by a fascination with the interview process from the outset of his career.  He has clearly, in a paraphrase of Pasolini, thrown his body into the struggle.

In Breathless, Godard steps into a mode of practice which at the time had more in common with the Beat Generation of writers and the jazz musicians associated with them.  The main stylistic trait which Godard’s early features were to share with the Beats, was that of improvisation.  This is clearly evidenced in the wandering up and down of the Champs Elysées of Michel and Patricia which was simply made up as they went along.  This improvisational feel is maintained in the next few films by the shear speed at which Godard made them, after all he completed 15 in 8 years.  This use of American culture to attack it from within, is a Nietzschean act of creative destruction with Godard aligning himself with those artists most marginalized by the contemporary American political and social realities.  The spirit of Breathless and the Beats were to coalesce at the end of the 1960s with such films as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces where the central anti-hero is alienated from all traditional forms of human organisation whether they be work or family related.  For Godard, and in the context of being a practising European artist, the influences of popular American culture are juxtaposed with Brechtian alienation techniques in breaking down the fourth wall and shouting at the audience to wake them from their consenting slumber.

If the professional world of film has taken little or no notice of Godard since the 1960s then the 15 feature films he made in the eight year period from Breathless in 1959 to Weekend in 1967 represent the single most influential ouevre of the last 50 years.  Breathless with its fusion of jazz and philosophy was according to Richard Brody the film which inspired other directors to make films in a different way, sparking young people’s desire to make cinema, showing the possibilities and the excitement of the art form of a new generation, and Godard’s influence can be seen all over the best of the other new waves which grew up in the wake of the nouvelle vague.  We can see him in the best of Wim Wenders and others of the New German Cinema in their reworking of lessons learned from American cinema, and even in the wayward genius of Werner Herzog, who certainly manages to make films in a different way.  Most tellingly of all, are the lessons learned from Godard by the directors of the New Hollywood, who saw in Godard a filmmaker of intellectual and political courage and an obvious example to look to in an America deeply divided by the war in Vietnam.  Godard’s reworking of classic American genres can be seen in films as diverse as Bonnie and Clyde and Chelsea Girls, but probably reaches its zenith with Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver in 1976.  Here was a film which confused genres but also mixed jazz and philosophy, religion and psychosis to give America a window through which to examine itself in the wake of its failures in Vietnam and a decade of social unrest.  Here, in the spirit of Godard was a film which took the idea of ordinary decent American hero and turned it on its head mercilessly.  Godard’s Nietzschean aphorisms were to be the inspiration for one of the biggest commercial hits for the generation which followed in Scorsese’s wake, with Quentin Tarrantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994.  Tarrantino turned the mixing of genres into an art form all its own and dressed it up with some of the smartest dialogue since the days of Billy Wilder, but it was all a bit too slick, with the dialogue more clever than intelligent, and ultimately a triumph of style over substance. 

Ultimately, cinema is Godard’s vocation.  His is a secular conversion according to Brody, firstly to art but specifically to cinema, and his holy city was Paris, birthplace of theatrical cinema.  The depth of this conversion can be seen in another aphorism from his early critical writing: “At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.”  In this phrase the barriers between cinema, its audience and its makers disappear and Godard’s existence and that of the cinema are already fused (Brody p3).  This fusion can be seen in full flight in Godard’s official cinematic autobiography over forty years later, JLG/JLG:autoportrait de Decembre (1994).

In Praise of Eloge de L’amour (In Praise of Love, 2001)

Watching this again it is clear to see its logical placement at the end of the Histoire(s) journey, as Godard begins in the present in beautiful classical black and white celluloid and ends up in the past in painterly saturated high definition video.  The ironies abound as usual but the message is very clear, the classical western search for meaning is pointless for their is no meaning to life, only love.  For Godard, like Nietzsche and Weil before him, we must fall in love with loving not try to understand it as this is something which we will simply and spectacularly fail at.  The levels of discussion engaged by Godard in this film are quite astounding as he examines to varying degrees the creative process, the French Resistance movement, Nazi Art theft, Christian Mysticism, American Imperialism and of course love in its many guises.

            Quotes:

“I am a painter with letters.  I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.”

“Although I felt ashamed of it at one time, I do like A bout de souffle very much, but now I see where it belongs – along with Alice in Wonderland.  I thought it was Scarface.”          

“Cinema is truth, twenty four frames a second.”

“Only violence helps where violence rules.” Bertolt Brecht

“And if cinema today still works on television, it’s because television itself has no love ... On television you can find power in its pure state, and the only things that people like seeing on TV at all are sports and cinema films, and that is because they seek love ...”