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
