I have
some good news, for everyone: cinema is in crisis. Which is hardly news, in a
way, for it has continuously been in crisis throughout its existence. It is not
a sign of future danger either – the future is an enigma, and it takes a lot of
irresponsibility to speculate about it, to pretend to decipher its mysteries –
but rather that of a seismographic sensibility to the stakes of the present. I
think there is no other symptom more relevant to an art’s vitality than its
constant reappraisal, in accordance with the constant reformulation of our
world. The real issue would be to know whether the forces that transform the
world are the same forces that transform the arts, how both feed on one
another, unless they are contradictory.
It seems
to me that another question arises today as well, which, in its own way,
parasitises the other two, muddies the waters, and obscures our reading of
cinema and its place in its own history: the nature of the reflection
determining our gaze and the way in which this reflection is structured.
Historically, that is to say, since the middle of the history of cinema, its
modern age, the tools of cinephilia have defined this framework, which was
conceived by André Bazin, himself a product of Jacques Maritain’s Social
Christianity. Its success and relevance are due to the fact that it was adopted
by a generation of young filmmakers, those of the Nouvelle Vague, for whom
theoretical writing was the foundation of their practice. Reflection and action
were two poles of a dialectic that would become the key to our understanding of
cinema, its singularities as well as its paradoxes.
Forgive
me for going back so far in time, more than half a century, in order to deal
with the current state of cinema, but the problem of time seems vital to me
when trying to understand where we are exactly. This is why we should begin by
asking ourselves both the question of what this original cinephilia is exactly
and what its alternative might have been.
I
postulate, rightly or wrongly, that any reflection on cinema is consciously or
unconsciously based on the ambiguous nature of cinema’s relationship with the
other arts. And, consequently, with their theory. From the earliest days of
cinema, a contrast existed between the proponents of a cinema in line with the
synchronous history of the avant-garde on the one hand and the proponents of
its intrinsic bastardism on the other – torn between popular literature and
symbolist imagery. André Bazin and Cahiers du cinéma, for their part, chose to
examine praxis and to build an essentialist bubble out of it. Cinema was, as it
were, elsewhere, unrelated to the old issues.
The
various Nouvelles Vagues that spread through the world federated around this
approach.
At the
centre of it all was the question of filming and the ethics of filming, and the
freedom of the auteur, which allowed all idiosyncrasies. But from the beginning
of the 1960s, and more extremely afterwards, this cinephilia was doubly
cornered: by the repressed relationship with the visual arts – Jean-Luc Godard
made this the centre of his work – and the socio-political evolution of the
world, which was shaken up by the youth movement that materialised in France in
May 68 and in the United States in the Summer of Love of 1967.
Put
simply, the relationship with the visual arts questioned the form of modern
cinema, its relationship with figuration and narration, while the upheaval that
swept across contemporary societies questioned the place or even the legitimacy
of the auteur.
Everything
that seemed clear became blurred; everything the new cinema had been built on
was consequently called into question, even by its main artisans.
This
profound and insoluble question of whether or not cinema is part of the visual
arts left its mark on me personally. Is cinema the “seventh art”, a term that
is often used without really understanding it, or is it something other than an
art, perhaps even the philosopher’s stone that the 20th-century avant-gardes
were searching for, the sublation of the arts, in the Hegelian sense of the
term. Cinema as an art, indeed, but one that would possess the power to look at
the other arts, to solve the mysteries of the representation of the world, in
short, to perform the miracle of the reproduction of perception as a whole, the
access to which haunts the history of painting – Turner similarly solved the
search for movement by way of abstraction.
I often
think of what Ingmar Bergman said about Tarkovsky moving freely through spaces
whose doors he himself had knocked on his entire life.
In this
sense I have always been confused by the misunderstandings sparked off by the
distinction between experimental cinema, heir to the early-20th-century Dadaist
(Hans Richter) and Surrealist (Man Ray, Buñuel) endeavours, and the narrative
cinema that established itself very early on as popular entertainment,
gradually winning its spurs. Venom and Eternity (1951) by the founder of
Lettrism, Isidore Isou, should in my opinion be regarded as the harbinger of
the Nouvelle Vague. And, on the other side of the Atlantic, a similar break
brought about by a generation of experimental filmmakers who challenged
everything that came before them, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Stan
Brakhage or John Cassavetes, was the basis of the free cinema to come, of New
Hollywood, if you like. Especially in terms of the formal reformulation of
cinema’s aesthetics, which far less affected the Nouvelle Vague. Through
superimposition and black magic (Anger), abstraction (Brakhage), a diaristic
style (Mekas), dramaturgy and the status of the actor (Cassavetes), or the use
of the zoom as a reinvention of the fixed shot, liberated from the static
camera obscura (Warhol), it is not the syntax but the very texture of cinema
that is at stake.
I, for
my part, regard cinema as a whole: narrative cinema has always fed on
experimental works just as the latter have always been inspired by the limits
or deadlocks of figuration. What I mean is that there is some Brakhage in
Michael Bay and some Warhol in Fassbinder or Almodóvar.
At the
heart of these matters, as is often the case when it comes to questioning the
contemporary, is the work of Jean-Luc Godard, initially a product of classical
cinephilia and haunted until sundown by his questioning of and by the doubt
eating away at this same cinephilia, the knot of suffering that has defined his
art for a long time now.
Theory
is thought in motion, thought in its capacity to take hold – including in
strategic terms – of the issues of a present that is constantly redefined. At
what point, when exactly, did cinema cease to be thought? When did it lose the
vital, essential link between the practice of an art and its reflection? I fear
that many irresistible forces have contributed to what I continue to perceive
as the failure of a generation.
First of
all, I would say that cinema has been the victim of its own prestige, and
(auteur) theory of its international success, which has opened wide the doors
of the academy. As soon as film thought became an academic discipline, it
became fixed; it ceased to be the continuation of filmmakers’ material and
practical concerns. Who, today, is seriously interested in how lenses transform
space, particularly by the long focal lengths specific to modern cinema? Who
wonders about the monocular perspective as a limit to cinema’s reproduction of
the real? Or, again, who explores the disparity between the open, free field of
novel or modern-theatre writing and the narrow limits of the conventions
governing the work of committees and commissions holding the power of life and
death over cinematographic works? Not to mention series, whose standard-bearers
seem all too happy to have a go at applying the tissue of conventions and
platitudes from American screenwriting textbooks.
What I
am getting at is the point when living theory becomes dead ideology. In the
hands of university professors, who see it as a chance to add a touch of
modernity to their teaching, thought in motion becomes a doxa, an assemblage of
rules, of automatisms, no longer based on anything since we have forgotten
their very source, the source of youth, of the most spontaneous poetry.
If I
wanted to take my reflection another step further and be more provocative than
I wish to be in this context, I would say that it is time, today, to seriously,
and responsibly, confront the failure of cinephilia. I do not mean to cast
doubt on its achievements, nor on its critical importance within 20th-century
thinking about the image: it is of paramount importance. But the very success
of this treasure of film history should open our eyes and force us to admit
that it is a moment of cinema, that this moment is long past because it no
longer produces anything new, if not a form of tetany resulting in the idea
that the totality of cinema would have been thought in the era of 1960s
modernity and of classical cinema before that, and that the only thing left for
us today is to be satisfied with the values and tools of an ironic, or rather
non-duped postmodernity, if not lapsing into baroque grotesques.
What I
mean is that in a world of proliferating images, of all kinds, we cannot but
notice the fragility of the place of cinephile thought, which has become a
fall-back position, whereas, until recently, it was still at the centre of the
debate.
Once its
great principles had been acquired, once film had been recognized as a
legitimate object of study, once its auteur had gained the prestige that was
formerly reserved for those practising older and more serious disciplines, once
its legitimacy had been recognized to be halfway between high and low culture,
we did not move an inch, it seems. I have witnessed the walls of a – university
– stronghold being constructed so as to protect, around the guardians of this
temple, values that have not produced anything useful or relevant for a very
long time.
I say
this all the more uneasily as I put myself not only in the position of essayist
here but also in that of a filmmaker examining theory, asking the question of
knowing, of understanding, in what way it would have been useful or stimulating
to me beyond what I learned by contributing to Cahiers du cinéma for five
years, between 1980 and 1985. The answer, as far as I am concerned, and it
could – perhaps – be different for others, is brutal: nothing. And, as nature
has gifted me with a rather contrary spirit, I am left with the feeling that I
had to swim against the tide of ephemeral conceptions, of lucky charms, of
instantly forgotten fashions of a drifting cinephile thought, determined by a
late connection with Bourdieusian sociology, dabbling in the mirror games of
postmodernity and naively running after the prestige of the visual arts, ever
since the latter have invaded the field of the moving image via the practice of
installation art, however fragile and questionable.
Please
allow me to look to the past one last time before coming to less negative
considerations, although I am in many ways a supporter of the powers of the
negative, which were a great inspiration to me.
When
historical cinephilia was formed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, did the
theory of the visual arts have anything at all to say about cinema, about its
history and the powerful forces that determined its transformation? Not much,
in my opinion, and you do not have to be, as I was, a reader of Guy Debord and
the Situationists to observe that during those years, faced with the advent of
the New York School (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko...), the main question
troubling the European avant-gardes was their own political failure and the
rehashing of the deadlocks of abstraction, the repetition of transgressions
that weren’t even shocking anymore in 1930. Cinema was so far removed from the
concerns of the theory of the visual arts that it referred, even in its most
contemporary variations, such as Italian neorealism, to the the most basic
monocular reproduction of the world. Cinema’s question of figuration seemed
insignificant compared with the exploration of the obscurities or the
dazzlement of the unconscious through the means of abstraction and, even more so,
compared with the movement of art’s negation through happenings in their most
radical and extreme variations, such as Viennese Actionism. Or, again, the
Hamburg Theses of Debord, Vaneigem and Kotanyi which signalled the Situationist
renunciation of art in favour of the “realization of philosophy”.
I am
writing this to recall how cinephile thought was also a powerful antidote to
the destructive forces at work within the avant-gardes and how it enabled the
budding filmmakers of the time, undoubtedly the richest and most prolific
generation in the history of film, to find a basis for a practice of
representing the world, which the visual arts were denying them.
We will
have to come to the present. I am going to try and do that. I would like to
begin with the issue of theory, given that I reject cinephilia for its
ossification into ideology and dogma.
In his
recent book A History of Pictures, David Hockney, whom I consider to be the
main contemporary thinker of the image, apart from being the greatest living
painter, pursues a fascinating reflection on the origins of representation: how
it was long built around a relationship with the monocular perspective, with
the technical evolution of lenses and their usage, and the technique of the
camera obscura. As much as these tools allow him an infinitely stimulating
rereading of the classical era of painting, he also deals with their modern
reappraisal. The Cubist moment was a pivotal event in this regard, breaking
with the traditional reference points of perspective through a multiplication
of angles for one and the same image.
In my
view, Hockney does not go far enough, in the sense that his view is not
supported by the theory of cinema, which has over time forgotten being a theory
of perception – except with Gilles Deleuze who, primarily in The Movement
Image, has been one of the very last great thinkers of cinema. It is indeed
from the point of view of movement – and of the multiplication of perspectives
and axes within a sequence, not within a shot, which is not the true syntagm of
cinema – that the question of cinema as an answer to Hockney’s concerns plays
out, as a way of questioning the limits of the original camera obscura. The
movement of the camera, ever since it can be carried, and the use of long lenses,
including indoors, ever since we have sensitive enough opticals at our
disposal, indeed brings us several steps closer, I think, to the reproduction
of perception, which is finally within reach.
Hockney
refuses to take stock of these questions at work in cinema, which is the limit
of his reflection, but it seems to me that the last breakthrough in his most
recent work is essential, in the sense that it suggests placing painting back
at the heart of the history of images. To summarize it schematically, he does
not consider the shift from painting to photography as a break but a continuity
in which the decisive invention is not so much the rival reproduction of the
real as it is the ability to fix – on photographic paper – an image that
painters had already known for a long time through their use of perspective and
which was at the source of its techniques and their evolution.
The
importance of this idea lies in its relegitimization of the age-old artistic
theory developed around painting at the heart of cinema, which could quite
reasonably be considered the continuation of the invention of photography.
Fundamentally, the question I am trying to ask would be to know if it would not
be in the interest of cinema today to confront the wealth of reflections that
have, since the Renaissance, been concerned with considering both the question
of the reproduction of the world and the even more essential question of the
exploration of perception. If I were asked what I think is most useful to teach
in today’s film schools, I would recommend these two tracks.
Besides,
in order to support these intuitions, it would suffice to observe how the
thinkers of the image that Jean-Luc Godard – the most authentically plastic of
all the great modern filmmakers – most often refers to are Elie Faure and,
above all, André Malraux, whose brilliance and staggering juxtapositions –
theoretical short circuits – most certainly continue to haunt us.
What I
am trying to say here is how poorly equipped cinephilia is to face these
questions, which are at the heart of the understanding of cinema’s mysterious
contemporary nature, whose very elements still seem to escape us. Whereas the
history of the arts offers us a wealth of stimulating opportunities to reinvent
our relationship with the moving image and, perhaps, to set it back in the long
history that ended up being obscured by the opposition between classical cinema
and modernity, a productive time.
Who is thinking cinema today, from which point
of view and based on which values? And what does cinema think of itself,
according to which ethics and principles? Two questions of a very different
nature, whose answers seem to have crumbled – especially on the internet – and
whose coherence has become infinitely difficult to imagine.
Seen
from a limited angle, that of French cinema, it seemed to me that, although I
was not part of it myself, the strong personalities of Serge Daney and Claude
Lanzmann served as reference points for a while by founding a sort of funeral
postscript to cinephilia, which was post-leftist rather than post-modern and
defined by the question of the taboo: on the one hand, the “tracking shot in
Kapò” which was criticized by Jacques Rivette in an essay about Gillo
Pontecorvo’s film of the same name (Pontecorvo made The Battle of Algiers and
had previously been an indestructible idol of anti-colonialist cinema) and
which, for Daney, becomes obscenity itself, the aestheticisation of
deportation, at a time when he is giving a deeply moving literary form to his
own hitherto repressed personal history of a father he never knew, a Polish Jew
and victim of the camps.
Claude
Lanzmann, on the other hand, the auteur of the astonishing masterpiece Shoah,
by grasping deportation in a transcendental way and refraining from using
archival images, built a film ethics around this question that made a lasting
impression.
The
combination of these two issues served as theory for a generation of filmmakers
who were themselves rarely directly affected by these historical questions but
who were looking for a moral code which the ruins of classical cinephilia,
already critically wounded by leftism, were unable to provide.
The
paradox of this moment in cinema theory is that it had nothing constructive to
propose other than the establishing of some code of restriction. Complete with
the obligingly raised spectre of the death of cinema. I wouldn’t have liked to
start making films in those dire circumstances, and it was Arnaud Desplechin
who, in La Sentinelle – a film I always thought Serge Daney would have loved –
managed to untie this knot and rescue cinema from this curse. But wasn’t there
a fundamental truth to all this and wasn’t Serge Daney, who climbed aboard the
post-Bazinian train during the 1970s, nearly clairvoyant with regard to the
deadlocks of cinephilia around which he had established himself and whose
unravelling, decomposing and self-denial he witnessed while he was himself
dying?
What is
left of these questions? Do they remain, did they get past the borders of
France? Not really. Do they appeal to young filmmakers? Do they have a
posterity, or are they only relevant within the context of this reflection on
the present state of cinema? Hardly.
When
trying to identify the place of a reformulation of cinephilia today, it is
impossible not to situate it on the internet and in the latter’s redefinition
of both the viewing modes of cinema and the way in which we move through its
history. It is an irrelevant commonplace and yet a truth worth mentioning that
today’s generations have an infinitely wider access to history – to the entire
history of cinema as well as to its present – unimaginable for pre-digital
humanity, who only had access through the Cinematheque to a fraction of the
masterpieces of cinema, some of them remaining perfectly unattainable.
We don’t
see everything, but we have access to almost everything, free of charge even;
cinephilia has dissolved into a multitude of conflicting cliques, each
organized around one fragment of one glorious past, to the extent that even its
symbolic value continues to diminish. There are still films, often very good
ones too – more good films are made today than at any other time - whose stakes
play out on an ad hoc basis: will it win the Oscar, the Palm, the Lion, the
Bear, will it be nominated? While filmmakers as auteurs are fading. Who today
knows how to follow the thread of an oeuvre, to understand what is at work in
an artist’s search, however senseless and futile? It’s all about this film
right here, and after that everything starts all over again. In the digital
fragmentation and its dilution of theoretical pertinence today, the entire
legacy of auteur cinephilia is pretty much called into question.
Which
theory is entering into dialogue with cinema in the present, which theory is
accepted, has the right to help shape the inspiration of filmmakers? To whom is
one accountable? I am a little afraid of the answer, to be honest.
It seems
to me that it is sociology – it is easier to say the political – and
communitarianism. But is this a good or a bad thing? And am I not venturing
onto fragile, shifting sands? I believe there is an injunction to address these
questions, even if I doubt that I will be able to formulate a satisfactory, let
alone consensual, answer.
We know
the evils of our time. Global warming, ecological disaster, an insane increase
in social inequalities, the impossibility of managing migratory flows and,
above all, the inability of those who govern, of states, to give a satisfactory
or even vaguely reassuring response to these anxiety-inducing subjects, not to
mention wars, epidemics or unemployment. Conversely, it seems as if the
self-destructive opposition to the apprehension of these evils has in our
democracies become an electoral asset.
It is
only natural that filmmakers are citizens too and thus legitimately involved in
the issues society is facing. But the political is the domain of the complex,
and it does not necessarily produce good cinema. What’s more, fictional cinema
struggles – which is normal – to grasp social issues that are analyzed or
represented much more adequately by publishing, the press or even
documentaries, longer and therefore more legitimate forms that possess the
ability to treat fragile or sensitive subjects with the necessary rigour,
precision and exactingness that cinema can only very exceptionally offer.
From my
point of view, the sociological is a bad branch to catch hold of, not least
because simplifications, amalgamations, and dramatization risk cutting out the
facts, reducing them to comfortable generalities and resulting in an
interpretation that is both erroneous and harmful.
I do not
wish to criticize or delegitimize a cinema that aims to be accountable to the
state and its citizens; on the contrary, it is perfectly commendable. I just
want to say that I find it very difficult, and sometimes even dangerous, and
that I do not at any rate discern a key there that would allow us to think
contemporary, let alone future, cinema in a satisfactory or stimulating way.
What to
think of communitarianism, which has become a factor influencing our societies
and which in turn examines cinema for lack of being examined by it, which would
seem more fundamental, riskier and more satisfying anyway to our minds; I have
always been convinced that it is the role of cinema and art to examine society
and certainly not to be examined by it, especially not in terms of censorship,
the eternal hallmark of totalitarian regimes.
I was an
adolescent in the 1970s. I have often repeated this and will continue to do so
because this period, and its questioning of all society’s values, left an
indelible mark on my life. I lived and was actively involved in a
counterculture that advocated the liberation of everyday life, and I was
engaged in forms of leftism that promoted individual liberation rather than
collectivist utopias and support for authoritarian or even genocidal regimes. I
have seen the liberation of homosexuality in words and deeds, I have seen the
revival of feminism and its decisive victories. I have seen the invention of a
Franco-Maghrebi identity, of a culture originating in the districts the African
immigrants were relegated to, encouraged to settle in France in order to serve
as labour for Gaullist France’s great infrastructure works.
I was
less interested, afterwards, in the identitarian drift that followed from these
steps forward, nor in their political or ideological instrumentalization.
Perhaps they were fatal; perhaps they were necessary, I don’t know. I have
personally never thought of my relationship with others in terms of the colour
of their skin or their sexual preferences. As for my relationship with women
and feminism – which would be my lifelong favourite political party because I
am utterly convinced that toxic masculinity has become the source of all evil
in our world – it was Groucho Marx who gave the best definition when he said
that man is a woman like any other. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I add
these more personal comments not just to define who I am but, in this instance,
“where I’m speaking from”, to use the jargon of the political years. I
personally think that cinema can be communitarian – I do not think it is
intended that way, but why not – but this communitarianism is nevertheless
entirely unsuited to taking the place of the absence of theoretical thinking on
cinema, which we have to take stock of today.
I will
have to address Hollywood. I have practically nothing positive to say about it
except that this industry’s prosperity and new modalities do not delight me,
they frighten or even repulse me, because what they have recently produced is
diametrically opposed to what I loved or admired about the American cinema
that, throughout film history, provided this art with several of its greatest
masters.
We are
witnessing the triumph of series, the distribution of films through digital
platforms and the confiscation of screens in the service of (mostly
Disney-studio) franchises, whose hegemony now seems absolute.
Why take
the trouble to finance a film that is not meant to provoke a sequel, a
spin-off, or another film “in the universe of” and whose unsure relationship
with the public is unpredictable? For a long time now, in Hollywood, the
territory of film has been shrinking. To the benefit of an independent cinema
forced to make do with ridiculous budgets – and thus limited in its practicing
of the contemporary syntax of cinema, which is reserved for major productions.
And
Netflix, and Disney Plus, and Apple, etc.: hasn’t cinema taken refuge there?
Haven’t Alfonso Cuarón, Martin Scorsese, the Safdie brothers, and Noah Baumbach
found political asylum there? I have even been there myself, since my film Wasp
Network is distributed by Netflix in most places, except where it had been
bought in advance — first of all in France, where it was an honest public
success on the big screen. No other distributor offered the producers of the
film a viable alternative.
If there
is one issue cinema-thinking – which could use some sorely missing theoretical
tools – comes up against, it is the confusion generated by the profound
transformation of film distribution and financing. First of all, do the
platforms intend to finance ambitious contemporary auteur cinema, beyond the
incidental effect of fame that comes with the rivalry in this field of newcomers
determined to take over a large share of the market? In other words, will
Netflix, in need of prestige and symbolic value today, still need it next year
or the year after? Not really, I guess. As for the studios, will they return to
film as a business model or is the deviation towards franchises on the one hand
and series on the other definitive?
In
short, is there still room for a free cinema on the big screen? I believe that
if this window is not closing, it is at least shrinking before our eyes. The only
real model left is an independent, radical, daring cinema, alas with limited
distribution.
Am I
comfortable with that? Not really. I come from the visual arts originally; I
was influenced by contemporary poetry, and my musical tastes have most often led
me to artists on the margins’ margins, not to mention my aesthetic,
philosophical, and political convictions, which are of a terribly minority
nature within my generation. But if I chose to devote myself to cinema, it was
because of its majority status, because it was the last art form that
profoundly resonated with society, that wasn’t trapped in its stronghold, that
hadn’t suffered the overwhelming deviation of the visual arts, which opted for
an alliance with triumphant financial capitalism, choosing a false cynical
radicalism, which Guy Debord called “state Dadaism”, meant to promote it to
stratospheric heights.
The
cinema that inspired me, that I loved, that I have tried to practise myself is
an impure and open cinema, particularly accessible to those for whom cinema is
often the only opportunity to encounter art as vital, beneficial and, why not,
salutary.
Do I
think, in this regard, that Alfonso Cuarón, Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers,
and so many others have been right in choosing a form of security and
entrusting their films to Netflix? I don’t. I think that their films
demonstrate that the cinema I believe in is alive and feasible – most of these
films could have easily been financed without the help of Netflix or other
platforms – and that it is the extension, the continuation of an art that is
truly of our time, of our generation, that gives the most susceptible,
sensitive account of the transformation of the world, of beings, of time, so
many things that belong to cinema and which are in danger of getting lost or
forgotten in the flow of images; and, even if I have few certainties, I am
certain that this danger is very real, that facing it and persevering will
unite us, however powerful the forces we have to face.
At this
point, my reader has every right to ask me what this absent theory is, exactly,
that cinema in the present time would need. It seems I have already evoked the
indispensable back and forth between intuitive, spontaneous, uncontrolled
practice, often determined by the use of new tools or new mediums, and its
thought. I don’t mean to say that the development of the arts is the word of
the Pythia and that it is up to critics, essayists, and certain filmmakers too,
as I am doing at this very moment, to try to decipher its enigmas. But I do
think it might be important, perhaps even essential, that works generate what
Roberto Longhi called ekphrasis, that is to say the discourse made possible and
provoked by the questions, enigmas and breakthroughs that art in its quest for
life and its contradictions leaves unsolved. A writing that would be in
dialogue with the artists, a revelation of the work and by this very fact an
intercessor for the spectator.
I
understand this in the most literal sense, that of knowing how to read and
answer the questions raised day by day by the practice of film, but I would
also like to push this issue a little further and open it up to two fields
which seem to offer great potential within the present context. The first is
the unconscious, and the second is ethics.
Here,
more than elsewhere, I must speak in the first person and share concerns that
have always haunted me, even when they were losing ground in film reflection
and in the inspiration of filmmakers.
Applied
to cinema, and please forgive me the inevitable simplifications and shortcuts
when approaching that vast a subject, psychoanalysis enlightens us in two
different forms. The first, broadly Freudian, form reminds us that auteurs are
never entirely aware of what they are doing in their apprehension of characters
and their acts, in the same manner that writers, taking up their pen, do not
always write what they had planned to, as writing reveals thought rather than
thought freezing writing: in short, I mean that both filmmakers and writers,
however lucid they may be, do not always know what they are saying or doing
because their unconscious is at work.
In
another time, not long ago, this went without saying, and one went looking for
what motivated or determined the modern individual, for better or for worse, in
reflections on Ingmar Bergman’s, Michelangelo Antonioni’s or Jacques Tati’s
characters. I believe the same could be the case today, at a time when the
meaning of films, in its multiple forms, has more than ever become a subject of
debate and polemics. In films, as in any work of the mind, it is the
unconscious that acts. We open our doors to it and there is nothing more
precious than what it expresses through us once we refrain from commonplaces,
convenience, conventions and all the false dramatic rules determining
committees and commissions on which the present and future of cinema sadly all
too often depends, limiting and distorting the authentic inspiration and
desires of young filmmakers who are taught how not to be themselves by the dominant
rules of the film industry.
The
other dimension according to which psychoanalysis defines cinema I would like
to call broadly Jungian, in the sense that cinema in its entirety, even in its
most conventional and simplistic form, can – and, in my opinion, should – be
regarded as a collective unconscious. The world of images, the fantastic, the
imaginary, wherever it may lead us, often in the most disappointing or banal
ways, is the dream of our society, and it informs us, often without knowing,
about the state of the world better than any other art, with the exception
maybe of songs, of popular entertainment and music in all its forms, providing
a real-time account of what is flowing through our present time.
For
example, I have always considered Star Trek a quasi-documentary look at office
life and the interactions between employees, torn between their daily routine
and the dangers of the outside world; I only later realized what was literally
staring me in the face, that their spaceship is called “Enterprise”...
On a
darker note, it is difficult not to consider the proliferation of films that
are in some way haunted by destruction and the end of the world, and built
around Marvel superheroes, a sort of revenge of masculinity, which is
threatened by the redefinition of the place of women in modern societies.
And I
deliberately choose two rather simple tendencies with the sole intention of
showing that unravelling these threads could contribute to thinking the truths,
including the unpleasant ones, that animate our time.
Which
brings me to ethics.
It
deserves to be examined, even if the present state of cinema might provide us
with few easy or satisfactory answers.
It is
not a question of morality for me, given that most of the works of Eisenstein
or Vertov could be defined as propaganda, that Rossellini himself made films
approved by the fascist state, that it can be painful to watch The Birth of a
Nation, one of film history’s masterpieces, that Bergman, Hitchcock and many of
the most eminent artists in the history of cinema have made Cold War films.
This does not detract from their genius. Not to mention Leni Riefenstahl, who
is denied her – important – place only because of her Nazism and the benefits
she derived from it. A great filmmaker like Xie Jin, the inspired auteur of Two
Stage Sisters and Woman Basketball Player No. 5, had no scruples about pursuing
his career during the Cultural Revolution’s darkest hours.
I rather
consider it a question of practice, like when André Bazin spoke of a “forbidden
montage” when two antinomic shots are put together, a wild beast on the one
hand and an actor disguised as an explorer on the other. Or when Claude
Lanzmann, who I quoted earlier, examines the legitimacy of representing, of
fictionalizing the concentration camps and the gas chambers. Everyone has the
right to argue and to defend his or her point of view on this issue. It is no
less relevant and it has, above all, the merit of going to the utmost limit of
a question that arises on a smaller scale in every single gesture of the
practice of cinema.
Who
finances films, where does the money come from, whose accomplices do we become
when spending that money, when practising our art? What did we give up, what
did we have to compromise with when we needed to meet the demands of the market
and the industry dictating their rules? The practices of which television
channel, basing its audience on which demagogy, do we approve of? To which
fantasized demand, to which “general public”, despised by those who claim to
speak in their name, have we given in?
For
example, fifteen years after the fact, I discovered that my film Sentimental
Destinies had been distributed in the United States by a company, and a very
sympathetic one at that, whose main shareholder happened to be the
extreme-right agitator Steve Bannon. Am I comfortable with that? No, I’m not.
Do I have a choice? I don’t know, perhaps, but things would be much clearer if
these issues were discussed and laid out in black and white. The same goes for
American megaproductions adapting their scenarios to the demands of the Chinese
government’s politico-confucian censorship in order to reach the planet’s
largest audience.
I am
often reminded of the title of an article by François Truffaut, ironically
called ‘Clouzot at Work, or the Reign of Terror’. We have to acknowledge, as
Truffaut did, the image, widespread at the time and more diffuse today, of the
demiurge-filmmaker who abused his authority and power to the benefit of an
unspeakable quest, an absolute as vague as it is hard to formulate, and whose
whims, anger and impertinence are as many tangible expressions of it,
remaining, however, inaccessible to ordinary mortals. I consider the opposite
important, that filmmakers are accountable to their crew and that the quality
of concentration, the richness of sharing, the clarity of intentions all form a
decisive part of the collective adventure of a film shoot. I have often,
whenever I had the opportunity, thanked the crew of my films and reminded them
how much cinema is the sum of energies relayed by a director, whose art often
depends on his ability to listen, to pay attention to ideas, to the flow of
things that arises on set day after day. His talent also depends on knowing how
to give rise to that. For me, it is an old and deep conviction that the best of
cinema depends on the quality of everyone’s commitment to a strange undertaking
which has to do with the reinvention and re-enchantment of the real, but which
is also a parallel world, a parallel life in which everyone must be able to
surpass themselves, to find fulfilment and, in a way, to give meaning to what
is a little more than a job, the commitment of a life, an intimate quest.
This in
no way means that I would renounce what I have often declared, namely that
directing is first and foremost a force of disruption in the automatisms that
structure the functioning of a set. It is indeed up to the mise en scène to
constantly unsettle conventions and conveniences, forms that are only alive if
they are constantly shaken up and questioned: and the more we shake them up,
the more we refuse to content ourselves with ready-made answers, the more we
put into practice the conviction that cinema can and should be a thousand
things – what it was in the past or what remains to be explored, that this
territory is infinite and the only one that really deserves exploring – the
more chances we get to reveal the very meaning of our art and its place in the
world. But none of that can be achieved alone. It needs to be extended,
deepened, applied by everyone, with all attendant risks and with the
exactingness necessary to realize this ambition.
This
applies to all filming and to all filmmakers who have chosen to practise their
art outside the laws and rules of the streaming industry and who have been able
to preserve their often hard-won freedom – cinema’s supreme value – to their
own benefit, of course, but also, and just as much, to the benefit of their
collaborators. A film is a microcosm, all of society, every stratum is
represented in it, and the same waves, the same tensions run through it, except
that these values are put to the test more immediately, more urgently, on a
daily basis and with immediately observable consequences. This is why I attach
inestimable value to an ethical practice of cinema whose beneficial effects,
pleasures as well as dangers, would be shared by all, amounting to a
disalienated work at the heart of the very territory of alienation. I talked
about accountability, and I believe one must first of all submit one’s work to
the respect of these values.
As you
can guess, I do not really like what has become of the current film industry in
the hands of executives who look more like business managers produced by
business schools, or of senior civil servants, who are often people of great
quality but whose instincts, ambitions and imagination are a million miles away
from those of the adventurers, the players and visionaries who built this
cathedral we all share, the cathedral of the first century of cinema.
In this
regard, I have always put my Faith in what is called independent cinema –
structures whose historical models would be François Truffaut’s Les Films du
Carrosse or Barbet Schroeder’s and Eric Rohmer’s Les Films du Losange. But this
would disregard the work of producers who have, in the often hostile
undergrowth of various film-funding bodies and in the maze of the banking
system, managed to support – beyond any profit logic, happy not to be out of
pocket themselves – singular, atypical works against the values of their time.
Works by authentic authors who are themselves carried by nothing but their
convictions, their obsessions but also their limits and their fragilities, the
raw material of their work.
It is this ecosystem, rephrased time and again in different cultures and countries, more or less dependent on cinema-favourable legislation or patronage, or on nothing at all, that has kept alive reflection, research, daring and, first of all, a form of integrity that is indispensable to the best practice of cinema.
We have
seen the wave of streaming cinema grow, we have seen cinema become an industry,
and this industry become dominant – and I am hesitant to use the words
“mind-numbing” or “alienating ”, which would have, until recently, flown quite
naturally out of my pen without even feeling the need to justify it. Yet whereas,
in another time, one could dream of cinema as a utopia, it seems to me that it
has become perfectly dystopian and that, in the name of entertainment or
whitewashed in conformism and bland good intentions, it is essentially devoted
to the perpetuation and flattery of the most conventional emotions and of the
lowest, if not inane, desires. In this respect, I am happy enough when a film,
for lack of a concern with nature, light and the human, at least refrains from
being harmful.
This is
why, deep down, today, cinema must be made against cinema. Especially if it
wishes to embody, within the new world of images, that which is most precious
and most vital: the freedom to think, to invent, to search, to wander and to
err, in short to be the antidote we need so as to preserve our faith and keep
the flame alive, which it is our duty to know how to protect and transmit,
generation after generation, in a battle that is never won.
March –
April 2020
In 2018,
by analogy with similar initiatives in other art forms, Sabzian created a new
yearly tradition: Sabzian invites a guest to write a State of Cinema and to
choose an accompanying film. Once a year, the art of film is held against the
light: a speech that challenges cinema, calls it to account, points the way or
refuses to define it, puts it to the test and on the line, summons or embraces
it, praises or curses it. A plea, a declaration, a manifest, a programme, a
testimony, a letter, an apologia or maybe even an indictment. In any case, a
call to think about what cinema means, could mean or should mean today.
For the
third edition on 26 June 2020, Sabzian was honoured to welcome the French
filmmaker and author Olivier Assayas. He had chosen Tarkovsky’s The Mirror to
accompany his lecture. Sadly, due to the corona crisis, the screening could not
take place. Olivier Assayas’ State of Cinema was streamed online.
State of Cinema 2020 : Cinema in the Present Tense. By Olivier Assayas. Sabzian , June 26 , 2020
Sabzian. Video
