Is the Cinema Really Dead?

[The] early nineties have not been as encouraging as the early seventies. ... It is not as easy now to believe in the medium's vitality or its readiness for great challenges. So many of the noble figures of film history are dead now, and who can be confident that they are being replaced?.... The author sees fewer films now. He would as soon go for a walk, look at paintings, or take in a ball game. [1994]

It has become harder, this past year, to go back in the dark with hope or purpose. The place where "magic" is supposed to occur has seemed a lifeless pit of torn velour, garish anonymity, and floors sticky from spilled sodas. Forlornness hangs in the air like damp; things are so desolate, you could set today's version of Waiting for Godot in the stale, archaic sadness of a movie theater.... This is not just a lamentation that movies are in a very bad state. Rather, I feel the medium has sunk beyond anything we dreamed of, leaving us stranded, a race of dreamers.... [1996]

I still look at movies the same way today that I did [at the time of the New Wave], but I know it's not the same world, exactly. Even if we enter the theater the same way, we don't go out the same way. [Question: How is it different?] Less hope.... [1996]

Cinema's hundred years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories, and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. This doesn't mean that there won't be any more new films that one can admire. But such films won't simply be exceptions; that's true of great achievements in any art. They have to be heroic violations of the norms and practices which now govern moviemaking everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world ? which is to say, everywhere. And ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, will continue to be astonishingly witless; already the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative filmmaking, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art, in the hopes of reproducing past success. Every film that hopes to reach the largest possible audience is designed as some kind of remake. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the twentieth century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art. [1997]

It is perhaps too late to lament the disappearance of the foreign film from a major place in our culture. After many depressing conversations, I have found that younger moviegoers, reared on little but American movies, imagine that mourners for the foreign cinema are talking about some fool's paradise of zinc counters and cappuccino, a pretentious refuge for bearded losers and solemn girls in black. "Cinéastes" ? isn't that what they used to call them? It is worse than useless to tell such moviegoers that Bergman and Kurosawa, Antonioni and Fellini, Godard and Truffaut ? to name just the most obvious figures ? defined our moods in late adolescence, enlarged our sense of romance and freedom and passionate melancholy as well as the expressive possibilities of movies, and that their influence was so pervasive that Bonnie and Clyde as well as the careers of Woody Allen, Paul Mazursky, Robert Altman, and a host of other American directors would not have been possible without them.... One must quickly add that the current French, Italian, German, and Japanese cinemas are but a remnant of their former selves, and that the new movies from China, Russia, Finland, and Iran, however fascinating, cannot replace the old masterworks in excitement and glamour. "Where are the great foreign films now?" a friend asks, by which he means that he refuses to feel guilty about not going when there are no masterpieces to see. He has a point, but even when a good French movie opens here (like Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie, in 1996), it's hard to scare up much of an audience for it. [1998]

    One could cite other recent texts voicing the same sentiments, butthese five representative samples ? drawn from four highly respectedwriters whom I'd prefer not to identify right away ? should suffice. Iwon't identify them just yet because I'm interested primarily in whatthey're saying, not who they are. Their striking similarity in tone andposition tempts one to conclude that they all swim in the same water,which further suggests that they must be right to some extent.

    But are they? Or, more to the point, can they be right? The firstquotation laments our lack of confidence that "the noble figures offilm history ... are being replaced" and the fifth is equally morose:"the new movies from China, Russia, Finland, and Iran, however fascinating,cannot replace the old masterworks in excitement andglamour." But if I complained that no messiah has come along in twothousand years to replace Jesus, that we haven't yet found adequatesubstitutes for Brueghel or Shakespeare, that no novelists have comealong lately to fill the gaps left by Proust and Faulkner, and that nojazz musician since the fifties has displayed the genius of CharlieParker, would I be saying versions of the same thing, or something different?A replacement implies a duplication, or at least an equivalent,rather than something new. Furthermore, since Jesus, Brueghel,Shakespeare, Proust, Faulkner, and Parker may not have been adequatelyappreciated in their own times, anyone who came along to"replace" them probably wouldn't be adequately appreciated either.

    Maybe the first and fifth quotations are implying that, rather thaninsufficiently recognized "noble masters" or "masterworks," we lackmasters and masterworks period ? and that, unlike most of our historicalpredecessors, we're fully capable of rooting them out and recognizingtheir merits. But how do we root them out? Only a tiny fractionof finished films actually arrive in theaters, and if we're talkingabout foreign-language films in this country, we're talking about lessthan one percent of what gets shown commercially; very few criticsnowadays ? including the four represented above ? are likely to seeall of these. If the handful of foreign films that open here, the eliteless-than-one-percent, were the absolute best that's being made ? whichautomatically assumes that "the best" equals the most commercial ? thenwe might have the basis for making such a generalization.But what evidence supports that belief beyond wishfulthinking? Are we confident, for starters, that distributors see all thepossible candidates? And that they have such impeccable taste thatthey would recognize the best films as a simple matter of course? Orthat the best films, even if they saw them and recognized their merits,are invariably commercial propositions worth investing in?

    Still, it's the usual role of critics ? bolstered by such adages as"Cream rises to the top" (even if it takes a few centuries for someonelike Jesus) ? to make such pronouncements. To put it bluntly, we moreor less have to make such sweeping generalizations from time to timeif we expect to be listened to. To some degree, we all have to assumethat we have some idea of the value of what's being produced in a givenart form, even if we prove to be wrong in the long run, because toassume otherwise is to abnegate all responsibility about such matters.

    But once critics make such judgments, they owe it to their audiencesto convey how they arrived at them. So unless foreign film distributors inthe United States are all-seeing, all-knowing, preternaturally giftedguides in determining what's best in world cinema ? not only in the present,but also in the indefinite future ? there must be other sources forthese conclusions about the state of world cinema. Maybe these criticsattend certain foreign film festivals where they can view wider samples(although these, too, are highly restricted in relation to the sheer volumeof the films that get made), and maybe they read critics in other countriesin order to get some estimation of what others think about what'simportant ? although, in point of fact, two of the four writers cited aboverarely attend foreign festivals, and if they read foreign critics, there's scantevidence of it in their work. Maybe they read what some of their localcolleagues write about such festivals, and arrive at certain conclusions onthe basis of whether or not they agree with the overall drift of their colleagues'opinions. Or maybe they're simply pretending to possess a certainexpertise on matters that they know little or nothing about.

    My quarrel here is with texts and positions, not individuals, and Ihasten to add that I would never lodge an accusation of posturingagainst Susan Sontag, the author of the fourth quotation (drawn fromher article "A Century of Cinema") ? a world traveler fluent in severallanguages who attends many film festivals abroad. Though she doesn'tregard herself as a film critic, she has done enough legwork to qualifyher to judge the current state of world cinema, and even though I don'tagree with many of her conclusions, I don't consider her presumptuousin making them. The third quotation, which is more about the climateof moviegoing than the state of the art per se, comes from Jean-LucGodard's press conference at the Toronto Film Festival in 1996, and I'veincluded it here only because Godard's own pronouncements about thedeath of cinema over the last several years have probably influencedother commentators ? perhaps Sontag most of all. But when DavidThomson, the author of the first two quotations, and David Denby, theauthor of the fifth, make comparable claims about the contemporarystate of the art, I'm less inclined to take them seriously, because I see agood deal more than they do and seldom feel that they're attentive toanything more than what's currently available, commercial, and fashionable(a very thin slice of the pie) ? thereby leaving out most of whatkeeps the art of world cinema, including American cinema, alive.

    If Thomson and Denby suddenly changed their minds and decidedthat exciting and important things were happening in the cinemas of Iranand Taiwan, they would probably no longer be publishing in the samemagazines, because mainstream publications aren't interested in suchsubjects, even as theoretical possibilities. They're interested almostexclusively in commerce and fashion, not in art when it comes to film,and for this reason alone declarations about the death of cinema as an artform from the likes of Denby, Thomson, and even Sontag can easily betranslated into expedient defenses of these magazines' own positions ascommercial vendors. Such declarations even become godsends to editorswho are tired of feeling challenged by the number of things goingon in world cinema that they choose to ignore. (Although, as I'll show alittle later, even Sontag's more nuanced and informed articulation of thedeath-of-cinema position had to be significantly modified before it couldappear in a mainstream American publication.) Paradoxically, they alsowant to promote ? and to benefit from the promotion of?new commercialfilms as art objects, because unless one decides that art and entertainmentare incompatible, new works of entertainment have to bepraised as works of art if they're going to be taken seriously.

    So the ideal film columnist in a magazine like Esquire would writealternate columns declaring the death of cinema as an art form and therebirth of cinema as an art form every time a "special" mainstreamproperty comes along. Thomson filled that bill perfectly during hisextended stint at that magazine. He boldly inaugurated his column bydeclaring that movies were at an end, then promptly resurrected themin his second column in order to praise L.A. Confidential, somethinghe would do again for The Truman Show. In a comparable spirit,Denby, who didn't share Thomson's enthusiasm for The Truman Show,seemed to base much of his own despair about the future of film as anart form on the "difficulty [of L.A. Confidential] in finding a large theateraudience" ? "a matter of much chagrin to me and a number ofother movie critics I've spoken to." I don't happen to share Thomsonand Denby's enthusiasm for or even their interest in that particularfilm, but even if I did, I doubt that I could rest my conclusions aboutthe survival of cinema as an art form on either the existence or the commercialsuccess of one particular movie. I'm pretty sure that they don'teither, but it's part of the peculiar hysteria produced in mainstream popculture to foster such temporary impressions. And one of the naturalconsequences of such a stance is that Denby, like Thomson and someof his other colleagues, seesaws regularly between announcing thedeath of cinema and hyping a certain number of current releases. Onefeels at times that he and his colleagues are merely trying to do what'sexpected of them, and contradictions of this kind are virtually inscribedin the editorial dynamics at their publications.

    Indeed, a good deal of journalism is devoted to creating feedingfrenzies that are subsequently forgotten, usually in order to make roomfor new ones. It's a syndrome I'm susceptible to as well, for the pressureon consumer-oriented reviewing is always to make the products of aparticular week or month seem important regardless of whether theyare or not; after all, to treat a movie as unimportant is often tantamountto telling a reader to stop reading. But when another week or monthrolls around and it becomes necessary to treat another movie or set ofmovies as important, the reviewer and reader both have to experiencetemporary amnesia in order to keep the process going.

* * *

Tweaking the doomsday positions of Sontag, Thomson, Denby (in earlierpieces), and others in the April 1997 issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcottcountered their gloomy claims about the state of cinema with a listof twenty-odd recent favorites, not one of which was in any languageother than English. L.A. Confidential, which hadn't yet been released,didn't make it onto his hit parade, but his common ground with Thomsonand Denby, when it comes to nonmainstream world cinema, ismore significant than any polemical differences. In fact, Wolcott's deepestscorn was reserved for those "sullen Village Voice reviewers" who"praise movies so obscure that simply getting to the theater counts as aquest for the authentic." One of them, he pointed out, had the nerve towrite hyperbolically about a recent Godard video ? something that Wolcottpresumably couldn't be bothered to see himself.

    In other words, American film reviewers are expected to dispense acertain comfort to moviegoers by assuring them that what's available attheir local multiplex or video store is all that's worth seeing. If these reviewershappen upon films that aren't available at those outlets, they won't beable to run reviews of them in mainstream publications; so unless theywant to feel frustrated about their jobs, they accept the choices made bylarge distributors on their behalf. Assigning central importance to someonelike Godard in these circumstances can only sound irritating and elitist,and it's important to underline that there's nothing new about this bias;in mainstream terms, Godard has remained a marginal spokesman sincethe sixties, even if many of his critical and cinematic ideas have periodicallyentered the mainstream in simplified or garbled form.

    Writing in New York magazine in 1980, Dan Yakir noted thatGodard "had become a cultural nonperson," and blithely added that"It's possible that Godard was not even surprised" after Jean-Paul Belmondo? Godard's star in Breathless (1959) and Pierrot le fou (1965) ? recentlyasked him, "Can you still direct?" The fact that Godard haddirected over half a dozen released features and two extended FrenchTV series during the seventies ? a corpus of work with the collectiverunning time of almost two days ? obviously didn't count in this reckoningeither for Belmondo or Yakir because none of the Hollywood studioswere distributing this work. In other words, out of sight, out ofmind ? and anything not for immediate sale is out of sight. (As I'll showlater, the same skewered reasoning has given Orson Welles a mainstreamprofile of artistic inactivity over the last quarter-century of hislife, while he was working on literally dozens of projects.)

    One of the most sophisticated American film critics I know refusedto see Béla Tarr's seven-hour Sátántangó at the Toronto Film Festivalbecause he knew that if he really liked it he would feel frustrated aboutnot being able to write about it: "I'd rather see four terrible films," hebluntly informed me. An equally sophisticated colleague of his madeit to the first couple of hours of Sátántangó, which he liked, but thenhad to leave in order to attend the screening of something else he likedless that he knew his editor expected him to review. Although theprospect of a seven-hour film seems daunting ? even if it's shown withtwo intermissions, as Sátántangó usually is, in accordance with thefilmmaker's wishes ? when I selected the film as a "critic's choice" forthe Chicago International Film Festival, it drew nearly a full house ata commercial cinema, and there were very few walkouts. By contrast,the press screening in Toronto attracted only a handful of reviewers;most of the others logically concluded that such an experience, no matterhow rewarding, would only interfere with their jobs.

    Anomalies of this kind are both frequent and on the rise nowadays,especially at film festivals, and they point to a contradiction that is evenmore damaging than coupling end-of-cinema pronouncements withthe hawking of new commercial products: the assumption that audiences,unlike sophisticated critics, are intolerant of films that demandsome thought or patience. In my experience almost the reverse is true,and part of the reason for the critics' intolerance is the intolerance ofmost of their editors. This is what makes the death-of-cinema racket soattractive to certain critics as well as editors; if you decide in advancethat something like Sátántangó has to be a waste of time ? unlike theusual trash that gets reviewed ? you're bound to experience a certainrelief.

* * *

Susan Sontag's essay "A Century of Cinema" ? a generational lamentwhose validity for me both rests on and is partially thrown into doubtby its generational stance ? has by now appeared in many languagesaround the world as well as in many different English-language publications,including the The New York Times Magazine (February 25,1996), the "movie issue" of Parnassus: Poetry in Review (volume 22, nos.1 & 2, 1997), The Guardian, and at least two book-length collections ofessays. I've noted many interesting variations in this piece as it'sappeared in various settings, and assume that some of these representsubsequent revisions or afterthoughts on Sontag's part. But the moststriking differences appear between the first version published in America ? inThe New York Times Magazine, with the strikingly different title"The Decay of Cinema" ? and all the others, and I assume that these,including the title, stem from editorial interventions, or at the very leastcollaborations between Sontag and her editor or editors at the Times.These differences reveal a great deal about mainstream positions on themovies in general and the cinema-is-dead postulate in particular, especiallyas these positions become translated into editorial decisions.They expose an ideology of avoidance that I consider central to thehabits of mainstream publications I have already been discussing.

    Missing from the Times version were almost all of Sontag's referencesto such filmmakers as Theodor Angelopoulos, Shohei Imamura,Miklós Janscó, Alexander Kluge, Nanni Moretti, Nagisa Oshima,Edgar Reitz, Aleksandr Sokurov, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, AndreiTarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and Krzysztof Zanussi, as well as the titles of someof their films ? a virtual honor role of contemporary filmmakers whomSontag regards as important. (In one of the later incarnations of heressay, Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees was added to her listof "wonderful films [that] are still being made.") Although it appearsthat Sontag's article was cut for length so that it could fit into a two-pagespread, it hardly seems accidental that most of these dozen figureshadn't curried much favor in recent years with either Times reviewersor U.S. distributors, and consequently couldn't be counted on as familiarnames to Times readers. Perhaps for the same reason, the Times versioncontained one sentence that can't be found in any of the other versions:"In this country, the lowering of expectations for quality and theinflation of expectations for profit have made it virtually impossible forartistically ambitious American directors, like Francis Ford Coppolaand Paul Schrader, to work at their best level."

    In other words, even in an article decrying Hollywood's ruinouseffect on world cinema, Hollywood directors had to be given moreattention ? and overseas directors less ? when the piece was publishedin the Times. (Perhaps for the same reason, the names of many greatnon-American filmmakers of the past ? including Jean Cocteau,Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, YasujiroOzu, Marcel Pagnol, and Pier Paolo Pasolini ? were excluded from theTimes version of Sontag's article as well.)

    It reminds me of Marshall McLuhan's account in his Introductionto Understanding Media of the "consternation of one of the editors ofthis book. He noted in dismay that `seventy-five percent of your materialis new. A successful book cannot venture to be more than ten percentnew.'" By the same standard, any article about world cinema thatappears in the Times ? even, and perhaps especially, a death-of-cinemaarticle ? can't present too much new information, including unfamiliarnames and film titles. That's apparently why the frustrations and disappointmentsof Coppola and Schrader become ipso facto more germaneto the Times' interests than the acknowledged achievements oftwenty others. Unless there's a new commercial picture around tohawk, evidence of the death of world cinema is mainly what the Timesconsiders fit to print; evidence of its past and present life only gets inthe way of its everyday operations.

Continues...
Excerpted from Movie Warsby Jonathan Rosenbaum Copyright © 2002 by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Excerpted by permission.
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