Why I am no longer a Cinephile

Just in time for The Oscars, a piece on movies, of sorts.

After a few decades of movie watching I must state here that for the most part the thrill is gone. It is not so much that good movies are not currently being made and there was some golden age in the past when the movies were better. (Though there may be truth to that if our criteria is a classically organized comedy or drama). Indeed in the current epoch some of the greatest movies that have ever been made are being made now: I can name names. Tsai Minh Liang (who made one of the greatest movies concerning movie watching, whose long durational end I post at the top of this entry) and Abbas Kiaorstami are two in Taiwan and Iran respectively. Anna Biller, Kelly Reichardt, Andrew Bujalski and Nina Menkes are a few in the United States. And these are just the fictional narrative ones. There are surely others and I apologize for not mentioning them all here.

Yet most Hollywood studio films are so terrible and terrible in so many ways, in terms of visual congestion and nonsense and auditory horror, that it would be a whole book to list and explain the sins. In my view Star Wars is the film that not only ruined cinema, in the sense of starting a mistaken course that continues to this day, but also ruined our whole culture in all sorts of ways, but that was a long time ago, in the late seventies.

There are many so-called documantaries that are excellent. The good documentaries are either self reflexive docs that interrogate the author and their own making (Sherman's March and Tarnation). Or they are the exact opposite: durational films in so-called "real time" that unfold with exacting observation. (Anything by Fred Wiseman). But most docs are terrible because they occupy a middlebrow middle ground of voice-over narration, dreary interviews and photographic stills to create some sense of usually baby boomer nostalgia.

In any case, I recognize no legitimate distinction between documentary and fictional film. That distinction serve to uphold narrow and glossy, "postcard pretty" notions of the "cinematic" on the one hand, (that fictional films are required to pereptuate in the studio system), and to uphold certain dubious notions about "the real" on the other hand (as if anything in representation, properly and broadly defined, weren't created and subjective affairs).

Films, like other arts, are but stylistic effects organized in various ways to create meaning (or, as is the case in work that might interest me more, something not bound by discursive and conceptual meaning). It is completely irrelevant at worst or trivial at best what the facts are in the world. I suppose an exception could be made for a teaching film to be shown in schools where the facts have to be right. I suppose I would get really offended by a Holocaust denialist documentary. But I could never suppose for a moment that I would want to hold movies to any standards separable from those I hold to a poem. I couldn't care less what millions of people love to look at. I know I don't like to look at what they seem to love, and I don't like to hear the boom and noise they are accustomed to enduring, or even loving.

Which brings me to my final observation. Since most of the movies I deeply love are at best marginal affairs, and do not seem to please, entertain, or hold the attention of that many people, I am no longer in any true sense a cinephile (if ever I were one). I am not interested in looking at edited images in consecutive succession merely to look at this or that old myth or narrative unfold in a new guise or setting. And I am no longer as interested as I once was in looking at actors doing what they do best in such a setting. (Because the setting, or sets, are in a bad way).

It always necessary to cleanse the palette, to turn away from a form or a style when it has no longer served one. I feel much that way about movies. Indeed I think the written word or live performance seems more interesting and more possible. Visual, moving images seem to me to be sprung out.

I have seen many movies. Certainly more than enough to know what is worth seeing. I do change my mind but I also have definite views as to what is perpetually valuable.

Newer modes of production and technologies have killed my cinephilia. I don't keep up so much with the latest, or hottest, or even the edgiest.

People in the current epoch are simply less interesting than in earlier times (!) They are less idiosyncratic, less daring, and less original. They may be brighter than in earlier times in terms of a certain kind of social or emotional intelligence, and maybe in literacy, but they are less passionate and more dull. It is hard to make great art out of them, whether they be the so-called professionaly trained or not. (The best movies today consist, in my view, wholly of non-professionals). I do like seeing the most boring people doing what they do for long periods of time if a sensitive filmmaker allows them to unfold and (un)blocks them in certain ways. Thus their "boring" status becomes heightened to utmost dignity. But this is increasingly rare, since they are usually forced to do conventionally dramatic things that had been done far better in an earlier epoch by performers like Jimmy Stewart or Barbara Stanwyck. In a curious irony, the problem with todays' movies is they don't allow the quotidian and banal to shine forth. (There are exceptions: Mike Leigh).

Above all, I blame the internet. We would do well to remember Marshall Mcluhan when he said that form - the medium - is what is important. People complaining about video games and porn, or heaven knows what else - (inaccurate Wiki entries?) - are forgetting that the world wide, epoch shaking phenomenon of simultaneity of goods and information, that is, the erasure of the need to travel from one loacation to another for separate and distinct kinds of experiences and states of consciousness, in short, the destruction of boundaries between one kind of thing and another (news and art, science and speculation, adult and child) is what has hurt all of the arts, (to say nothing of our lives), but none more than cinema which, as an electronic media to begin with, was more vulnerable to, as it were, infection.

I will continue to mention cinema in this blog. Indeed my next cinema entry might be on "talky cinema" like Rohmer, Cassavetes, and others. But cinephilia, at least in the present tense, is no longer a possibility for me in the current moment.

Book Review: HOLLYWOOD INCOHERENT: Narration in Seventies Cinema by Todd Berliner

I have a belief that reviewing and, moreover, criticism ought to be in part a dispassionate affair: that there ought to be in it more objectivity of appraisal and comprehension than the subjectivity of enthusiasm and censure. There are times of course when a special case and exception can be made, where subjectivity must, by definition, lead and flourish. Given that the subjects of Berliner's Hollywood Incoherent are cinema and the 1970s, two topics dear to this author's heart, and, given that the approach and style of the book is an aesthetic one rather than a theory addled or ideological one, upon completing this book it appears at times as if the book had been written with this reviewer alone in Berliner's mind.

Hollywood Incoherent is a much welcome and needed addition to the growing body of both 1970s and cinema scholarship. One of the virtues of it is that it puts style at the center, rather than political ideologies, identities and historical and cultural significance. In many ways Berliner (and to be fair, others must be mentioned in this regard, namely, Susan Sontag, Ray Carney, David Bordwell and a few others) is attempting to return criticism to a position somewhat close to the aesthetic and artistic concerns that had been dominant in the decades prior to the Theory revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet Berliner is unafraid of theory and uses it when necessary. Indeed his book takes the time to define David Bordwell's concept of "parametric narration", rather than assuming knowledge on the part of the reader, and also makes a good case for why such a concept is perfectly valid in understanding general trends in 1970s studio and independent filmmaking. Still, in the end, Berliner follows in the matter and manner of "close reading", which concerns how objects in the movies create the effect they do, and what the implications are of such effects on the emotions of audiences.

Two concepts that Berliner introduces that are helpful are those of "incoherence" and "perversity". These words are redefined not as negative states of personal or collective organization or psychology, but rather, positive states of works of art. Perversity is taken from critic Stephen Booth to mean in Booth's words, (in Booth's Precious Nonsense), "a usually gratuitous and potentially distracting and counterproductive extra system of coherence that rivals the narrative, polemic, or other ideationally essential organization of the work". One of the themes that crops up in practically every film made in the 1970s is this evenhanded and observational quality that is the effect of a certain disunity regarding closure concerning the morality or psychology of the characters on the screen and the causality and temporality of visual events as they unfold. In Berliner's words:

"Although all narrative films employ a degree of perversity (without turns there is no narrative), the relatively prevalent, pointed, and superfluous narrative perversities in seventies cinema do more than delay satisfaction and narrative resolution: The preclude the definitive and satisfying resolutions characteristic of more normative Hollywood movies."

Even in the case of ostensibly lower brow fare like The Exorcist, there is the same effect at work as in other higher quality films of the same period and this effect has cognitive value for spectators: "I propose that spectators leave The Exorcist having had an experience more cognitively eventful than the film's shocks, thrills, and thematic substance can account for".

Whatever one may think of The Exorcist as a film, Berliner's account of its specifically 1970s characteristics is consistently interesting.

Following in the steps of David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson, and, to go back even further, Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, Berliner raises the question of style as opposed to meaning as a critical category. In a chapter of a close reading of Taxi Driver, for example, Berliner shows how stylistic effects can be as valuable as and different from meaning, as a way of comprehending a work of art. Moreover Berliner defends his case very well, especially given the weight of certain traditions in thinking "meaning" the key to art's purpose. In Berliner's book, each film is analyzed with exacting scrutiny, neither abandoning the text for dubious historical or sociological claims, nor viewing the films in isolation from the cultural context in which they were made.

Many of the big commercial films are discussed in this volume, specifically those prior to the Star Wars phenomenon that arguably ushers in the 1980s. There is a subtle reading of The French Connection as a violation of police genre norms.

One of the most valuable parts of the book is the chapter on John Cassavetes. Ray Carney has been and is the undisputed scholarly expert on Cassavetes' oeuvre. Berliner adds his voice to the discussion with a perceptive essay on real life dialogue and scripted and aesthetic dialogue and how the differences between the two are negotiated by a modernist master like John Cassavetes. The one chapter alone is worth the cost of the book. Noting the dilemma that any artist faces in confronting on the one hand the false and artificial effects of "trying" to be "realistic" and, on the other, the prison of traditional and classical conventions in representation, Cassavetes hit upon a brilliant third solution.

"Cassavetes' dialogue, more than conventional, tightly scripted dialogue, prevents spectators from easily distinguishing his actors' improvisations from the improvisations of Cassavete's characters, who, like the actors playing them, appear to be composing their lines as they are speaking".

Though Berliner is aware of dimension of authorship and refers to the hand of directors and writers (and no hand is more authorial than Cassavetes), he is always keen to note that 1970s cinema is a continuum, that the films in the period all share similar features, some more than others, and that they have a certain family resemblance, that, though they do influence current cinema - (Berliner notes Eastwood's Unforgiven and P. T. Anderson's Magnolia as being particularly seventies in feeling) - they are unique in being rather unlike anything to have come before or since the 1970s.

If there is anything to the concept of a 1970s aesthetic in film and if it can be understood to have coherence, then Todd Berliner's Hollywood Incoherent is a useful introduction to such a concept.

There is much here for fans of both 1970s scholarship and cinema studies in general. In my view, Berliner's book deserves a rightful place alongside previous classics of 1970s scholarship like Bruce Schulman' The Seventies and Thomas Hine's The Great Funk. As a work of film criticism it is a welcome corrective to the excesses of theory found in other film studies. More constructively, it is a good application of the "cognitive neo-formalism" of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. It succeeds in applying the ideas humanely, staying lose to the films in discussion, and being faithful to art as having a value more than that of mere utility.

Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner, University Of Texas Press, 2010