<nettime> the World Moves On

["Dr. Future" <richard@dig-lgu.demon.co.uk>]

Preserving Cultural Cinema while the World Moves On…


Art Cinema: Where Next?
9th October, 1999, ICA
By Any Means Necessary: Getting Cultural Cinema onto the Big Screen.
13th Nov, 1999, LUX (London Film Festival).


These days when it seems impossible to get outside the front door
without falling over a film crew, the number of new films being made is
equalled only by the number of seminars and conferences charting this
groundswell of activity. Two recent events attempted to navigate their
way through the minefield of competing terms like art cinema, cultural
cinema, independent cinema, underground cinema and so on. In doing so
their implicit aim was to delineate what it is that mainstream cinema,
commercial cinema or Hollywood cinema lacks that these alternative film
practices are intending to make up for, and perhaps even more
importantly, if these films are so culturally valuable then why it is so
difficult to distribute them and to reach an audience.

It is traditional for these kind of events to start pessimistically and
these two were no exceptions. “Art Cinema” revealed that the new cinema
multiplexs were planning to marginalise art films further by having
separate entrances for the art house screens, and “By Any Means
Necessary” began with pre-publicity stating than 70% of films in the
London Film Festival would not reach cinema screens in the UK due in
part to the fact that distributors prepared to take on “cultural films”
had all but dried up. It is also traditional at these events for there
to be at least some attempt to define what is “art cinema” or “cultural
cinema”, and at the “By Any Means Necessary” seminar at least, this
attempt converged surprisingly quickly onto a working definition. This
was that cultural films are films which are made for intentions other
than just to make money - they have other cultural values. But this
definition also reflected the differing focus of the two seminars – “By
Any Means Necessary” concentrated squarely on the distribution and
exhibition of films, and the limitations of this definition became
clearer when some of the panelists tried to expand it. Pierre Menahem of
the sales agency Celluloid Dreams proposed that art films were the films
that distributors didn’t want and Lawrence Garnall from The Feature Film
Company declared that art films were the films that didn’t make money,
and that if they did happen to make money then their cultural status
tended to diminish proportionately.

Lying behind much of these discussions is always the uncomfortable
thought that if the cinematic experience provided by the art film is
really that important then why aren’t people queuing up to see them in
droves? Can we really explain this through some kind of conspiracy to
prevent art films reaching the screen or will they always be unpopular?
In fact cinema going, like all other forms of popular culture, possesses
a social dynamics which makes it a product of complex forces. For
example, Theodore Adorno liked to point out that the reason that the
working classes loved the easy escapism of mass media was that because
their daily lives were so much harder than the intelligentsias they had
to have some form of emotional release just to get through the week with
their sanity intact. According to this view a cultural elite became the
guardians of cultural values that the lower classes would never be able
to appreciate under the prevailing social conditions. But like many such
theoretical approaches this merely becomes an excuse for accepting the
status quo. Practitioners need theories that put film making into a
wider and more informed context but that also enable them to move
forward. Shouldn’t we expect some flexibility in peoples viewing habits
– like finding the point where escapism meets imagination, where
spectacle meets shock, where feeling meets thinking?

As the day wore on at “Art Cinema”, a series of debates tried to explore
the particular differences between the commercial film and the art film.
Three main positions were discernible here as to what the role of
cultural film was and why it was important to oppose its marginalisation
by the Hollywood “product”. Michel Ciment the French cinema critic most
forcibly stated the idealist position. For him cultural film possesses
intrinsic artistic values in contrast to Hollywood films which are
designed to appeal to twelve year old American boys. In the 1960s mass
film education created audiences for auteur film makers like Antonioni
and Fassbinder but this programme has since been dismantled. Another
argument which has almost become the de facto response when
intellectuals are put in a corner and which surfaced in various guises
at various points in both seminars was that of cultural diversity. We
need to have a balanced film culture where mainstream and cultural films
are both available and to retain opportunities for widely different
approaches to film making. Lastly there is what we might call the
materialist approach which was best represented by producer Keith
Griffiths. Art film making is like a research and development arm of
film production in which radical new ideas are allowed to be tried out.
If successful they might spread and benefit the whole film industry
which might otherwise stagnate for lack of inspiration.

But of course none of those positions really stand up to much scrutiny.
Michel Ciment’s conservatism implies that audiences are just too thick
to appreciate art and need to be brought around. But people tend to be
strangely resistant to the “education” they are offered, perhaps for the
social reasons that Adorno thought he had analysed, and perhaps because
they simply do not share the cultural values that they are being
“taught” to admire. In fact this position is implicitly contradicted by
the cultural diversity argument which presents the need to watch
different films in similar terms to the need for eating a balanced diet.
If the audience is given a unbiased choice of films to watch then we
should witness a more even distribution of viewing figures across the
different genres and forms as people mix and match to suit their
different tastes and moods. Unfortunately this kind of relativism
suffers from the same problems as all arguments based on these premises
– it becomes difficult to talk about the value of any particular kind of
film. It is not an argument that can appeal to film makers who have
particular motives and objectives for making cultural films and who are
not just making them because they want to be “different” or offer an
alternative for its own sake. In any case, if all films are of equal
value then why should we bother to promote cultural films at all if they
are no better than any other? The diversity argument has a tendency to
implode. By contrast the idea of the artist film maker as a maverick
researcher exploring new cinematic aesthetics attempts to give cultural
film making a specific role within the film industry. But if the value
of a cultural film is that it provides a testing ground for new ideas
which will eventually advance mainstream film making, then it is only
valuable to the extent that it advances the interests of the dominant
mainstream culture, not in itself. This is the kind of argument that a
producer would make when trying to prise more money out of a commercial
funding institution or company but is of limited relevance to film
makers themselves. Experimentation is important but it cannot provide us
with a cultural or aesthetic sense of purpose on its own.

In order to answer these questions it is necessary to be much more
fearless about what we want to achieve through our film making. Do we
really believe that a long panning shot has more cultural value than
some fast cutting, and if so under what conditions? We must develop
specifically cultural and aesthetic strategies which nevertheless pay
full respect to the social and economic context in which they must
realistically operate. “Dogma 95” was a bold way of addressing the first
requirement but had a tendency to fight shy of the second. For this
reason it now runs the risk of degenerating into a stylistic exercise
exploited for publicity purposes.

The value of Hollywood films are that they are designed to have mass
appeal, they are carefully crafted to meet market researched
specifications. Director Mike Figgis pointed out that these rules by
which mainstream films are constructed do not succeed in their purpose
of attracting an audience by accident - we are now addicted to the fast
cutting and film making spectacles that are used to enthral us and this
condition does not seem to be reversible. But although the particular
techniques that Hollywood films use tend to be identified with the aim
of seducing an audience into a state of passivity, this does not
preclude the possibility of incorporating these new and powerful
techniques into a radically different aesthetic. The implication is that
the task of cultural film making is not to preserve artistic values but
to innovate and find new ones appropriate to the current times,
otherwise art cinema would be defined as “the cinema that refuses to
accept that the world moves on”.

This brings us naturally to the question of “new technologies”, that
question that is so often mentioned but so rarely fully discussed. At
the end of the “Art Cinema” seminar producer Keith Griffiths gave a
rousing closing address on their importance to the future (survival?) of
the art film. He reminded us that at crucial junctures in the history of
the cinema the most radical cultural ideas often came from technical and
scientific research. He described his experience at a recent exhibition
of new media art at Cologne where he observed an excited audience
getting to grips with digital image making forms that were
non-narrative, visually complex and conceptually challenging as well as
entertaining – all the values that art cinema traditionally aspired to.

During the debate at the “By Any Means Necessary” seminar, a question
from the audience about new technologies was postponed by the chair
Bertrand Moullier until later. Incredibly, it was left until just five
minutes before the end to discuss this huge area. A lady in the audience
from Atom Films, one of the new online internet film distributors began
to describe what her company did but was soon cut off for some closing
remarks from the panel who declared that the cinema theatre would always
define the most important viewing experience. At the final discussion at
“Art Cinema”, I put a question (one of only two from the floor) to Keith
Griffiths about his presentation but soon became aware of the fact that
we seemed to be having a private conversation. As I glanced around the
dwindling ICA theatre I saw the rest of the audience either gazing at
the ceiling or glancing impatiently at their watches. If new
technologies are really the future of cultural cinema, both in
production and distribution, and I personally believe that they are,
then this evidence unfortunately suggests that few members of the
current cultural film community will be actively participating in that
future.


1,822 words



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