"... than a bad argument for something I hold dear," said Daniel Dennett, quoted at the top of the column to the right. In this case, the argument belongs to Camille Paglia ("Art Movies, R.I.P.") and the thing I hold dear is the intoxication of seeing a great movie. She does a lovely job of capturing what the latter is like (although she puts it firmly in the past tense), but spends too much of her time simply explaining what a dinosaur she has become. (What am I talking about? It's just Paglia in Apocalyptic Mode again. But I'm still trying to figure out why this column of hers bugs me so much.)
I have to admit: If I thought that in the last 30 years "only George Lucas' multilayered, six-film 'Star Wars' epic can genuinely claim classic status," you could stick a fork in me, too. Actually, you wouldn't have to. I'd do it myself, because I'd know I was done, without "A New Hope" for movies.
Paglia says t'was modernism killed the magnificent beasts of art cinema; I think it's more likely her own solipsism. Wallowing in what she calls a "cold douche for my narcissistic generation" (she's referring to the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni, natch), Paglia wonders: "I'm not sure who, if anyone, still views moviegoing as a quasi-mystical experience." (Obviously, she doesn't read film critics or movie blogs, some of the best of which are also listed in the column to the right.)
But hers is not a rhetorical proposition. Posing a provocative open question is never enough. Paglia then formulates The Answer herself, and shuts the rest of us out in the cold, cold world of the Post-Boomer Death of Art:
The waning of art film has been just one of the bitter cultural disappointments that the baby-boom generation has had to endure. [...]While I sympathize with Ms. Paglia's Regrets ("I'm not sure who, if anyone, still views moviegoing as a quasi-mystical experience"), I resent her attempt to co-opt my pagan brand of atheism predicated on worship of both nature and art in the name of her art-movie secular-humanism death-wish. (OK, I wouldn't use the word "worship." What's wrong with a little "awe," girl? You needn't go leaping at "worship" like a bull at a gate.)My pagan brand of atheism is predicated on worship of both nature and art. I want the great world religions taught in every school. Secular humanism has reached a dead end -- and any liberals who don't recognize that are simply enabling the worldwide conservative reaction of fundamentalism in both Christianity and Islam. The human quest for meaning is innate and ineradicable. When the gods are toppled, new ones will soon be invented.
She sounds like a reactionary religious fundamentalist to me: My god will endure, resistance is futile, and any attempts to embrace another religion will only enable the false gods to rise! Is there some kind of contest between Pagliaism, Christianity, and Islam?
This, however, is quite beautiful, in a deliberately anachronistic fashion:
Other indelible memories: the grinding of the collapsing stone balustrade in the baroque gardens of Alain Resnais's "Last Year at Marienbad." The night wind eerily stirring the spray-painted green trees in the London park of Antonioni's "Blow-Up." The column of army tanks ominously rumbling through the city street in the unknown land of Bergman's "The Silence." The life-giving waters of the Fountain of Trevi suddenly stopping in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," stranding Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg mid-kiss.Yet Paglia claims only the "Star Wars" movies are on that plane (ship?), "and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction." I'm not quite sure what conclusions she's trying to draw from that comparison. Are you?
(Thanks to girish for passing this along.
P.S. I just re-watched "The Silence" last night, in part because I didn't remember any "column of army tanks." Turns out that's because they aren't there. It's one tank that comes into the square below the hotel window, stalls, starts up again, stalls for a long time, and then moves on. It's ominous, but it's not the way Paglia describes it. Memory can greatly enhance these long-ago moments from the cinema, too...
19 Comments
I just read this article. Wow, Paglia piles onto the 'Death of Cinema' bandwagon only 10 years or so after it became chic (and about 6 or 7 years after it ceased to be).
She's right about art-house THEATERS being on the decline. As for the art-house movie, it seems to be doing just fine, even the ones with slow takes that she seems to miss.
Here are a few names I suggest for Ms. Paglia's consideration: Tsai ming-liang, Hou hsiao-hsien, Pedro Costa, the Dardennes Brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, Bela Tarr, Gus van Sandt, Jia zhang-ke, Olivier Assayas, Jem Cohen, or Leos Carax.
Baby Boomer mistakes personal perspective for Absolute Truth: stop presses.
News flash: aging critic decides things were better in her day, and that everything modern is simply a degraded descendant of the worst parts of her generation's excesses.
In other news, the sun will rise tomorrow.
The only thing I can think that defends STAR WARS as the only thing approaching the art films of old that has been made within the last 30 years would be the unprecedented control the artist (George Lucas in this case) had over the material, as compared to the control other filmmakers have over their material (it varies). Of course we all know the control George Lucas had over the franchise was actually its downfall -- the less opposition Lucas had, the more messy and less fun the films became. Maybe she's saying artistic freedom to make crap is more important than artistic collaboration to come up with something important. Even if this is what she's getting at, she's overlooking the fact that Lucas didn't even direct 2/6 of the STAR WARS flicks. Maybe she's just choosing the position she has chosen because she is aware almost everyone will disagree with her -- this way there doesn't have to be any room left for thoughtful dialogue or argument, it's her against the world.
I dunno. I tend to agree with Paglia here.(Although I find things to disagree with her about. I am a fan of the atheist apologist movement she throws a dart at, and I'd take Michel Foucault over Jehovah any day. I think the doctrinaire liberalism that Foucault's decendents have perched upon is dull, but that doesn't do anything to diminish the man himself. Anyway. . . )
I'm not sure she's saying that people don't make films like that anymore. I think she's saying they don't work anymore. Not the way they used to anyway. I'll be the heretic here and say that I find a lot of "art-house" classics to be dull, absurd, and pretentious. I think I "got" the classic Eurpean films from the sixties I've seen, but I found them pretty disappointing. The liberating shock that film critics describe when talking about new wave cinema or Italian neo realism or Bergman just never really happened for me, and I suspect the reason for this has something to do with the generation I'm a part of (I'm 28). It's not that my attention span is too short (I like Japanese gangster movies, which despite their fearsome reputation are very sloooowww), or that I'm not adventurous (I'm as eclectic as it gets. . take my word for it). It's just that these movies rarely have much to say that I need to hear. Paglia's protest against dull liberalism and her assertion that modernism has worn itself out seem about right. When I saw some of those films (which was within the last decade), I was living in a "post" era. The big questions that they asked had become cliches or they had been solved by a kind of irrelevant agnostocism. Maybe we HAVE lost a certain passion, but I'm not so sure. I tend to think instead that what made those movies so special was how they were different. The revolution is over now, and the manefestos don't have the charge they once did.
What was revolutionary about those films has become generic, and so we're left with very slooooow navel gazing movies that deliberately eschew the fun part of movies. . . the trashy rush of pop. That's not to say there aren't good movies from that movement, but they aren't as good as they used to be. We don't have any use for them anymore. It's not that we don't have the film literacy or the patience. It's that they don't have anything to do with us. This is why I prefer Woody Allen's self depricating co-opting of Bergman to Bergman himself.
Certainly there are exceptions. "La Doce Vita" has some stunning melodrama (that's not a pejorative word when I use it) that speaks quite emphatically about our media-saturated world. And some of Godard's movies mean something to me. Maybe because his interest in youth culture give them a little more gas.
I would disagree with her about the lack of "classics" from the past few decades. I'd name several David Lynch movies and several Martin Scorsese movies, just for starters. And the martial arts movie, which I think has produced several films that have a kind of rich iconic permanence that is just starting to be appreciated (particularly some of Chang Cheh's, Sammo Hung's, and Lau Kar Leung's stuff) was just getting off the ground in the seventies. If she can praise Kelly Clarkson as a great artist, I can praise Jackie Chan.
Anyway, I hope this post suggests more the limitations of my knowledge of classic art house movies. I'll be the first to admit that it is a bit shallow. . . but I feel I've given this stuff enough of a chance. Not that I'll never watch another Bergman movie, but I'm not going to seek them out. Just not impressed. Bored actually. Again, I "get" it. I'm just not excited by it.
I think this thing bothers me more than usual as well. I'm sick to death of hearing this sort of argument, but it's true that for whatever reason it doesn't seem possible for an "art" filmmaker to have the kind of widespread cultural impact that somebody like Bergman did for that brief period in the 60s. For such an argument to hold any water, that (and that alone) has to be the claim - but usually boomer self-regard turns the piece into something conflating cultural impact with quality. (And, actually, my own term, "cultural impact" is suspect as well - the amount of influence that Asian filmmakers like John Woo or King Hu or Chang Cheh have had on contemporary film is undeniable, the diference is that there's less awareness of those directors as artistes.) There are more films being made now than ever before in more countries of the world, and there are probably more masterpieces being made as well (just far, far fewer coming out of Hollywood). What don't they have? They don't have the glamorous sheen of sexy early 60s art house. Anytime there's a claim as to the greatness of the 50s/60s art house, go back and take a look at what was popular, for every L'Avventura or Breathless there's something by Claude Lelouche or Roger Vadim (to cite the first two filmmakers to come to mind) - or films that have been long forgotten. The art house filled a very particular niche, it was novel, and it was intellectually glamorous for a certain segment of the population. That's Paglia's argument: going to the art house isn't glamorous anymore. And that seems to be why she stopped going or caring a decade before I was born.
Confusing that glamor with quality is particularly frustrating, because as a sometimes programmer and occasional critic, I really do wish that the films I love could have more of an impact. I wish I could get people as excited as I am about the latest Hou Hsiao-hsien film, for example, but that's no more likely today than it would have been in the 60s for Gertrud or Au Hasard Balthasar. (I also want to point out that Bresson retrospectives have done remarkably well, and that the masterpieces of this decidedly unglamorous filmmaker are now more widely seen among cinephiles in the U.S. than they ever were during Bresson's life. Again, Paglia's claim has nothing to do with actual quality.)
Actually, I wonder if the problem might have something to do with New York's status as cultural arbiter. I know that within Seattle, for example, any time a new film by the Coens, Almodovar, Zhang Yimou, etc opens, it does extremely well, and everyone that I know goes to see them. Without meaning this to sound like an insult (really, I don't), I think these are serious art house filmmakers whose films are just as popularly accessible as the films of Fellini, Truffaut or Bergman, and that they have the same sort of aspiring upper middle-brow appeal. But there isn't a single certain of supposed cultural relevance, where locals are able to confuse popularity within their own community for wider cultural impact, and be, to a certain degree, correct.
Hey Jim,
Just dropping in. I'm impressed by your comments, and thank goodness you said it first. :) The essay,"Art Movies, RIP" bugs me as well. (Experimental Cinema, anyone?) Camille Paglia's essay is erroneous, full of generalized assumptions, and grand proclamations, that were never supported with documentation. Salon happily published and consequently established this essay as fact just because of her name! She might as well have declared that the Earth is the center of the universe . . . Paglia did not PROVE her argument at all. This essay should have been pulled from publication and rewritten at the very least. Neither of us should take Paglia's essay seriously, because it is quite honestly . . . false.
I was equally stunned and annoyed. Then I read that line about the night wind and the trees in "Blow-Up" (hardly a notable achievement) and I began to wonder how many decades it's been since she's actually seen a movie. She could find those shots at the local multiplex, if only she went looking.
I'm still boggling over her claim that Star Wars is the only classic of the last 30 years. It would make perfect sense for a ten-year-old who'd seen only ten films made since 1970, but good God, you'd expect more than that from an adult with even a passing familiarity with film. It makes me both eager to dismiss her writings and intensely curious about her metric for films in spite of it.
Whenever I read a critic's/academic's viewpoint that is deliberately limited to his/her knowledge on the subject, I always think one thing: "he/she wants to sound like an expert on this topic but not have to do any comprehensive research!"
I'm sure that a philosophical rationalization of this type of critical position can be formulated, but no matter how much one defends this point-of-view, I will still think its a cop-out.
It also reminds me of Candide's 'optimistic' philosophy in Voltaire's eponymous novel: (paraphrase) "if everything is good in my world, it must be good everywhere!" Or, in the case of Camille Pagila, "if everything is dying in the cinema I know, cinema must by dying everywhere! And better yet, secular humanism is dying too!" That's just kid logic. "If I saw my nanny's boyfriend smoke, than all boyfriends must smoke!"
Also, in regards to this editorial, I'm reminded of an exchange Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich had that is repeated in the book THIS IS ORSON WELLES (which I can only paraphrase:) Bogdanovich and Welles are discussing Welles' theatrical career, and Bogdanovich echoes the sentiment that "the theater is dying." To which Welles replies, "haven't they been saying that since the time of the Ancient Greeks?" Or in the case of "the death of cinema," haven't they been saying that since the 50s? Or the 30s?
What a pointless rambling incoherent article by Paglia! At first, she's championing art films and how they protest against the 'forced jollity of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking' and by the end she's revelling in the 'sensual beauty and glamour' of Rita Hayworth. In between she riffs about Rock n' Roll and Kelly Clarkson but the bottom line is that she laments a time when art seemed more vital. The truth is that as we get older, art doesn't affect us with the same blinding impact then it does when we're young. It really has nothing to do with the quality of the art itself. That fact that she can't see past this is pretty sad.
I wanted to comment about Adam's comment. . . I think the "loss of glamour" is a nice way to put it. Independent minded film doesn't magnetize people the way it used to, and so the profundity that some of these films used to seem to have (and still do for some folks apparently) has dried up and blown away. What's left is movies, some very good, some terribly overrated. What Paglia's lamenting is kind of like what rock fans lament- the loss of the illusion of community. Nobody is every going to reproduce what the Beatles did because rock music is fragmented into so many sub audiences now and because the cultural and aesthetic revolution they started has been rolling along for a while now. For my money, there are several rock bands working today that are as good as the Beatles (a blasphemous statement I know, but I'll stand by it), but none nearly so important. We live in a more fragmented culture, and to construct new monlithic things like musicians and filmakers in the sixties did just ain't gonna happen. Not only that, but as we get a clearer persepective on the past, their work (if we're honest) begins to shrink a bit.
I fear I'm slipping into making the argument that "the sixties are overrated." That's not quite what I mean. What I mean is the sixties aren't really even the sixties anymore. Paglia's argument about modernism's needing a more conservative, monolithic culture to push against in order to reach it's greatest heights is true, not just for artists, but for audiences. The Beatles early records were a cultural atomic bomb and an aesthetic manefesto for the pop music of the next half century. But now they're just brilliant garage rock. The Eurpean "art house" directors of the sixties, in my mind, have been similarly diminished by time. Their movies are more than worthwhile, but they ain't what they used to be.
I'm going to stop before this gets any more esoteric than it already is. These are movies for cryin' out loud!
Jamie:
These are well-stated arguments, but they nonetheless lack the same deeper examinations as Paglia's. I do not know nor will I ever believe that there was a time when everyone's tastes were simpler, that this "fragmentation" is somehow a new occurrence. This implies there was some point where everyone was listening to the same stuff, reading the same stuff, watching the same stuff.. and it's our latter-day condition that sees us dividing into narrower and narrower niches.
Well, I have to call bullshit. I'd wager what is actually going on is media is catching up to the diverse tastes of the public, and that we have always, in fact, had diverse and esoteric tastes. We have never been a mono-culture. The fact that so much media diversity seems to be (by and large) successful should be proof enough, nevermind the posts to this very blog pointing to that same trend: "event" movies targeting that tired demographic that bolster big and ultimately hollow numbers, as well as the increasing trend toward boutique movie houses and, of course, the home theater experience. Let's not forget satellite radio and cable/satellite TV, with channels catering to just about anything you can imagine, and a few dozen more interests besides.
And yet, strangely, I think this has made community building stronger, not weaker, as you and Paglia contend. The evidence would be, you know, this blog, and the dozens (or hundreds or thousands or millions, if you go beyond the movies) draws together people all over the world who share the same interests... so these people can exchange ideas, crack jokes, and generally get their geek on without fear of reprisal. And I know my hometown sports an assortment of art/indie/foreign theatres that do very, very good business, and have built-in audiences attending screenings, Q&A's, and film festivals large and small.
The world doesn't get better or worse, man. Energy can't be created or destroyed. It just changes form.
Ken, I think I mostly agree with you about the health of the movie community, and I mostly (but not totally, since our access to different kinds of movies is so much greater than it used to be abd geek culture has really gone mainstream during the past two decades) agree with you about the fact that audiences were always more diverse than we think of them. Things do indeed change less than it appears sometimes.
But what is important is the ILLUSION of a community, not the reality of a community. That's why I don't agree with the "bullshit" call. The era when a genre of film is going to be understood as "revolutionary" is done, and it's no longer possible for an artist to become a kind of iconic, quasi-religious (this isn't quite what I mean to say here, but I'm at a loss) figure like Fellini or Bergman or Goddard. We are firmly in the postmodern age, and ironies and shifting contexts define what's important. Artists can't make BIG CLAIMS anymore. Who are the icons from the past twenty years? George Lucas, Quentin Tarrantino, and Martin Scorsese. Three talented guys (particularly the last two!) who first and formost are known for their love of movies. That's a different legacy than than the generation of auteurs before them.
I certainly agree that passionate film culture still exists. But do we make the claims for this kind of film culture that people made for "art house" films in the sixties? Do we think pop culture is going to inspire social revolution? Can movies give us mystical experiences? Tell us "truth"? People sure used to think that. I'm not sure they do anymore. The one's who do are a diminishing cult.
I don't think this is a bad thing. Pop culture is supposed to be fun for Christ's sake! If we are in an Andy Warhol age rather than a Picasso age, so be it. The diversity of the films being made and the amazing access we have to film(seriously. . . I can just type a few lines on the netflix website and have any Kurosawa film I want delivered to my door!) might mean that we don't feel like we're worshiping at the same alter, but there are plenty of compensations. This suits me fine.
These sorts of postulations drive me insane, because they aren't postulations at all, but definitives disguised as postulations. Right now the sitcom is dead. 15 years ago horror was dead. And honestly my caring about what someone like this has to say is also deceased.
hhhmmm, maybe my mind has gone as bad as Ms. Paglia's, but when she mentions "The night wind eerily stirring the spray-painted green trees in the London park..." in Blow-Up, isn't she conflating the London park in Blow-Up and the painted trees in The Red Desert? Or were there painted trees in Blow-Up?
James:
I remain skeptical that Fellini/Bergman/etc were the monolithic titans in their day that we see them as now. I don't doubt it's somewhat true, but we must remember at all times that we have the benefit of hindsight of their era. We saw who stuck, in other words, and we're no longer inundated with the pop culture "noise" that permeated their time, diminishing the significance of the true titans with their distractions.
That's also, I think, why it's harder to pinpoint the titans of our era: we're in the thick of it. We don't have the benefit of hindsight to say oh, well, obviously David Cronenberg (or whomever) was the greatest director of his time. We're immersed in a hell of a lot of noise -- perhaps a lot more than ever before, I'll concede that -- and our vision's not so clear. It'll be up to later film scholars to tell us what should have been self-evident.
And, of course, to lament the fractiousness of their own age...
Not to give too much credit to Paglia or any particular cultural critic, but is it possible that a truly large groundswell of "this is dead or that is dead" can actually lead to that genre's/art-form's revitalization by challenging the purveyors of said genre or form? I'm not suggesting that that is the intent of these people (Paglia) but I can imagine artists of undefined talents picking up the gauntlet. Of course it's just as likely that as Phillip Kelly implies the sitcom and horror revivalists are just the children of the previous golden age.
It's not that whether they were or weren't Giants during there own time. . .it's the feeling of "true believerness" that their audiences felt. I've read about this feeling, but I've never experienced it. I certaily care about movies, but I don't watch them like that. I care passionately about Martin Scorsese's work, but I don't think Scorsese has some special access to some kind of wisdom. I think that there was a time when people did see movies like that.
Maybe some folks still do. But it's harder than it used to be.
It may be that we have always lived with this feeling. Perhaps Paglia's lament is just nostalgia. She might be longing for something that never was. That, for me, doesn't diminish what she's saying. Maybe we're always fictionalizing the past. But I really do think that people were better at fictionalizing the present during the sixties (when a lot of the movies were talking about were made).
Again I'll use pop music as an illustration(cause I know a lot more about it). From reading and from listening, I gather that the realities of the "revolutionary pop music" of that decade were a lot less exciting than we think they were, but there was that illusion of community. Like nostalgia for the present, if that makes sense.
Of course this could also be nostagia for a less cynical time. But I for one, don't want to be less cynical. I'm happy feeling like a smart ass.
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