Does the cinema develop? No, I don’t believe that it does. Individual filmmakers do, in the sense that they continually refine and expand and re-define and re-shape their own obsessions and concerns and practices.
There’s a beautiful text by the American poet Charles Olson, a “dance” called “Apollonius of Tyana”. Apollonius, in the middle of his life, became concerned by two “ills” that he began to observe during his travels in Byzantium and Alexandria and Rome: “(1) unity was crowding out diversity (man was getting too multiplied to stay clear by way of the old vision of himself, the humanist one, was getting too distracted to abide in his own knowing with any of his old confidence); and (2) unity as a goal (making Rome an empire, say) had, as its intellectual pole an equally mischievous concept, that of the universal—on the ‘universals’ as Socrates and Christ equally had laid them down. Form (which, from the first cities, had stuck by the glue of content to particulars) was suddenly swollen, was being taken as a thing larger a thing outside a thing above any particular, even any given man.” To stake out one’s own ground and cultivate it and live within it and expand it within a sea of hazy generalities and pronouncements and directives and prohibitions and fears and superstitions—this is the preoccupation of every artist whose work I care about. Of course, it is now expected of all filmmakers that they can, must, should get up and talk about their films, explain them and defend them and, worst of all, justify them. They each find different ways of protecting themselves and their films. In essence, they find a way of speaking that lets the films speak. That’s the primary objective.
In the film that I just made on Hitchcock’s conversations with Truffaut, Martin Scorsese speaks of the atmosphere surrounding cinema at the time of the book’s publication. “There was a bullying,” he says, and then he adds, with a sigh: “as usual…” The bullying takes on many forms. Today, it’s not as concentrated as it was in the 60s, when the notion that cinema was a cheap entertainment and thus unworthy of being called an art form was still alive and well. At the moment, the bullying is more disseminated and resentment-based, as in “Let’s take filmmaking out of the hands of the “specialists” and “democratize” it. There is now a constant drone of moving images—my metaphor is sonic rather than visual, because the images tend to dissolve on contact—and the looming sense that there must be a shortcut to greatness. And, then…issues. “Important” issues. The crisis of immigration…global warming…the mass shootings in America…the Charlie Hebdo massacre… ISIS… Assad…oil…Ferguson…drug cartels…the really important issues, and how can we not think about them, and people are more important than movies, and so on and on and on and on… I have no sympathy at all for the habitually restated idea that anything and everything can and should be dealt with and righted by way of moving images. It’s a way of thinking that reflects the very worst aspects of the “spectatorial” (Richard Rorty’s term) American left, fixated for far too long on the easy targets of representation and rhetoric, filing all of the problematic phenomena represented and rhetoricized about under the demonic machinery of late capitalism, and deeming it impervious to all attempts at modification or eradication. I find the moralizing pronouncements about what is or isn’t possible in art during a given moment, what artists are “obliged” to deal with, what filmmakers can and can’t film, just as unproductive. To make a documentary about mass incarceration because it’s an “important issue” is to do nothing much at all. To make a film like Carmen Castillo’s On est vivants, in which she stakes out her own ground by going deep into a question that is central to her own being—what becomes of revolutionary spirit when there is no longer a worldwide momentum?—is something else again.
Of course, the truth has always been that all really great work carries the conflicting energies and mass obsessions of the outside world, in which the filmmaker is cultivating his or her own ground. All of the above and more—it’s there in Trois Souvenirs de ma jeunesse and The Assassin and Horse Money and Zodiac and A Serious Man and In the Stone House and The Master, to name just a few films made in the last ten years that I care about intensely. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of contrast. The fact that Bright Star and Inherent Vice, two more great films, were made during this moment, both without any apparent relationship to its ills and terrors, is something to take pride in, to rejoice. It’s not the lack itself that should be celebrated, but the defiance of the tyranny of the actual, the obligatory, and the tragic. Abbas Fahdel’s remarkable Homeland (Iraq Year Zero), invited to far too few film festivals (presumably because of its six-hour running time, a result of what my old friend Olivier Assayas calls “the corporatization of film festivals”), and Carmen’s film should be celebrated for opposite reasons. The common thread is the intensity of engagement.
Obviously, film criticism has changed dramatically in the last decade. There was once such a thing as a “critical establishment.” This is no longer the case, and good riddance: we shouldn’t be hanging on every judgment of a few benighted individuals. On the other hand, I do not believe that film criticism has been “democratized” by the internet. Here, we are back to the desire for the shortcut. There is too much film writing on the internet that finally isn’t writing at all. To paraphrase Alexander Mackendrick on screenwriting, writing is rewriting. Writing is not recording your reactions, or keeping a diary of your favorite films, or making lists lists and more lists. The undercurrent of resentment in a lot of blogs is as constant as it is intense, as so is the unseemly activity of drawing attention to oneself by simple virtue of the fact that you’re nobody special and everybody deserves some kind of attention and who are you to judge me and we’re all entitled to our opinion, and here I am. That is no way to conduct yourself in this world. We’re back to Apollonius: cultivate your own ground, take pride in it, don’t imagine that there’s an enchanted realm out there to which a lucky few gain quick access. If it’s now easier to make your words accessible to the public, just as it’s now easier to make films, then make use of these changed circumstances as a tool, but don’t imagine that they comprise an end in themselves.
The future, for me?
I’m cultivating my own ground.
Kent Jones