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Three Scenes of the 1970s

A suite of moviegoing reminiscences from 2017

1. In the Realm

In 1977 I was 17, not yet old enough to legally attend the Melbourne International Film Festival. And certainly not old enough to view the uncensored print of Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976), a Japanese film already notorious for its unbridled – and sometimes unsimulated – sex scenes. But there I was, unaccompanied, bravely queuing up with thousands of strangers outside the enormous, old-style Palais theatre, very early on a Saturday morning, to see this ultra-special event, in 35 millimetre celluloid on a vast, loud screen.

The feeling of engaging in an illicit adventure both before and during the screening was overwhelming; I was convinced that the cops would bust in at any second and drag me – only me – whimpering from the theatre.

Near the end of the session – as the genitals of Kichi (Tatsuya Fuji), voluntarily strangled to death, are tenderly severed and brandished by his enthusiastic lover, Sada (Eiko Matsuda) – we all heard a bloodcurdling scream, issuing from a distressed audience member up in the highest seats of this picture palace. Emergency service was required for this suitably transgressed spectator.

Afterwards, in the nearby back streets of this suburb along which I walked home in a daze, an even stranger apparition seized the world – this one more in tune with the Georges Bataille-style surrealism and eroticism of the film just witnessed. Parked cars, with no one visible in any seat, rocked gently or violently back and forth, as if seized by a magical will. Clearly, some spectators, unfazed – or perhaps incited – by the final castration scene had raced to their mobile bedrooms to live out the movie before its credits had even stopped rolling.

I made it home safely that day, avoiding police arrest for my crime against state restrictions over my delicate consciousness. But I had to wait twenty-three years before seeing In the Realm of the Senses again in any form but the pathetically dubbed and cut video version that circulated for decades. On screen, fully restored and re-released, I saw that Oshima’s film had lost none of its hushed, riveting power.

But in 2000 there was no scandal: no public figure made a fuss over it; the cops were not called in; nobody screamed; the empty cars in nearby alleyways sat forlornly still.

As a wise man said: “Only those who lived before the revolution know life’s sweetness”.

Serail

2. Anamorphosis

As hard as it is to imagine from the viewpoint of today, Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) was enough of a commercial success in Melbourne cinemas of the mid-to-late 1970s to create space for the release of an even more experimental film hailing from the Rivette ‘family’: namely, Eduardo de Gregorio’s Sérail (aka Surreal Estate, 1976). Argentinean-born de Gregorio had been a script collaborator on Céline and Julie, always present during shooting to provide any dialogue or extra ideas needed on the spot.

Re-seen today, Sérail loses none of its strangeness. [Note: I will be writing more about the film in a forthcoming issue of Narrow Margin in 2027.] A British novelist (Corin Redgrave) in France is drawn in by a sprawling, atmospheric, mostly empty manor where two mysterious women (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier from Céline and Julie) spin stories and adopt fake identities. Lurking in the background is none other than Leslie Caron, perhaps more of a Mabusean manipulator than she is letting on.

But what happened to the ending? From the ‘70s, I retain an absolutely vivid memory of the final shot: we are serenely looking at this haunted house from an exterior, distant vantage point when, suddenly, it is as if (pre-David Lynch) a lens is removed from the camera, utterly warping the image. It’s a beautiful flourish: this film about how fiction devours life itself auto-destructs at the end, its fragile illusion going up in smoke.

However, when I test this recollection out on friends around the world, no one can confirm it – and the visual effect is definitely not included on the director-approved DVD edition of Sérail. (De Gregorio himself died in 2012).

I am forced, finally, to accept the hypothesis of another Melbourne cinephile from those years: it was probably the cinema’s projectionist, anxious to set up for the next session (of an altogether different film), who yanked off the anamorphic lens that would have been necessary to unsqueeze the print of the widescreen Sérail.

In this instance, at least, I am grateful that the projectionist’s intervention – his personal contribution to the unwritten, global history of expanded cinema – was perfectly in tune with meta-fictional conceits of the film itself.

Rio Bravo

3. The Ciné-fils

At the very end of the ‘70s, I attended what must have been one of the last ‘children’s Saturday matinees’ scheduled at a suburban cinema situated far from Melbourne’s centre – and most certainly the last to screen an old, classic Western, a ritual that had been slowly dying out across the decade. Ten years previously, when I was a child, my father had often taken me to the cinema to watch Westerns, old and new.

But here was my golden opportunity, as a young cinephile, to see Howard Hawks’ mythic Rio Bravo (1959) – the film beloved of critics from Robin Wood to Serge Daney – projected on the big screen.

I was the only adult present. Just before the screening started, several parents dropped off their very young kids at the cinema door. These children tolerated about one minute of this ancient movie before deciding to run around the aisles, shouting and playing.

Except for one small boy, who detached himself from the group … and silently came to sit next to me. At intermission (it’s a relatively long Hollywood film), he looked up at me and plaintively inquired: “Do you like this film, Mister?” I answered, as enthusiastically but also as pedagogically as I could: “Yes, I sure do! It’s great!”

The film started again, and the boy silently stayed in his seat for the duration, eyes fixed on the screen. At the end, when the lights went up, he said “Bye, Mister”, and walked out into the street where one of his parents was waiting to pick him up.

© Adrian Martin September 2017

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Part Three of Bruce Hodsdon's new series on the history of art cinema

Editor’s Note: This is the third part of a series by Bruce Hodsdon in which he analyses the history and impact of Art Cinema. Part One appeared on March 10 and can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE. Part Two appeared on 16 May and can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE

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Howard Hawks

 

Part 3: From Classicism to Modernism

 

Although Howard Hawks (1896-1977) was active through the decade directing two of his best and most representative dramas, Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966), Hawks was never recognised as a director of the year by IFG's selection panel on a par with their selection of four other great directors from the studio system: Cukor, Hitchcock, Minnelli and Huston. Neither was John Ford ever selected by the IFG panel despite directing two major 'testaments' in the 60s : The Man Who Shot LibertyValance (1962) and Seven Women (1966). The editors provided little clarity as to what the 'Five Directors of the Year' selections were intended to represent other than their personal choices and that the format was modelled on the Wisden Cricketers' Alamanac's '5 Cricketers of the Year', IFG's editor, Peter Cowie, being a cricket tragic.

John Wayne, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, Rio Bravo

In Sight & Sound's 2012 decennial World Poll Hawks is not voted with Hitchcock, Ford and Fritz Lang, amongst the top 25 directors of all time; Rio Bravo is voted equal 63rd with 24 votes in the “100 top films.” As to be expected, the minds of the great majority of 1200 critics and filmmakers “were variously and more dutifully most often opting for rating the milestone movies and turning points in the art of film.”  

Hawks is reinforced as a paradigm of the Hollywood professional by his most committed defenders when they claim that he directed the 'timeless' best film in every major classic Hollywood genre. The doubters are held to account by David Thomson in his  'Biographical Dictionary' for their dismissal of Hawks's work as being “subject to the limitations of the entertainment film, prone to a romantic view of men in action; in short, a moviemaker for boys who have never quite grown up.” Thomson goes on to add that “because he is so unassuming as an innovator, so natural as an entertainer, his work has not been surpassed.”  In comparison with John Ford, Thomson argues “that while Hawks's West is equally romantic in Red River and Rio Bravo it is only a background for character studies that are profound, humane and touched by sadness.” In comparison, in a judgement that most would consider excessively harsh, for Thomson, “Ford was so often bigoted, grandiloquent and maudlin.”

Thomson proceeds to argue his case in his 'Biographical Dictionary'. Like Hawks, Ford's work, as voted for in the World Poll, has only one film in the top 100 but it is ranked seventh.  Thomson concedes that The Searchers,for him a film apart in Ford's oeuvre, is “very moving and mysterious...it does not cheat on a serious subject, and beautifully relates the landscape to its theme.” Ford would have directed more great scenes than any other classical American director and, as Thomson concedes, “he had an eye,” more so than ever after Ford lost the sight in one when he was wounded while filming a documentary of the Battle of Midway. Ford's indulgences do provide plenty of material for the unsympathetic critic in his extensive oeuvre of Irish-Americana which stands in contrast to Hawks's understated consistency in the playing of the dramas against the comedies, placing in relief the high points that seem to emerge organically in his best films.

John Ford

Sam Rohdie in his exploratory book 'Film Modernism' devotes his entry on 'Classicism' exclusively to Hawks. Referring to the dramas, Rohdie locates the secret of Hawksian laconicism in his self-acknowledged interest in “characters rather than actors,” choosing actors with 'character' (e.g.     Bogart, Bacall, Wayne, Clift, Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson, Jean Arthur, Cary Grant, John Ireland), a  journey or itinerary providing a simple and straightforward structure with readymade continuity in   which the characters resolve their differences. “Hawks is the perfect classicist. It is as if his films objectively imitate nature and invent nothing, going along with what occurs and what is met on the way exactly as his characters do” (ibid). The comedies often made almost systematically in relation to the dramas, reveal a darker Hawksian reversal – coarseness of humour involving slapstick and gender role reversals successfully replacing the subtlety of the dramas by Hawks' genius in retaining full control in the pacing and timing of the comedy. As John Belton points out, the action films and the comedies complement each other: while the male characters in the former resist change, those in the comedies learn to adapt to it as the female characters oversee the 'feminisation' of their man.

"gender role reversals"
Cary Grant, Ann Sheridan, I Was A Male War Bride
(Howard Hawks, 1949)

What Rohdie outlines is how the work of a classical American director was assimilated into the modernism of 'la nouvelle vague' [in a way that Ford's wide ranging traditionalism was not]. He notes how the New Wave had enthusiastic appreciation of Hawks's qualities and classicism. “By naming and revealing its self effacement (objectivity, power and grace), Hawks's style was made evident.  As a consequence his images (means) were recognised as both integrated with, but separate from, their original narrative ends.”  By rupturing Hawks's continuity “they rescued American cinema by highlighting its classicism giving it new life by making it part of the forms of the New Wave's modernism” while also undermining its classicism by making it visible, that it was no longer merely serving the narrative. This left what was learned from Hawks's skills, and their potential for use, “as primarily formal and cinematic.” When cited in a Godard film they were as fragments excised from classical cinema “given a home in the new forms and awareness of modernism” (ibid). In other words they had their your cake while eating it too.

Barrett Hodsdon quotes Hawks's biographer Todd McCarthy's conclusion “that his oeuvre did not represent an autobiography; rather it constitutes a massive self-projection, a portrait of his fantasy of himself”  (The Grey Fox p.6) Hodsdon adds that “as with Ford, Hawks's career was still a remarkable projection for a hard-nosed mainstream filmmaker who believed in and worked under a commercial rubric. However, unlike Ford, Hawks never deconstructed himself [and his  'world view'] but retreated into his personal mythos in his last films.”  (The Elusive Auteur 129-30)

Hawks's last 6 films were released 1959-70: Rio Bravo, Hatari!, Man's Favorite Sport, Red Line 7000, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo.  Ford's last six,1961-66, were : Sergeant Rutledge,Two Rode Together, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Donovan's Reef, Cheyenne Autumn, and Seven Women.

Transformation of Film Style                                                                                                                                             “There is little doubt that a classical aesthetics looks for and favours films that can be constructed as organic, coherent, meaningful controlled art” (Adrian Martin 22).

 

                       For classical cinema, rooted in the popular novel, short story and

                       well-made drama of the nineteenth century, “reality” is assumed

                       to be a tacit coherence among events, a consistency and clarity

                       of individual identity. Realistic motivation corroborates the com-

                       positional motivation achieved through cause and effect. Art-cin-

                       ema narration, taking its cue from literary modernism, questions

                       this notion of the real rooted in the nineteenth century popular

                       novel and well-made drama: the world's laws may not be know-

                       able, personal psychology may be indeterminate.

                                                                                  (Bordwell 'Narration' 206)

 

Bordwell acknowledges Marcel Martin's summing up of new aesthetic conventions which recognise these new 'other realities'. Neorealism sought to depict the vagaries of life as lived to “de-dramatise”the narrative by showing both climaxes and trivial moments. “Specific sorts of realism motivate a loosening of cause and effect, an episodic construction of the syuzhet (plot), and an enhancement of the film's symbolic dimension through an emphasis on the fluctuations of character psychology”  Bordwell goes on to illustrate how art film's reality is multifaceted in dealing with “real” subject matter such as contemporary alienation and non-communication (ibid).

  

Jerzy Skolimowski in his film Walkover

                                                                    

The sixties became the decade of transformation in the history of film style in which classical mise en scène could be “rejected wholesale but also referenced, cited, and thereby bracketed, problematised and merrily interfered with.” Godard in Le Mèpris (1963), as Adrian Martin further describes, “both mi-micks the classical system for expressive purposes while poking holes in its surface in a myriad of in-scene distances” (Mise en Scène 80).  Jerzy Skolimowski, not long out of film school, in the midst of the Polish new wave, made a critical experiment in the way he deployed the extended long take in his second feature, Walkover(1965), one of the first films to do so, remarkably as Martin describes it in the opening single shot of 11 mins and throughout the film of only 29 shots in 72 mins. Skolimowski, inventively places traditional mise-en-scène (with its deference to montage) within potentially subjective scenes 'in crisis', as Martin recognises, by maintaining distance through total objectivity in lateral movement, fresco-like across sudden shifts of viewpoint.  Although Skolimowski claimed not to have seen any of Godard's films before making Walkover,Martin notes his work on cinematic style “as having evident, transnational affinities with what Godard and others were doing in this period and throughout the remainder of the decade.” (ibid 75-6)

 

“The competing claims of realism and modernism was one of the sustaining debates through the last century from the late fifties to seventies that “produced many of the conceptual models of the cine- matic image, from André Bazin's realism to Screenjournal's modernist Marxism,” as G&S note (15). Historical and ahistorical impulses, being integral to their flexible appeal “are held in creative tension by art cinema, it is further suggested (G&S 14-15). Its flexibility lies in this combination of the ahistorical (its refusal of traditional historicism potentially avoiding ethnocentrism) and the historical (e.g. in the importance for it of movements and national film waves). In the end, any defining of international art cinema returns simply to a nostrum that potentially it encompasses narrative film that is “not Hollywood.”

 

As already referred in part 2, the local has played a key role in the evolution of “art” in international art cinema. In outlining its history Geoffrey Nowell-Smith emphases its heterogeneity across national cinemas through the sixties in western and eastern European cinemas. He is dismissive of the attempts that were made to give definition in art cinema to distinct generic properties analogous to Hollywood cinema and other mainstream film genres. While Nowell-Smith acknowledged an identifiable sharing of structural and stylistic breaking of the rules of classical construction and characterisation in many of the art films of this period, he saw this as continuing to move in many directions.

 

 The apparent diversity of key New Wave directors from common ground, contributed to their international film festival and art house notoriety accompanied by the engagement of critics and a growing public interested in the variety offered by art cinema. Its opposition to Hollywood rests on the international variety of its films from austerity to spectacle, neo-realism to Felliniesque fantasy, radical narrative experimentation to relatively conventional storytelling, and Marxist inflected narrative to romantic humanism. As the scope for divergences between individual filmmakers outside the mainstream increased so also did the dependence on the commitment of producers prepared to back originality. The 60s also saw the increase in new forms of state aid in France in the 60s, and from television in Italy (RAI) and Germany (ZDF) in the 70s. 

 

Against institutionalisation

The radical events of May 68 generated an international climate for new cinemas as well as sharp differences in formal strategies for dealing with overt political content independent of the mainstream, in Europe, Africa, India, Japan, and North and South America (1).

 

"...overt political content independent of the mainstream"
Nagisa Oshima

In 1981 Steve Neale referred to the containment of the variety of art cinema by its economic infrastructure with “its basis in commodity-dominated modes of production, distribution and exhibition [within] a general institutional framework of discourses on high art and culture, and by the repetitions that tend to mark such discourses (15)” (2). In the new millennium the uneasy relationship between  high art and low (cult) art was highlighted by David Andrew's polemic for new ground. He argues against what he sees as the outmoded containment of art film in the distinct generic terms identified by Neale as an institutional practice closely associating with designation and stratification of films according to the 'quality and artfulness' of modernism. Against this actual, or at least potentially reactionary institutionalisation as 'high art' cinema, Andrew proposes an “egalitarian,value-neutral path” which would admit disenfranchised areas such as 'soft-core porn'. Soft core art film emerged with the progressive relaxation of censorship in the late sixties to the mid seventies (3). What Andrew is specifically referring to in this context is a 'feminised' soft core genre first established as a cultural industry in America in the 1980s which remained unacknowledged for serious study. His main goal has been to develop a framework whereby untraditional scholars could “justify their exploration of cinema's most disenfranchised areas” using an art cinema approach (4).      

************************************************                                              

 

Notes

(1)The emergence of the concept of a Third Cinema in the late 60s initially in Latin America, did not simply refer to so-called Third World countries but to any films confronting political and social issues that challenged entrenched modes of  mainstream action genres or individually expressive narrative: the First Cinema being the mainstream Hollywood model , the Second Cinema being the auteur-based Art Cinema centred in Europe. This will be further discussed in Latin American cinemas in part 4.

 

(2) It may be that art cinema is best defined not through a certain historical period, nor a directorial canon, or a set of distinctive subjects and styles but as an institution in whichcertain films are 'assigned' a position within the general film culture and are defined in terms of a particular mode of consumption. Film festivals are a key component of this institution. The institutional context is critical to the stabilisation of the 'genre' and the films' separate status as cultural objects. This circulatory network may be the key unifying aspect serving to distinguish its minority audience from the mass audience of the commercial mainstream cinema. ( from Tom Ryall  “Art House, smart house  Movie no. 90 1981 quoted Cook & Bernink  eds. 108)

                                                                                                                                                                                             

(3) Steve Neale notes (33) that the gradual postwar opening of anglophone film exhibition to European films increasingly provided commercial stability for 'adult art' on the screen beginning with films like La Ronde(1950), One Summer of Happiness(1954), And God Created Woman(1956), Les Amants(1958), La Dolce Vita(1960), Antonioni's 'trilogy' beginning with L'avventura(1959-62), The Silence (1963), Une Femme Mariée(1964), and Belle de Jour (1967) to art films with a reputation for explicit representation of sexuality such as I Am Curious Yellow(1967), Pasolini's 'trilogy of life' beginning with The Decameron(1970-4), Robbe-Grillet's Eden and After(1970) et al, Last Tango in Paris(1972), The Night Porter (1973), and Jancsó's Private Vices, Public Virtues (1976).  

                                                                                                                                                                                       

(4) David Andrews is a specialist in American literature, and art film including soft core porn. In 2006 Ohio State University Press published his book, 'Soft in the Middle', described as a nuanced study of the devalued soft core film and TV industry which occupies an ambiguous “female friendly” middle ground between hard core porn and Hollywood

 

*************************************************************

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith  “Art Cinema” Oxford History of World Cinema 1996                                                                                           

John Belton “Howard Hawks”  in Nowell-Smith op cit  

Steve Neale “Art Cinema as Institution” Screen v.22/1 1981                                                                                        

Rosalind Galt & Karl Schoonover “Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema” Global Art Cinema 2010                                      

Stephen Crofts “Concepts of National Cinema”  Oxford Guide to Film studies Hill & Gibson eds.                                                 

Murray Smith  “Modernism and the avant gardes”  Oxford Guide ibid                                                                                                       

David Andrews“Towards an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema”  Global Art Cinema ibid                                                                                                                                                    

Sam Rohdie  Film Modernism 2015                                                                                                                                       

Adrian Martin Mise en Scène and Film Style  2014                                                                                                                

Julian Petley “Art Cinema” The Cinema Book 2^nded. Pam Cook& Mieke Bernink eds. BFI 1999 p.106                  

 David Bordwell  Narration in the Fiction Film 1985                                                                                     

David Bordwell ”The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” reprinted with afterword in Poetics of Cinema  2008                                                                                                            

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Part Two of Bruce Hodsdon's new series on the history of art cinema

Last year at Marienbad

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a new series by scholar and critic Bruce Hodsdon in which he analyses the history and impact of Art Cinema. Part One appeared on March 10 and can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE.

                                       

Part 2: Art Cinema: a matter of definition?

 

Art cinema: genre, quality, alternative, marginal, pan-national, a mode of film practice, a form of film exhibition, an institution? Or what everyone understands, yet no-one until fairly recently has been prepared to specifically define, other than simply 'not being Hollywood'. The mode of narration is loosened from classical structures typically (but not necessarily) engaging the audience in a 'foreign' production including overt aesthetic formalism and/or an emphasis on verisimilitude over narrative drive.

 

André Bazin

Julian Petley notes that serious anglophone discussion of art cinema per se dates back to the late 1970s with the publication of David Bordwell's essay on 'Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice' (1979) and Steve Neale's 'Art Cinema as an Institution' (1981).  Bordwell called for the examination of the complex historical relation of art cinema to the classical narrative cinema. The term was then applied retrospectively to identify historical phenomena from 1908 as outlined in part 1. Petley lists a series of discussions through the 60s into the 70s going back to Alexandre Astruc's discussion of 'La Camera Stylo' in 1948 (the idea of  'writing with the camera'), André Bazin's critical work on neo-realism (Rossellini in particular), and Cahiers du Cinema's ranking of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Bresson and Dreyer in its directorial pantheon. By the early 60s there was a growing sense that a new kind of cinema was developing without agreement on what its specific characteristics might be. (Cook & Bernink eds. 106)

                           

In common usage the term art cinema has come to describe feature-length  narrative films  outside  mainstream cinema, located somewhere  between fully  experimental films  and overtly commercial products. They may typically include foreign  productions engaged in  unrestrained formalism or a mode of narration that is pleasurable but loosened from classical structures while distanced from its representations.(G & S 6)

Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell

                                                                                                      

At the radical end of the art film spectrum Last Year at Marienbad  has been described as a quintessential work of art cinema with, as Bordwell notes, “a plot so wrought that it becomes impossible to construct a story” (Narration 232). At the other end, as Bordwell further points out, by the 60s art cinema had so accustomed critics to looking for personal expression in films by Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni et al, that auteur critics “unproblematically applied art cinema schemata to classical Hollywood films.” By the 80s “the intense subjectivity of the 60s art film was less in evidence “with greater emphasis on an ambiguous play between objective    realism and authorial address.”  (ibid).

 

In recent decades there have been two forms of international art cinema offering a range of viewing experiences:  one centred close to the mainstream in its cinematic values and distribution centred in Europe, the other lower budget independent films coming from a variety sources including the U.S. What is most important about art cinema is “the room it provides for difference,” which Nowell-Smith seeks to release  by letting art cinema fragment.  ( World Cinema 573-5)  

 

In 1981 Steve Neale describes art cinema, both historically and contemporaneously  as “the attempts made by a number of Europeancountries both to counter American domination of their indigenous markets in film and also to fostera film industry and film culture of their own.”

Adrian Martin

 

Adrian Martin insists that “no distinction should be made between art cinema and so-called commercial/entertainment cinema – both are, or can be, cinematic art...In essence according to classicism, style exists to serve the subject or story. This is an expressive economy: style expresses subject.” (Mise en Scène 22)  A broad swathe of production with the label of 'art cinema' as a loose marketing term, Martin suggests, implies that other types of cinema are not art. This was associated with luminaries such as Bergman, Bertolucci, Resnais and Haneke, “a range of moments in their films racing ahead of the critical language. In the 70s mise en scène analysis began to stage a comeback.”(ibid 78)

 

It has been relatively easy to locate art cinema for simply being 'not Hollywood or even anti-Holly- wood', “Art films tend to be marked by a stress on visual style (an engagement of the look in terms of individual point of view rather than by institutionalised spectacle), by a suppression of action in the Hollywood sense, by a consequent stress on character rather than plot and by an internalisation of dramatic conflict” (Neale pp 13-14), and a tighter causal chain replaced by an episodic structure and more nuanced characterisation. These elements function as differentiation from what is perceived to be the Hollywood text, art features differing from classically constructed features. As Kristin Thompson has noted they can be more ambiguous, reflexive and stylised and at the same time more naturalistic.  Art filmsalso tend to be marked by the signifying presence of an authorial voice. Art is thus the space in which indigenous (or in the US, independent) cinema can develop and make its critical and economic mark.

David Andrews

The description by Peter Lev of art cinema as “what is shown in art theatres” (quoted G&S 65) might lead us to conclude that art cinema since its inception has been tantamount to most every kind of “alternative” or non-Hollywood cinema.” (David Andrews 65)  This represents a challenge to a formalist definition. Any complete history of art cinema and its discursive trappings, it is suggested, reveals a genre so eclectic that we might even be tempted to call it an “open” formal category.

 

As one follows them, however, according to Andrews, the lines of inquiry suggest how unlikely it is that theorists will ever develop a satisfying definition of art cinema that defines it only in the formalist terms of a specific kind of cinematic text and not the the unified body of work such analysis tends to imply.

 

There is also the question of the development in fields such as the philosophy of art which “have abandoned attempts to define “art” in evaluative formal terms (i.e. in terms of a preferred set of texts) some decades ago” (ibid 68). Further it is clear that dedicated art house circuits don't necessarily follow any film-as-art definition in their programming. Does it even make  sense, Andrews asks, to refer to art cinema as a form of high art (as classical music might be posited against jazz with its folk origins) apart from implying a sense of exclusiveness?

 

The following are some principles Galt & Schoonover nominate by which art cinema might be more clearly identified in relation to the mainstream and historically to classicism( 6-9).

Karl Schoonover, Rosalind Galt

The lack of strict parameters for art cinema is not just the ambiguity of its critical history but a central part of what it is: “a positive way of delineating its discursive space.” It is proposed by G&S that art cinema be identified for its impurity without losing its place as an alternative cinema between the main- stream and avant garde - “a difficulty of categorisation that is as productive to film culture as it is frust-rating to taxonomy.” To be impure G&S emphasise, “is not to be vague or nebulous.”  They further contend that art cinema, by its nature, “always perverts the standard categories used to divide up institutions, locations, territories, histories, or spectators.” They illustrate how this impurity can be understood in different ways such as an institutional space “that moves uneasily between the commercial world and its artisanal others, neither experimental nor mainstream.” At the mainstream end contemporary European art films, for example, can look more like the derided cinema of quality rejected by the French New Wave. In some cases art films can, as suggested by Lev, simply be those shown in art-house theatres, or at film festivals, so that their very existence as art-films is dependent on certain critics, programmers, or distribution models. 

 

Art cinema has an ambivalent relationship with location and identity. A mainstream film in its place of origin can become an art cinema release in another country (further signified by the addition of sub-titles) immersed in a sense of internationalism. G&S point out that art cinema always carries a comparativist (national) impulse combined with a transnational tenor (ibid 7). Canons of great films established by world polls are dominated by this sense of internationalism co-existing with nationalism. The format of this series links this co-existence with individual expressivity in the key role of the director as auteur.  In the designation of “art” within global art cinema, the local has played a key but shifting role. When a country's films are selected for foreign cultural screenings by a commission or similar agency, conformity with eurocentric notions of art cinema has tended to prevail in the process.

 

A film's positive international reception can become proof of its importance in the country of origin. This ambiguity/impurity also resists attempts to define 'art film' as a genre. International is often a code for 'foreign film' understood primarily in terms of its consumption. Leaving international festivals, with their predisposition to search out difference, to directly identify another country's talent from the outside has meant that the films so selected for screening have increasingly been recognised on their own terms in crossing the threshold from a national to an international art cinema.

 

Far from rejecting Hollywood systems of stardom and authorship, art cinema deploys these systems   in parallel if more ambivalent form, not necessarily with the same aesthetic criteria that mark their operations in the Hollywood system. Stardom, for instance, tends to adopt criteria such as bodily qualities with somewhat different emphases. The auteurist impulse in the role of the director also demands a different emphasis. Given the global spread of production and film cultures in the 50s and 60s, the role and nature of authorship with art cinema as a platform, particularly its political and cultur- al agency, can have a pressing significance.  

 

Issue #1 (?)

Art film has a more ambivalent yet central relationship with authorship than is the case with classical narrative. Auteur was initially deployed polemically by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics as a term for what they perceived as being too often critically unrecognised excellence within the confines of Hollywood's studio system. The critics, some soon to be making their own films, writing in Cahiers, found new ways of identifying authorship in the studios, most notably adapting the notion, adapted from the theatre, of mise-en-scène as a measure of a director's commitment, intelligence and sensitivity in naturalising the way emotions and ideas are thematically 'de-theatricalised' and conveyed 'cinematically' by the auteur's direction of the actors and the camera.

 

Sam Rohdie, in his posthumously published Film Modernism, suggests defining an auteur as “some- one who creates his or her own system rather than putting into play an existing one,” stand out examples in American cinema being Welles and Cassavetes. In classical Hollywood movies, cinematic means are subordinated to narrative and story... a great classical artist being someone who is great for his or her ability to imitate not to innovate, who obeys the rules with grace and style.” (26-7)  This dominance of narrativity involves the effacement of the forms deployed   in the telling of the story. In essence classical storytelling is objective, “imitative of nature,” as Rohdie puts it. Directors such as Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Sirk, Fuller, Ford, Preminger, and Howard Hawks, were singled out and praised by the Cahiers critics for the excellence of their filmmaking within the Hollywood system, not for subverting it. In this respect, Rohdie further suggests, they were more like traditional craftspeople but ones using the system by making it their own.

 

Sam Rohdie

 Authors in art cinema more often speak from outside America or Europe or are otherwise located outside the mainstream. The film festival circuit constitutes a major platform, both commercially and culturally, for the success of an individual film that is also closely tied to that of an often relatively small, or even almost non-existent national industry.

 

An Australian Intervention

The final problem for the classification of art cinema raised by G&S is the application of the notion of the impure spectator, “both at the level of textual address and in the history of audiences” (ibid 8). They note that the literature of the emergence of an art-house audience meshes with the sense of a hybrid audience.

 

Queuing out the door.
The Savoy Theatre Sydney, 1950s.
The film screening was  La Ronde

Initial potential for audience hybridity in Australia was heightened by postwar migration which generated the increased inflow of European feature films in the 50s and 60s through ethnic based distribution and even the American distribution majors in the 60s and 70s whose head offices, in response to the international art house boom in the 60s acquired world rights (for the first time?) to selected foreign language titles. The story in these decades, however is as much one of parallel rather than of intersecting audiences for foreign language cinema.

 

The ongoing rigid, often arbitrary application of the censorship code by the Commonwealth film censor in the 60s served to increase the notoriety of so-called “continental” films attracting a predominantly male audience in search of erotic content in inner city cinemas, most often in ex-newsreel theatrettes. Expectations were continually thwarted by the censor until the introduction of the 'R' certificate in the early 70s.The first art house film to break the drought in Sydney cinemas, I seem to recall, was Pasolini's The Decameron.

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini as Giotto, The Decameron

A growing art house audience was concentrated in the above average income socio-economic bracket with an otherwise seeming preference for British rather than Hollywood films, plus a small but growing number of tertiary-educated and student filmgoers looking for an alternative or supplement to Hollywood-dominated screen entertainment. This widening spectrum of cinema audiences was also the product of the postwar influx of migrants from Europe with screenings in the large Italian and Greek clubs equipped with 35mm projection, for members of smaller ethnic clubs organised in cinemas, or the regular programming of sub-titled films in suburbs with a concentration of migrant populations.In Sydney and Melbourne, film festivals made their first appearance, film society initiatives over a weekend in the early to mid 50s, becoming major cultural events by the late 60s in packed 2000 plus seat cinemas over two weeks by the late 60s, also spreading to other capital cities, and later a travelling film festival for regional centres.

 

“The openness of art film to aesthetic experience,” conclude G&S, “is not unconnected to its openness to minority communities who have formed a significant part of art cinema's audience as well as its representational politics.” They find in this “the kernel of art cinema's significance as a category of cinema brings categories into question and holds the potential to open up spaces between and outside of mainstream/avant-garde, local/cosmopolitan, history/theory, and industrial/formal debates in film scholarship” (9).

 

The bibliographic references for this part are combined with those of part 3 to be posted shortly.