Toward a Definition of the International Art Cinema

Subtitle

Author:

Philip R. Fagan

2001

I. Modernism:

The influence of the Modernist sensibility on the International Art Cinema (IAC) cannot be overstated. Fueled by the writings of James Joyce (Ulysses), Ezra Pound (The Cantos) and T.S.Eliot (The Wastelands), and artistic movements such as Cubism and Surrealism, Modernist thought after World War I challenged 19th Century notions of a unified and stable reality, subordinating objectivity and reason to subjectivity and ambiguity. While Joyce, Eliot and Pound defined Modernist literature and jazz deconstructed popular music, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein brought psychiatry and science into the Modern World. Like Freud, the Modernist writers were convinced that mankind’s essence was inherently decentered and fragmented and that life itself was ultimately unknowable.

Modernism explores identity through its inherent fissures and fragmentation. The Self is unstable and unknowable, and life is but a playing field for existential angst and alienation, a game of random chance. Modernism reflects a postindustrial cultural despair and exhaustion; a keenly felt loss (and perhaps recovery) of religious faith.

In the realm of film, Modernist schools of thought such as French Surrealism (Un Chien Andalou, 1928), German Expressionism (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), and Russian Futurism and montage (The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) found their perfect modes of expression in the early silent cinema. Out of such works, and against the burgeoning Classical Hollywood Cinema (CHC) style, grew the International Art Cinema.

Like Modernist literature, the films of the IAC are character-oriented and focus on the inner worlds of their protagonists; they are not action-driven films like those of the CHC. Modernism and the IAC also share certain generic conventions such as subjective, free-floating narratives, Joycean epiphanies and “border situations”, as well as a number of common themes: The loss of the self or individuality; pessimism, despair and suffering, and an adverse reaction to the Industrial Age. In both Modernist literature and the films of the IAC, time and space are often seen as relative rather than fixed concepts. This Modernist tradition manifests itself within the IAC often in startling ways, as in the cubistic blurring of two women’s faces in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, a scene which functions as the cinematic heir to Picasso’s Modernist paintings.

Due to the devastation of World War II, the burgeoning IAC was effectively shut down in the 1940s, experiencing its rebirth and heyday from the 1950s through the 1970s. As the existential angst triggered by World War I acted as a catalyst for the Modernist movement of the 1920s, the aftermath of WWII and the later Vietnam War come to inform the new Modernism of the IAC.

II. The Auteur Theory:

The International Art Cinema is a “cinema of names”. As indigenous films from around the world became globally distributed in the 1950s, writers at the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema established the Auteur Theory. The theory essentially states that many filmmakers consistently apply common themes, styles, and motifs throughout their work. As a result not only are they the effective “authors” of their films, but they become the subjects of their work as well. Whereas audiences of the CHC were generally attracted to a film due to its star or subject matter, the IAC continues to attract those who want to see a “Bergman film” or a “Fellini film”. The works of such directors take on a quasi-literary aspect, their films reflecting their inner lives as a novel can be said to reflect that of its author. The director not only acts as the narrator of his film, but is indivisible from the film. The resulting text is personal and self-consciously authored. IAC directors become so associated with their work that Federico Fellini began inserting his name into the very titles of his films in the 1970s (Fellini Roma; Fellini Satyricon). The film is no longer simply by Fellini, it is literally Fellini. He is both the film’s subject and title.

Many proponents of the Auteur theory from the Cahiers collective, including Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim, 1962) and Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, 1960), would go on to helm the French New Wave of the 1960s, one of the most influential movements of the IAC.

III. Style:

Cinema is inherently a realist mode of expression, reflecting physical reality as no other art form can. The “there-ness” of the film image (actors, mise-en-scene) demands realism. Film pioneers like the Lumiere Brothers quickly saw the power the moving image could achieve over its audience simply by presenting everyday life. Others, like George Melies, saw the potential of film in its magical powers, in its ability to convey illusion and the fantastic. Classical narrative cinema, as shaped by directors like D.W. Griffith and Buster Keaton, can be said to have derived their “realist” style from the Lumieres’ “actualities.” As the Classical Hollywood Cinema evolved, filmmakers in other countries stayed truer to the illusion and experimentation of Melies. German Expressionism established itself as a style in the films of Robert Weine (The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari) and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, 1922), while in Russia, Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) and Dziga Vertov (The Man with a Movie Camera) defined montage editing and “the power and revolutionary potential of cinema.” In France, the works of Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali and Man Ray spawned a trend of surreal and experimental cinema. Eventually, directors like Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa helped fashion a national cinema in Japan.

These international movements developed a tradition of cinema style in stark contrast to the CHC. American directors who shared similar sensibilities were either marginalized as “experimental” or “underground” (Maya Deren; Stan Brakhage) or ostracized by Hollywood (Orson Welles; John Cassavetes). Still, the CHC often co-opts what it wants from the IAC. Although the film noir cycle of the 1940s and 50s certainly brought an art cinema style and sensibility to American audiences, these elements were lifted verbatim from the German Expressionists (just as they were incorporated into the earlier Universal horror films). Additionally, film noir was identified as an artistic movement and given its name by the writers of Cahiers du Cinema rather than by the American culture which produced the films. Furthermore, art cinema directors often use the conventions of Hollywood genres only to subvert and overthrow them, as in the work of Godard and American Robert Altman. Conversely, the French neo-noirs of the 1960s such as Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge riff on CHC to produce affectionate homages. There is a curious give and take between the styles of the CHC and IAC.

From its earliest roots, the IAC subordinates storytelling to art. In a film such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, the style is all-important. The story is designed, rather than told. In the practical application of his montage theory of editing, Eisenstein asks the viewer to find meaning in juxtaposition. The assembly of images asks to be read in association with what precedes and follows each shot. In the similarity and/ or disparity of images and motifs, the meaning emerges: Proletariet/ Bourgeois; chaos/ symmetry; crowd/ individual; movement/ countermovement. Like Vertov after him, Eisenstein explored the revolutionary power of montage to manipulate time and space, abstracting, elasticizing and subjectifying such concepts. In contrast to CHC’s precise editing and careful camera placements, the Russians deployed a jarring style of radical juxtapositions and bricolage.

The German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s eschewed realism altogether, creating a bizarre artificial world. The sets are obviously constructed and the actors wore heavy make-up. These films, with their abstract and chaotic sense of time and space and tales of horror and madness, demonstrate a tension between realistic narratives and expressionistic reality, reflecting the influence of Freud’s theories on the culture.

In contrast to these and other early national cinemas, the Italian cinema of the 1950s emerged as a return to realism. Through location shooting and the use of working class non-actors, Italian Neorealism addressed the social problems facing the country following WWII. These films comprised another break with the CHC in the concept of realism itself. The Italians were interested in a “true realism” that captured the complexities of human life, not the highly manufactured “movie realism” of the CHC. Some Neorealist directors (Michelangelo Antonioni, Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini) went on to embrace a more experimental Modernist approach to filmmaking as the cultural revolution of the 1960s impacted the style and art of cinemas around the world.

The IAC can be said to manifest the conflict between the “realism” of CHC and Italian Neorealism, and the more subjective and experimental work of other early national cinemas.

IV. Narrative:

The International Art Cinema continues to provide new forms of storytelling which challenge the fixtures of the Classical Hollywood Cinema. The narratives of the IAC are often baffling; poetic in nature rather than novelistic in the classical sense.

The disjointed narrative form of IAC derives from a Modernist tradition of fragments, conflict, cacophony, montage. It is ambiguous, puzzling, metaphorical (rather than literal), and exhibits a contrast between the subjective and objective. It stands in opposition to the conventions of classical narrative structure. The purposes of IAC narrative are different than those of Hollywood films. The IAC is reflexive, political and subversive, cerebral and associative, poetic rather than realistic. It celebrates chance and randomness rather than cause and effect. It asks to be read vertically as opposed to sequentially. To read the IAC requires a break with the conventions of Hollywood cinema.

In real life there is no beginning, middle and end. Life is episodic and fragmented. The only realistic view, then, is one that is personal and subjective. To convey this interior realism, characters often appear to drift through their stories in a sort of dreamlike trance that defies temporality, as in the films of Bergman (Wild Strawberries, 1958); Fellini (8 ½, 1963), Godard (Weekend, 1968), Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror, 1975) and countless others. Not only is time free-floating and nonlinear, but the characters themselves are often fragmented and ambiguous. The inner life is a powerful force and not necessarily within our control or comprehension. The IAC demands that the viewer play psychologist in order to interpret the work. As David Bordwell says of Godard’s narratives, he “invites interpretation but defies analysis.” The challenge IAC narration sets for itself is the articulation of the inarticulable.

The IAC narrative form is unabashedly aware of CHC, acting as a counterpart to it. Unlike Hollywood films, IAC is a reflexive art, acknowledging itself as a part of a tradition of history and popular culture (including the CHC). The art cinema is full of references to other works of art and is often filtered through the painful memories of WWII in the 1950s and through the reality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Such concerns and preoccupations inevitably find their way into the narratives of the IAC and inform the films thematically as well.

V. Themes / Values:

The political tendency has been part of the IAC from its earliest days. In Battleship Potemkin, there is no lone individual to face the crowd, there is only the crowd, the soldiers, chaos. As the IAC thrived amid the cultural climate of the 1960s, it began to more overtly express its countercultural tendencies. In the chaos of the 1960s, the IAC sought new ways to ask the old Modernist questions about reality, existence, politics, religion, war, sex, and death.

The IAC is inherently political due to its rejection of the CHC, a rejection not limited to style and narrative form, but one also marked by an aversion to the cultural domination and conservative ideology that Hollywood films trade in. By its very nature, then, the IAC is a political action, and as it seeks to address both the problems of the individual and the larger culture, it tends toward a liberal progressive stance. The IAC wants to be read as a statement and on its own cultural terms.

This political aspect, more often than not framed by WWII and/ or the Vietnam War, serves to support a variety of themes within the IAC. As Fellini and Tarkovsky return again and again to the years of the Second World War, Godard’s work becomes increasingly radical after Paris’ class war in May of 1968 and his work begins to take on explicitly political themes. The leftist political tendency is one of the unifying values of the IAC.

Throughout the IAC there is an obsession with identity, schizophrenia, and multiple selves (Persona, 8 ½, The Mirror). But perhaps the defining feature of the IAC is the themes of religious belief, and disbelief, which are as vital here as in the Modernist literary tradition. Such crises of faith consistently appear in these films, and might be considered the single unifying theme of the IAC (as evidenced in the work of Fellini, Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Wim Wenders, Bergman, Kurosawa, Ozu, Robert Bresson, etc.).

Still, the IAC is a cinema of auteurs and its themes reflect the obsessions of the individual filmmakers as well as their particular culture. While Tarkovsky and Bergman view life as the persistence of youth and memory, Fellini sees the world as a circus, while the work of Godard or American auteur Richard Altman filter their realities through the lens of their countries’ own contemporary (counter)culture.

Finally, in seeking to define the International Art Cinema, the writer shares in the burden of these film directors. In the end, he is seeking to articulate the inarticulable.

Back to Scribblings >>