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The End Of Cinema
By Ronald Bergan

With the consensus that last year's Cannes Film Festival was the worst for a generation still ringing in our ears, it is worth considering that this was only a reflection of the general crisis in cinema today. So this is not another post-mortem on Cannes, but on cinema itself.

At Cannes, Peter Greenaway controversially declared "the age of cinema is dead... I cannot think of a single truly great movie made in the past 40 years… I have to go right back to Powell and Pressburger to find multi-layered visual cinema and films that explore the cinematic language."

Actually, it was the prescient Jean-Luc Godard who pronounced cinema dead 33 years ago with the final title of Weekend, which reads "Fin du Cinema." And, in a way, for anyone with an interest in films "that explore the cinematic language" and film as a radical, contemporary art form rather than a commercial enterprise (i.e. Hollywood), cinema reached an impasse in 1968.

It should be remembered that the birth and growth of cinema was almost immediately parallel to the birth and growth of modernism in the other arts. The French New Wave extended modernism for a few years after the movement was gasping its last breath at the end of the 1950s. Film is generally at its best when it recognises its roots in modernism i.e. when it rejects conventional notions of realism, disengages from bourgeois values, and questions the primacy of narration. As Robin Wood wrote, "The first duty of a radical filmmaker is to shatter the dominant modes of representation – to destroy the illusion, to overthrow the tyranny of narrative."

In 1918, Louis Aragon wrote that "cinema must have a place in the avant-garde's preoccupations… if one wants to bring some purity to the art of movement and light." Writing about film in 1916, Hugo Münsterberg discussed the unique properties of cinema, its capacity to reformulate time and space, a critical issue that would be the focus of much of the theoretical discussion of cinema for the next 40 years, namely, the tension between realism and formalism.

Riccioto Canudo, the Italian-born French critic, who had written an essay The Birth of the Sixth Art as early as 1911, saw cinema as "plastic art in motion" and argued in 1926, that cinema must go beyond realism and express the filmmaker's emotions as well as characters' psychology and even their unconscious. The formalist possibilities of cinema were expounded by French "impressionist" film-makers and theorists, Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein, and underlined by the montage theory expounded by the great Russian filmmakers in the 1920s.

For Lev Kuleshov, meaning, significance, and emotional impact came about by relating and juxtaposing individual shots. Eisenstein, who wanted to film James Joyce's Ulysses, went beyond Kuleshov by theorising and demonstrating his "montage of attractions", one of collision, conflict and contrast, with the emphasis on a dynamic juxtaposition of individual shots that forces the audience to come to conclusions about the interplay of images while they are also emotionally and psychologically affected. Rudolf Arnheim felt in Film as Art in 1933 that the very unreality of cinema as its greatest asset and the plasticity of its image as its major claim to art.

From the beginning, film artists working in the new medium understood that its strength was not in conventional narrative, something literature or the theatre could do better. While commercial cinema, especially Hollywood, continued with the conventions of 19th century literature and theatre by producing illustrated novels and "opened-out" plays, modernists looked towards non-narrative film form or considered narrative as secondary to style. They disturbed the accepted continuity of chronological development and attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts, replaced logical exposition with collages of fragmentary images, complex allusions and multiple point of view. They resisted the commercial film in favour of "art cinema" to equal the other arts in seriousness and depth.

This so-called "art cinema" included such movements as German Expressionism, Russian Contructuralism, Surrealism and Dadaism. Avant-garde artists like Man Ray, Hans Richter, Fernand Leger, Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttmann made films influenced by Cubism and Abstraction. Beside such monuments of modernism as Pablo Picasso, Arnold Schoenberg, Marcel Duchamps, Walter Gropius, Andre Breton, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Antonin Artaud, Oscar Niemeyer, Bertolt Brecht, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and Samuel Beckett, can stand names from cinema such as Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, F. W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Federico Fellini, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard.

Technical advances like fast film, sound, Technicolor, CinemaScope, lightweight camera equipment were used to look into new ways of expression, in contrast to today when we are supposed to admire technical wizardry for its own sake. In the mid-20s, Abel Gance had anticipated many of the technical advances, such as the wide screen, by 30 years. Dynamic montage and deep focus had reached their apogees with Eisenstein's October (1928) and Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) respectively. Max Ophuls' Lola Montes (1955) and Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) have been unequaled in their use of space on the wide screen.

The French New Wave directors took advantage of the new technology that was available in the late 1950s, which enabled them to shoot in the streets with hand-held cameras and a very small team. They deconstructed conventional narratives by using jump cuts, improvisation, and quotes from literature and other films. Resnais rejected a chronological structure completely in Last Year At Marienbad (1961).

In 1960 alone, some 18 directors had made their first features in France. At the same time, Italian cinema was at its glorious height with Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni. Among the winners at the 1960 Cannes film festival were Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Kon Ichikawa's Kagi, Antonioni's L'Avventura, Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring and Buñuel's The Young One, films that were not afraid to enter unchartered territory.

However, the experimentation elements of the French New Wave soon became assimilated into mainstream cinema. Many of the technical and conceptual advances of the Italian, Czech, British and other New Waves were transformed into the clichés of film-making. Truffaut incorporated more traditional elements into his films while Godard became increasingly political and radical in his film-making, leaving so-called commercial filmmaking after Weekend. Innovators such as Miklos Jansco, Bresson, Fellini, Antonioni, Bunuel, Nagisa Oshima, Satyajit Ray, Shohei Imamura, Kon Ichikawa, Akira Kurosawa and Bergman had already done most of their best work before 1968. It seemed as though realism, which had dominated film for decades, had finally triumphed over formalism. It was the beginning of an era of self-reflexive and referential genre cinema, one aspect of what was soon to be labeled postmodernism.

According to the Hungarian critic Bence Nanay, "the films of Antonioni, Godard and Resnais are strictly speaking narrative films, but more importantly, they represent a fragile balance between non-narrative avant-garde films and narrative films. This fragile balance disappeared by the beginning of the seventies. On the one hand, not only Hollywood, but also the so-called European art-house cinema produced conventional, non-avant-garde narrative films, on the other hand, some non-narrative, uncompromising, but hard to distribute experimental films (by Steve Brakhage, Michael Snow etc) were being made at the periphery. The middle ground vanished."

There have been comparatively few really inventive and original post-1968 directors. Most films continued in the same antiquated way using outworn narrative techniques. It is rather like a serious composer still writing in the sonata form, a poet writing in iambic pentameters, an artist still painting like the German Romantics or an architect building in the neo-Gothic style. Of course, there have been some superb films and filmmakers, free from American hegemony, that have enriched the cinematic language in the last 40 years, but the pickings have got slimmer and the golden age has not returned.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders gave a brief renewal to German cinema in the 1970s. There were a few individuals who made an impact such Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradzhanov in the USSR and Andzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski in Poland but Eastern European cinema gradually lost its way as did Italian cinema. At the same time, for signs of renewed hope, one had to look further afield, mainly to the former French colonies of Africa with films by Ousmane Sembene and Med Hondo, which contained anticolonial narratives.

The only revelations in the 1980s were the "Fifth Generation" of filmmakers from China, the leaders of the group being Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Certainly, in the 1990s, the centre of creative cinema moved from the USA and Europe to the Middle and Far East, and to the Third World generally, the most amazing phenomenon being Iran, which emerged fresh from not being exposed to Western films.

In the last decade of the 20th century, digital cameras enabled more people to make features than ever before and allowed Dogme to have its day. But the digital revolution has thus far produced only two great works, Alexander Sokurov's The Russian Ark and Jean-Luc Godard's Eloge De L'Amour.

Today, the most original living directors, Manoel Oliveira (95), Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Ousmane Sembene, Ingmar Bergman and Miklos Jansco are over 80; Godard, Rivette, Jean-Marie Straub are over 70; and Theo Angelopoulis, Danielle Huillet and Abbas Kiarostami are over 60. Who have we left of a younger generation to challenge the accepted aesthetic norms? Indubitably, Sokurov (52), Bela Tarr (48), Aki Kaurismaki (46), Wong Kai-Wai (45), Jia Zhang-Ke (33) and the Makhmalbafs (Mohsen, 46 and Samira, 23). But where are all the names that could have tripped off the tongue pre-1968?

And where are the film critics who could help form and lead opinion in these times? If there is a crisis in films, then there is equally a crisis in film criticism. Most film criticism is primarily descriptive, anecdotal and subjectively evaluative rather than analytical. Because Hollywood-led mainstream cinema is so overweening, and newspapers and magazines are forced to give them predominance, serious critics need to encourage any signs of life in the remnants of what used to be called the "avant-garde."

The problem is that, unlike music, films are not divided into "pop" and "classical". No music critic is expected to review both Blur and Boulez. Unlike other critics, film critics have to review every piece of commercial vomit that Hollywood, though not exclusively, throws up into their laps every week. It is equivalent to asking a book reviewer to write about airport bestsellers rather than literature, to review a Tom Clancey pot-boiler rather than a Milan Kundera novel. Or sending the food critic every week to Macdonalds with the occasional visit to a gourmet restaurant.

There is an answer. On the lines of music criticism, one critic should review "pop" movies, while another, with some education in Film History and Theory, should review more aesthetically challenging films. The latter would acknowledge the valuable contribution made to film criticism by the "ists", often scoffed at by the philistine press - linguists, semiologists, psychologists, Marxists and feminists.

Professor Ira Konigsberg has summed it up well. "Theorists and critics still have much to say on the nature of filmic representation and film as art by further examining film form, technique, and style, but they must get beyond the terminology and concepts of literary narratology. The interface of technology and art in the cinema, which has only begun to be explored, offers the possibility of theoretical ramifications that could change our way of thinking about film both as a medium and as a cultural and social phenomenon. Through such investigations, we may come closer to understanding the unique properties of film and the medium's impact on viewers and to achieving the language for cinematic discourse that theoreticians and critics began to search for three-quarters of a century ago."

Peter Greenaway recognises that films are not seen in the same way as they used to be, and that "films go to people nowadays rather than people going to films." Taking advantage of the new age of communication and a new young audience familiar with the multi-images of the internet, Greenaway's new film, the 125-minute The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part 1, sometimes splits the screen into fragments, introduces texts and talking heads into the wider frame in the manner of CNN on television. It will be followed by two more features, a television series of sixteen 40-minute programmes, a website and video games, with 92 DVDs to accompany each of the 92 suitcases presented in the film.

A few years ago, Chris Marker, always an innovator, made a CD-ROM called Immemory, only playable on Macintosh computers with operating systems 7.5 through 9. Composed of stills, film clips, music, text and fragments of sound, it is over 20 hours long and can be viewed in many different ways.

Both Marker and Greenaway are attempting to come to grips with this new way of watching films, and it might eventually bring into being the first masterpieces of the new age, keeping alive some hope that "modernist" cinema will be resurrected.

Ronald Bergan
© FIPRESCI 2004

Ronald Bergan, a FIPRESCI Vice-President, teaches Film Theory and Film History at Florida International University and is the author of several film books, including biographies of Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Renoir. At the moment he is editing a book of François Truffaut interviews.

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