Cinema Armondiso

DURING THIS END-OF-THE-YEAR agitation, when studios are busy unloading their prestige junk, anticipation for new movies frequently turns into the humiliation of being rooked. If you've seen Birth, Finding Neverland, Being Julia, Enduring Love, The Polar Express or P.S., you know the feeling. Because most moviegoers trust no resource but advertising, they're stuck in the naive belief that "new" means exciting. They don't know the excitement to be had from real movies (which is to say old movies), the strength and good faith to be drawn from movie history.

Our understanding and appreciation of movie history (which shapes our contemporary taste) is today blighted by a rejection of established standards of innovation and skill in favor of "newness." Remember how praise of Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven meant the dismissal of Douglas Sirk? And acclaim of Ridley Scott's Gladiator meant the dismissal of Spartacus?

Accompanying the rejection of standards is the severing of movie icons from social responsibilitythe ultimate mindlessness of our celebrity age. Neither movies nor movie stars are held accountable for the ideas they put into the culture. They're just product. And when product is extolled simply for being product, without regard for its message, integrity or style, movies lose their justification. Bewildered academics thus write film textbooks chasing after bored, media-sated students, using the worst contemporary movies as teaching examples: Chicago, The Matrix, Memento, Breaking the Waves, Seven. Only the most amnesiac movie buff would claim that these films supercede Singin' in the Rain, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rashomon, Jules and Jim or M. Since popularity is relative and thus an unreliable measure of quality, there is no justification for ushering recent crap into some canon. Bad films, no matter how current or popular, teach the wrong lesson.

Never before has movie culture been so reduced to brazen capitalist reflex. No wonder Jean-Luc Godard, the art's perpetual radical, has had his remarkable recent work limited to museum showings. When Godard's Moments choisis Histoire(s) Cinma highlights the Museum of Modern Art's reopening on Dec. 2 and Dec. 4, it will be interesting to see how audiences respond to his assortment of film clips and historical speculations.

Moments choisis is a compilation of Histoire(s) Cinma, the four-part 90s video series in which Godard surveyed the history of movies and 20th-century politics. Digitally editing fiction and documentary clips, art reproductions and movie stills, Godard intones his signature style of poetic perorations. It proclaims the video console and availability of movies on home video as today's primary media. Godard shows himself isolated at a tape deck performing cultural anthropology that is also introspection. He turns the quickly vanishing public habit of searching for meaning in movies into a private act. The series is both ravishing and mournful; every ingenious art politics juxtaposition (air- raid footage overlapping Picasso's Guernica; De Palma's The Fury matching Rossellini's Open City) illustrates how much movies used to mean, yet may never mean again.

Godard used a French word that means "story" to coincide with the English word "history" to force his sense of romance and commitment. But Histoire(s) Cinma was made in spite of the fact that contemporary audiences and media pundits ignore movie history. In his similarly brave and beautiful 2002 MoMA commission The Old House, Godard feared that cinema was becoming a relic, something only of interest to museum patrons. The debut of Moments choisis proves that he was tragically right.

And yet, Godard's instincts are profound. He understands what filmmakers from Todd Haynes to Michael Mann, Lars Von Trier to Guy Maddinas well as their ticket-buying minions and fawning critical supportersare too cowardly to admit: Despite our fascination with what's newfangled, we need to relearn movie history.

Luckily there's still hope that the form can regain its primacy even if movies tragically mean less than what Histoire(s) Cinma makes us wish. The current $20 billion in annual DVD sales signifies an audience with the potential to be as archival, curatorial and infatuated as Godard. These moviegoers have the chance to acquaint themselves with cinema's legacy, to single out the Moments choisis that not only reinforce their enjoyment of film, but also teach them something about humanity. Not everybody can go back to (film) school, but I don't know a single film critic who wouldn't benefit from a proper reeducation. The current DVD revolution has made refresher education both possible and more necessary than ever.

What we need is a proper movie crash course. So I offer Film 101: A Syllabus for Life, complete with recommended readings.

NOIR  

WHEN GIVEN THE "neo" prefix, this most misunderstood term in film culture becomes the most loathsome descriptive ever. Noir was never a genre. It was more a style of atmosphere and composition practiced literally in the long shadow of German Expressionism. Noir derived from the fatalism of 30s French poetic realism and articulated the existentialist philosophy of the 40s. For American filmmakers in the 40s, noir expressed the mood of World War II and evinced their response to Welles' mighty Citizen Kane. Both legacies coincided in the 50s beat era; a mix has been bastardized ever since.

Today's neo-noir movies use the fatalistic, existential mood merely as an attitude, in order to sanction the ugliness and nihilism of indie productions from The Usual Suspects to Memento. Adolescent minds are impressed by noir because it appeals to their smart-ass negativity (sometimes called rebellion). But it is never convincing, merely showy.

The Warner Bros. noir box set features The Set-Up, The Asphalt Jungle, Out of the Past, Gun Crazy and Murder, My Sweetmasterpieces and landmarks that evince real human anguish. Today's emphasis on style and 'tude reduces neo-noir to novelty.

Reading: A Certain Tendency of the American Cinema (Robert B. Ray, Princeton University Press)

AUTEUR  

THE SEISMIC PHILOSOPHICAL notion that even Hollywood movies expressed the sensibility of the director who signed his name. Andrew Sarris ambassadored the "politique des auteur" from France's Cahiers du Cinema, giving birth to "the auteur theory." This timeless way of understanding art through its maker was controversial if only because few intellectuals respected movies as art. Today, even hacks like Nora Ephron and Ron Howard can have a "signature."

Still, the most skilled and irreducibly idiosyncratic filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Mike Leigh and Robert Altman often have their signatures used against them. Anti-auteurism has become a tool in the power struggle of critics who ruthlessly try to overthrow established figures with new-jacks. Walter Hill and Alan Rudolph's magisterial cinema gets drubbed in favor of flash like Michael Mann potboilers or, more frequently, action films from Hong Kong. This corrupts auteurism into a fashion accessory or politically correct tool, but no one's come up with a more efficient way of categorizing or comprehending truly distinctive films.

Kino International's Wong Kar-Wai box set establishes a glorious standard. Days of Being Wild, As Tears Go By, Fallen Angel, Happy Together and Chungking Express all demonstrate the principles of auteurism exemplified by Wong's fascination with color and editing as expressive style. The set confirms that Wong's paeans to modern pop experience developed from the cultural and emotional exploration of his auteurist predecessors such as Godard, Truffaut, Fassbinder and Wenders.

Reading: You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet (Andrew Sarris, Oxford University Press)

INDIES, OR THE CURRENT STORM  

NOT EXACTLY A genre, yet "indies" do represent a particular type of film: those narratives that pretend to diverge from Hollywood formula while representing a struggling director's uncompromised vision. A Sundance imprimateur or bourgeois self-absorption is a common trait. This once heralded trend now typifies the corruption of formerly promising points of view like Spike Lee's, Gus Van Sant's and the media blackballing of less media-savvy directors such as Alex Cox (Highway Patrolman), Ira Sachs (The Delta), Wendell B. Harris Jr. (Chameleon Street).

Criterion's Altman series (3 Women, Short Cuts, Tanner '88, Secret Honor) and John Cassavetes box set epitomize the vicissitudes of indie filmmaking. The films of these vaunted directors range from working way outside the established industry to sometimes bending the structures of the institutions. Short Cuts, despite critics' confusion, has insinuated itself into the indie psyche. Its grasp of cultural fragmentation pervades most every new indie releases, minor or major.

Reading: The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World (Armond White, Overlook Press)

THE 70s  

BOOMER NOSTALGIA HAS just about supplanted the notion of Hollywood's Golden Age. By now, most adepts admit that 1939 had nothing on 1974, or '71 or '73 or '77. This was the era of the American Renaissance and the Road Movie. The European art film met its U.S. adopted child, resulting in movies that freshly explored American experience and initiated the final great syntheses of popular culture and high art.

Paramount's DVD of John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust is not a felicitous adaptation of Nathanael West's legendary Hollywood novel, but that it was made at all proved the 70s' readiness to reexamine film culture in meta-movie depth. Through Conrad Hall's exquisite camera work, technology made decadence almost tactile, an esthetic advance that would resurface in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr., the spiritual sequel to Locust.

Reading: Reeling (Pauline Kael, Little Brown)

STARS  

THOSE APPEALING PEOPLE who embody our desires and or vanity. Movie stars used to bear the responsibility of connecting disparate viewers, now they largely fend for themselves. Not merely indentured to Hollywood, they sign million-dollar contracts committing themselves to noxious but marketable social ideals. Limited talents yet ubiquitous presences, celebrities like Nicole Kidman and Samuel L. Jackson make mockery of the humanity movie stars used to confer.

Universal's W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers box sets show how far star performers can go. Their personal expressionFields' exasperation, the Marx Brothers' anarchyare still potent examples of movies that lift individuality into epiphanies that can be recognized and enjoyed by all. Years later these inexpensive showbiz artifacts are triumphs of personality. Fields' It's a Gift rendered the personal animus driving the myth of The Great American Novel unnecessary. The Marx Brothers' Duck Soup may be the only political satire that is simultaneously truly anti-war. Each set shows that when stardom becomes artistry, it refutes idolatry and elitism.

Reading: Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (Richard Dyer, Palgrave Macmillan)

NEW WAVE  

OTHER CULTURES BOAST their own moment of revitalization, but the event that took place in France roughly from 1958 to 1968 is the only wave to sweep the globe. Former critics (Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette) put their cinephilia in practice, forever changing how movies were made and seen. Kiddie cineastes like to think their personal period is the one that matters most but this simply is not so (Before Sunrise is no Breathless). The Nouvelle Vague was special for simultaneously resurrecting the original, surrealist principles of the silent era, expressing contemporary spiritual awareness and advancing new techniques like the handheld camera, direct sound and the glorious wide screen. The New Wave's experiments are still fresh because they raised cinema's primary esthetic and moral issues.

Wellspring's DVDs of Lola and Bay of Angels, both by Jacques Demy, are perfect New Wave touchstones that demonstrate how human issues are reflected through the self-conscious appreciation of movies, an art form both popular and profound.

Reading: I Lost It at the Movies (Pauline Kael, Marion Boyars Publishers), Confessions of a Cultist (Andrew Sarris, Simon & Schuster)

EAST MEETS WEST  

FICKLE MUSES MIGHT explain why certain film cultures occasionally seem blessed with inspiration. Commerce explains why the American film industry obsesses filmgoers around the world. It's always suspect when critics forsake one for the other. The recent explosion of creativity among Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern filmmakers should be a joyous occasion rather than an excuse for critics' anti-Western browbeating. This doesn't mean that Sino-derived movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Collateral are worthwhile, but Chen Kaige's Together and Zhang Yimou's Hero are great works that also challenge Western esthetics.

Criterion's Early Spring reveals that Yasujiro Ozu's early films were influenced by Western motifs. His Ohayo is a challenge to Western cultural habits, exactly what you don't get from Takashi Miike, who has simply acquiesced.

Reading: Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (David Bordwell, BFI Publish), The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan (Donald Richie, Stone Bridge Press), The Apu Trilogy (Robin Wood, November Books)

THE CANON  

A DIFFERENT ACADEMY rules movie discourse (critics and pundits pledge themselves to the Oscars, the industry's sheep-rearing seal of approval). That's why there are no arguments over which movies belong in the canon. The canon is either ignored or accepted without much enthusiasm. (What? Another revival of Dr. Strangelove!) Thanks to stalwart retrospectives at Film Forum, Symphony Space, AMMI, BAM and Anthology, New Yorkers are blessed with opportunities to see movies in their ideal setting. But the culture at large has lost the proper context for historical reconnection.

If critics and media aren't willing to sustain the verities (such as telling why Far from Heaven disgraces both All That Heaven Allows and Fear Eats the Soul; why Safe disgraces Red Desert; why Baz Luhrmann disgraces Vincente Minnelli), it's no wonder hipster audiences are derisive at a revival of Wuthering Heights. They feel smugly superior to the sincerity of the past and never fully grasp what makes a canonical film great.

Miramax's DVD release of A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and his follow-up My Voyage to Italy both attempt to solve the problems of moviegoing in the context of no-context. Scorsese gives good lecture to those not fortunate enough to attend a good film school (but so unfortunate they fall for those American Film Industry-Blockbuster Video 100-Best tv shows). Scorsese's fondness for all movies here settles on worthy achievements and because he is historically minded, his narration tells you why these movies matter. He says "to care about old movies is to care about people."

My Voyage to Italy is the most ambitious set, surveying Italian Cinema highlights with a digression into the French New Wave. Scorsese gives in to the nostalgia Godard's Moments choisis avoids, but the vivid restored clips of Visconti's Senso makes his awed reflections understandable. When Scorsese reiterates directors' themes, his audio-visual approach gives away all the climaxes of these great worksa bummer if you haven't already seen them. He makes the usual case for Bicycle Thieves, Senso, Voyage to Italy and L'Avventura but does so like giving testimony. The DVD format makes us all students, witnesses and believers. You wish to see these movies whole and see other movies with the same informed intelligence.

Reading: The Cinema Book (Pam Cook, British Film Institute)

CLASSICS  

FILMS THAT DEFINE the art form. But this determination is always in flux. Bonnie and Clyde gets replaced by Star Wars, E.T. by Pulp Fiction. It's virtually a pendulum swing, changing the outrage of one era into a pillar of the next. These are movies you have to know, whether or not you like them. Knowing teaches what cinema can become; realizing its limits and changing its limits. It's impossible to appreciate what is new without understanding what's original.

Kino International's new release of Fritz Lang's Spies and Criterion's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse together make a tremendous claim that Lang is the preeminent chronicler of modern experience. Griffith, Renoir, Welles and Godard set parameters for how movies could entertain and enlighten, but Lang (like Dreyer, Hitchcock and Bresson) innovated psychic-to-social exploration. Lang's vision coalesces with the mood that overrates noir yet, unlike neo-noir, still argues for human endeavor. The essence of movies as both art and social compulsion can be found in the voyeurism of Spies and its shocking ending that throws the morality of spectacle back at the viewer.

Reading: The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (Tom Gunning, British Film Institute), What is Cinema? (Andre Bazin, University of California Press), Jean Renoir, The French Films, 1924-1939 (Alexandre Sesonske, Harvard University Press), Hitchcock's Films Revisited (Robin Wood, Columbia University Press