Three-dimensional cinema: today’s
film-goers are plied with images and deprived of passion.
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Photography
is truth. And cinema is truth 24 times a second.
Jean-Luc
Godard, French film director (1930-)
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Economic value dominates
everything in the West, and cinema is no exception. Made for profit, moulded by television,
most movies have become pure entertainment. The results are a big turn-off
 Every
film-buff in Europe knows the name of Paulo Branco, a renowned Portuguese producer
who has worked with Manoel de Olivera, Raul Ruiz and Chantal Ackerman, directors
whose idiosyncratic styles have helped keep independent cinema afloat. Branco’s views
of current American and European cinema have become clouded with pessimism: Western
cinema, he says, “has slipped into a kind of comfort level, while filmmakers from
China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea have had to struggle and use their imagination,
which gives their films edge and audacity.”
The dominance of economic values and the search for prosperity in the West appears
to have deprived the region’s filmmakers of creative muscle. In contrast, Asia’s
political, economic and social upheavals have bred a cultural tension reflected in
its flourishing, dynamic cinema. “The culture is changing enormously, and telling
stories is a way of dealing with the changes,” declares Piers Handling, director
of the Toronto Festival. “Look at post 1917 Russia, post-World War I Germany, post-World
War II Italy, post-1959 Cuba, post-colonial France in the late 50s–all started producing
dynamic films. This energy tends to be dispersed when things are going well. Hollywood’s
Golden Age in the 30s and 40s was largely due to a flood of talent from Europe, people
running away from communism or fascism and finding themselves in a country full of
immigrants.”
New York critic Dave Kehr, who sits on the selection committee of the Lincoln Center’s
New York Film Festival, feels the same. In his opinion, the vitality of Eastern cinema
may have something to do with these countries’ resistance to post-modernist irony
and self reference. “They take their stories and their genres seriously, whereas
the West has lost belief in the old formulas without finding anything viable to replace
them.”
But Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes festival–which this year awarded its Golden
Palm to Danish director Lars Von Trier’s deeply northern Dancer in the Dark and prizes
to three Chinese films and young Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf–remains to be
convinced of such a categorical difference. “Iranian cinema is poetic, fresh. The
consecration of Asian cinema is happening now, but the movement has been growing
for years; Kiarostami is almost 60. The jury’s choice, however, doesn’t diminish
the value of other cinemas. French cinema is also on the rise.”
After years of failing to recognize filmmakers from the East, the West now seems
only too ready to welcome them with open arms. “For years we pretended we could ignore
anything that wasn’t American, European, and sometimes Japanese,” says Marco Muller,
who recently left his post as director of the Locarno festival and co-produced Makhmalbaf’s
Blackboards and Zhang Yuan’s Seventeen Years. “We all have a debt towards U.S. cinema
because it’s the first syntax we were exposed to, but now, we’re being exposed to
others from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Cannes and Toronto festivals established
credibility for these films. It’s not just story telling, but a different film universe
that has been shaping up in the past two decades. Western reality desperately needed
an injection of something new and that has come from those who have been shut out
by the industry.”
In the United States, meanwhile, business values and the power of the studios have
only served to squeeze diversity out of film production. “In Europe,” says Paulo
Branco, “we’re all independent; in America, even Martin Scorcese, who started out
independent, knows how to handle being recuperated by the system.”
Foreign
films: the desperate search for distributors
And America
does not really have auteurs, French producer Francesca Feder learnt in New York’s
Spanish Harlem, where she made Raphael Nadjari’s The Shade. “In America, you have
kilos of film school movies shown at Sundance, a festival that is like a marketing
machine. They look like studio movies made with less money. Miramax buys a couple,
and the fledgling director graduates to the studio.”
Annette Insdorf, in charge of cinema studies at Columbia University, disagrees, remarking
that despite the appetite for Asian cinema, U.S. independents flourish while films
from other countries like Poland, Hungary, Brazil, Italy and Germany that dominated
festivals in previous decades are much less visible. “Independent films in the U.S.
are being produced in larger quantities, thanks partly to digital video and new venues
like Showtime on TV. But foreign language films are having a harder time in the U.S.
partly because independent American films are flooding the market.”
Her view is echoed by Jacques Bidou, a Paris-based producer who worked with Haitian
Raoul Peck on Lumumba and Cambodian Rithy Panh on Un soir apres la guerre (One evening
after the war). Bidou acknowledges that independent American films still have the
advantages of language and a larger scope: “The volume of American films that invade
theatres and television in Europe prevents distribution of those made by other nations,”
he says. “The problem is not creativity, it’s distribution. We see movements in China,
Taiwan, Japanese and Korea, countries in which national films have an audience. But
when the market is so small, the film needs foreign distribution. Television doesn’t
buy foreign language films, and distributors won’t take the risk.”
The
most visually overwhelmed generation
Television’s
strong-arm in production has certainly cut into filmmaking ambition, dictating the
nature of movies even down to the casting. Piers Handling (director of the Toronto
festival) feels that Western cinema is now almost totally oriented towards the marketplace
and the notion of providing entertainment. “Western audiences have been devastated
by the impact of television–they are the most visually overwhelmed generation in
history, so their idea of what constitutes the moving image experience is a dumbed-down
version of life. To get them to pay attention you cannot give them small, intimate
stories about real people–too boring and underwhelming–you have to give them sensation.”
As a result, Handling’s Toronto festival, which is non-competitive, has picked up
on new trends in world cinema and drawn films from cultures that he argues “are not
yet media-saturated, that still have a literary or verbal culture, such as Iran and
China, and are making the best films in the world.”
Yet hope remains for the Western film industry, argues Gilles Jacob, insisting that
there is still money to make more challenging movies. “Cinema is always in the red,
globally speaking,” he says, “We have to put fresh money into the system and we need
new people, like Francis Bouygues, who launched Ciby 2000.” Over the past few years,
Ciby 2000–a French production company–has co-produced films by David Lynch, Quentin
Tarantino and Pedro Almodovar. The international trend for French producers has developed
even further: Humbert Balsan produces Egyptian Youssef Chahine and Yousri Nasrallah,
as well as Sandrine Veysset; Marin Karmitz produces American independent Johnathan
Nossiter and Austrian Michael Haneke; while Michel Propper produced Israeli Amos
Gitai and Peter Brook of Britain. With several critical and commercial successes
under its belt, cinema’s alternative globalization appears well underway.
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