The history of cinema started in 1952. Specifically, it started in March, when Cahiers du Cinéma, in its second year and tenth issue, ran the twenty-one-year-old Jean-Luc Godard’s encomium to Alfred Hitchcock’s recently released “Strangers on a Train.” The article was followed by a sardonic note emphasizing that “all the points of this article are aimed against the editors-in-chief”—principally, the great critic André Bazin, whose soft spot for his visionary young critics didn’t extend to their taste. The note suggested just how controversial and unusual such enthusiasm for Hitchcock’s films was.
Now that point of view is no longer controversial: Godard, Truffaut, and company have carried the day regarding their recognition both of Hitchcock’s genius and of the art lurking behind high-studio glitz and B-movie grunge. Young French critics in the nineteen-fifties were talking about new movies, expounding the artistic merits of films by Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Otto Preminger, Max Ophüls and Ida Lupino, Kenji Mizoguchi and Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini and Jean Renoir. They were setting up the ideas and cultivating the taste for these contemporary releases and for other, unanticipated shocks, such as the films of Jean Rouch and Alain Resnais. They also primed audiences for the radical, revolutionary movies that they themselves were planning to make, that they in fact made, and that quickly got nicknamed the New Wave.
The history of cinema isn’t a matter of the past or the present but of the future of the art. A critic is a prophet who envisions the trajectory of movies, who discerns the principle of aesthetic vitality in a work, and who recognizes the vistas opening from it. That’s why taste in movies is inseparable from ideas and creation, and from the very notion of progress in art.
Thanks to DVDs, streaming video, cable channels, and the remarkably vigorous revival-house scene, classic movies are ubiquitous; yet the history of cinema is receding by the moment. When Godard wrote about “Strangers,” he was closer to the release of the first talking picture than we are, currently, to the releases of “Do the Right Thing” and “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” In 1952, many of the classic-age filmmakers—Chaplin, Dreyer, Lang, Walsh, Dwan, Buñuel—were alive and active, and their later films were as controversial then as the later films of such directors as Malick, Eastwood, Scorsese, and Godard are today.
As the history of cinema recedes, its works and its artists tend to fall into an undifferentiated glow of veneration—an idealization of styles, manners, and practices arising from the very fact that they’re of the past. The history of cinema often veers toward nostalgia, in overt resistance to the modern.
The most notable series in town at the moment is the complete retrospective of the films of Kenji Mizoguchi at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens. I wrote about it here recently, and that post stirred up a little discussion on Twitter. The subject of controversy was my suggestion that, in the Japanese cinema, there’s an artistic hierarchy, with Mizoguchi at the summit, Ozu just below, and Kurosawa far lower. It was more an assertion than an argument—it’s mainly an account of my moviegoing experiences—but that useful debate, hard on the heels of a recent visit to the Maryland Film Festival (a crucial showcase for American independent films), crystallizes some of the big ideas at stake in the hundred-and-forty-character back-and-forth.
There’s a critical mind-set, centered on such notions as the dramatic and derived from realist theatre, that exalts tidied-up, buttoned-down, script-heavy movies performed with nuances that map onto readily legible psychological traits and causes. The movies involve a midrange, in which acting doesn’t surpass character and directorial invention doesn’t outleap story, and which admits neither expressive excess nor opacity. It’s a complex that can be traced to a relatively indiscriminate love for classic Hollywood (an ironic inflation of the Cahiers group’s discerning reclamation of individual Hollywood directors from studio uniformity) and that involves the adoration of mid-seventies realism marked by the presumed maturity of its political or historical themes. It also helps to sustain today’s art-house consensus. This critical mind-set is distinguished by what it rejects: diverse strains of modernism, culminating in much of the best of contemporary independent filmmaking—in short, what was truly new in the past, and what’s new in the present day.
Criticism is a matter not only of acknowledging the qualities of films and filmmakers but of fighting for them, and against works that are deadeners of imagination and falsifiers of feeling. The early days of Cahiers were marked by polemical thrust as well as deep discernment. When Eric Rohmer was removed as editor, in 1963, and replaced by Jacques Rivette, it was with the purpose of renewing the magazine’s status as an “instrument of combat” in favor of the new cinema, which included the New Wave. And the magazine remains an instrument of combat to this day.
Issue No. 700 of Cahiers came out last week. It features a hundred and forty responses by movie people and other artists to a query from the editor-in-chief, Stéphane Delorme, about “an emotion that overtook you and the moment in a movie, whether a gesture, dramatic situation, or sequence of images, that sparked this emotion.” (I admit to the honor of being among the contributors to this issue.) The very list of participants suggests the magazine’s emphases, as does the list of movies that can be culled from the submissions.
On the occasion of this publication, Delorme was interviewed by the New York correspondent for Cahiers, Nicholas Elliott, in Bomb. It’s a terrific discussion, in which Delorme begins by emphasizing Cahiers’s ongoing tradition of criticism that propels a vision of future filmmaking. It passes through some individual ideas and opinions that differ from my own, but it traces a central line through film history, including “young New York DIY filmmakers,” Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors,” and Miguel Gomes’s “Tabu,” that suggests a cinema that needs to be fought for and is worth fighting for—a cinema that’s not petrified in a sanctified past but that derives original styles and forms from personal experience of life and cinema alike.
Somehow, however, the role of ultra-low-budget filmmakers at the front line of new cinema is the most contentious, because, unlike Malick or Scorsese, they don’t have a body of central industry successes to lend them credibility. The leading independent filmmakers’ work is seen, if not in a void, then within a tradition that is, itself, a counter-tradition. The critical brickbats that have greeted some of the best recent independent films are matched by encomiums for dubious classics and long-superseded traditions that nonetheless lay their dead weight upon the creation and reception of new movies.
A couple of days in Baltimore watching a new slate of independent films left me even more optimistic than I had been, going in, regarding the future of moviemaking and the creative energies of young, still insufficiently recognized filmmakers. (Many of these movies are en route to New York for next month’s BAMcinemaFest.) There’s a separate world of cinema, beside the one that finds its way to multiplexes and, for that matter, beside the one that tends to get distributed internationally, and it includes some of the best, most original, and most forward-looking movies being made anywhere in the world today. For critics looking prophetically toward the future of the cinema, that future—more than it has been for a long time—is now. And a clear view of that future should prove equally illuminating for the cinema’s history, its most vital heritage.
