The death of cinema?

A character in a Bernardo Bertolucci film, Before the Revolution (1964) states “One can’t live without Rossellini.” OK, a piece of hyperbole, one Italian director praising another in the clannish way that film directors sometimes do.

However, behind the exaggeration is a truth. Once upon a time a certain kind of cinema-goer actually felt that without the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Theo Angelopoulos, Andre Tarkovsky, Rainer Werner Fassbinder… life would, somehow, be emptier. Going to the cinema was something that you simply did, it wasn’t in itself a big event, but the release of a new Andrej Wajda film was.

I remember as a student in the Drama Department at Bristol University in the late-eighties how we would abandon everything and go down to the Arnolfini art cinema to watch the latest film by Bertolucci or whoever, or we sat glued to video players as we ploughed through the entire corpus of Godard and his contemporary François Truffaut.

At certain times in the history of cinema there have been periods when great works of art were produced: the Weimar era in Germany; the Soviet Union in the 1920s and in the "thaw" period in the 1950s and the renewal during Perestroika; Eastern and Central Europe in the 1960s; Brazil and other South American cinema during the time of "Cinema Nuevo", the post-colonial period in Africa, particularly in Senegal and the Maghreb; Iran after the fall of the Shah; the Nouvelle Vague in France and Italian Neo-Realism (an incomplete list, but it will do).

The films from these very different times and countries were made with passion, intelligence and a feeling for humanity, as the characters onscreen often struggled to understand and come to terms with the changing, sometimes brutal or indifferent world around them. Plots could become complex, causality was blurred, narratives were fractured or disjointed, protagonists were often confused, unheroic, contradictory, they struggled.

For me the classic protagonist of this kind of filmmaking is Antoine Doinel from Truffaut’s Quatre Cinq Coups (400 Blows) or Hendrik Höfgens from István Szabó’s Mephisto. Although those are very different films, they have a similar endings. A freeze frame stops the action and the film ends. In the Truffaut film Doinel, an escaped "juvenile delinquent", is running on a beach. He stops, turns and faces the camera. That’s it.

In the Szabó film, Hendrik Höfgens, the compromised actor who has embraced the Nazis, stands in the glare of a powerful spotlight, unable to comprehend any longer what is happening to him. The light intensifies, whites out the screen and the film ends. These films didn’t offer you the comfortable satisfaction of having just eaten a gourmet meal. Instead you were left hungry, moved, saddened or angered, sometimes even deliriously happy, you had unanswered questions, things to think about and discuss.

Along with the demise of a certain kind of cinema, there is, I feel, the parallel demise of a certain kind of film-spectator activity, what some have called cinephilia. The urge to see everything that is put onscreen, to be eclectic, passionate, all consuming, an all-devouring boundary-jumper.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t have your particular interests. Mine are obvious from my choices for Kino Eye over the years: films from Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and France. But a cinephile (I don’t like the phrase "film buff"; it’s a stupid expression which I don’t use) will also watch films from Argentina, Morocco, Japan, and Australia… and all kinds of different genres: film noir, crime thrillers, psychological dramas, melodramas, sci-fi, westerns and so on. No film was off-bounds to a cinephile but they are now, I fear, a dying breed.

Once I had no money for a ticket at the Arnolfini but was allowed to watch the film if I shone a torch for latecomers. The film was a late offering from the Soviet Union, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), directed by Alexei Gherman. Glued to the film I have to confess that the latecomers cursed me as they stumbled in the dark. At the end, when I handed in the torch, I asked the staff if I could have the film poster from the foyer (I couldn’t). I did think about stealing it but my conscience got the better of me. In and of itself this carries no weight at all, nor is it just about me but is suggestive of a devotion to film, which at the time, was shared by many others.

From the names of the directors I have mentioned it is easy to see that I am talking mainly – but not exclusively – about a particular time and place in cinema history, Europe (East and West) in the 1960s and 70s and partly into the 80s. Maybe I am open to the criticism of "Eurocentrism". I will leave that judgement to others.

The directors, most of whom achieved prominence in the late 1950s and early-mid 60s, went on to illustrious careers. Their names are a roll-call of cinema’s finest, often referred to as "auteurs" (although personally I dislike this term). Here’s a short (incomplete) list.

France: Jean Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Agnes Varda, Belgium: Chantal Ackerman, Germany: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Poland: Andrej Wajda, Krystof Kieszlowski, Czechoslovakia: Jiři Menzel, Miloš Forman, Vera Chytilova, Hungary: István Szabó, Marta Mészáros, Miklos Jancsó, Karoly Makk, Britain: Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Peter Greenaway, Italy: Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, Portugal: Manuel De Oliviera, Spain: Victor Erice, Sweden: Ingmar Bergman, Bo Widerberg, Greece: Theo Angelopoulos, Turkey: Yilmaz Güney, Soviet Union: Mikhail Kolatazov, Andre Tarkovsy, Elem Klimov, Kira Muratova. The non-Europeans would include from India: Satyajit Ray, Iran: Abbas Kiarostami, Japan: Yasujirō Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi; Senegal: Ousmane Sembene. Their influence on film word-wide has been enormous.

I can’t depart and not say a few words about Hollywood. I am not anti-Hollywood. It has, without a doubt, produced films of quality and excellence over the years, and technical innovations which have had a profound effect on cinema such as synchronised sound and Technicolour.

My personal favourites are mainly from the period of Film Noir. There Hollywood reached something approaching an understanding of the human condition it has rarely before or since achieved. Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon is unforgettable as the mass of contradictions that is the private eye, Sam Spade; the same can be said about Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat with her portrayal of the cynical, outwardly street wise but deeply vulnerable Debbie Marsh, despite having her face bandaged up for the final third of the film.

Yet I want to make a connection back to my previous comments, Film Noir would probably not have developed the way it did, or maybe not at all, without input from European (mainly German) refugees fleeing the Nazis, people such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmark, Billy Wilder, Karl Freund and Peter Lorre. Their influence was all-encompassing. Think about it – no Europeans, no Casablanca. The generation of European auteurs I have listed also influenced Hollywood filmmaking in the 60s and 70s, particularly in the cinema of the so-called "New Hollywood" and after in the work of the Cohen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, John Sayles, Gus Van Sant and others.

I don’t go to the cinema nowadays. Apart from other considerations, I can’t afford it on my pension. The last film I saw in a cinema was Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017), which was a big disappointment. Sometimes I watch films at home, but with the newer releases, Joker (Todd Philips, 2019) for example, I have simply been bored.

There are still worthy films being made. The Choral which I discussed in Kino Eye recently is one (Solidarity, 764). But I fear these are now few and far between. At times in the history of art a period of intense innovation and brilliance finally transcends or collapses into something else, as if it has worn itself out, exhausted its possibilities.

The art of the late Renaissance morphed into the Mannerism of El Greco; in the Twentieth Century, innovative modernist art (Du Champ, Picasso, Klimt, Moholy-Nagy) ended up in the utter banality of Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst.

In film a similar decline has taken place since the heady days of European auteur cinema: no beauty, special effects which serve no purpose whatsoever, cardboard cut-out characters, stupid plots, a deep sense of morbidity, a penchant for meaningless violence and dialogue worthy of a parrot. I will spare readers my views on the proliferation of Marvel Comic adaptations.

I was partly inspired to write this piece, my eulogy for Kino Eye and cinema, if you like, by an article in the Guardian, "100 years of cinema" (where I lifted the mention of Rossellini) by Susan Sontag written back in 1996 (2 March). Although there is much I disagree with, it is worth reading and it should be available online.

Sontag concludes her article with these words, “If cinephilia is dead then movies are too… no matter how many movies, even very good ones, go on being made. If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.”

I have to confess I have no idea where the "resurrection" of cinema or the “new kind of cine-love” will come from. That is up to the coming generations.

As a final word, if you want to engage with film seriously and not just dabble, if you want to be a latter-day cinephile (a badge of honour, not the mark of a snob) – in short if you love cinema – then go back to the 1960s, start with Godard and Truffaut, and work your way through the films of that generation of amazing directors, these magicians of sound and vision who conjured up probably the greatest single contribution to the world of art and culture in the Twentieth Century. Immerse yourself in the experience; we will, surely, never see their like again. §