Meditations On A Half Baked Concept Against Petulance
"In a world where Zack Snyder is a visionary"
There has been a lot of writing on the internets about Anti Christ, the new Lars Van Trier movie, and its over the top hysterical fever dream style mutilations and violence. Having not seen it, and not having any interest in seeing it, I obviously can't exactly critique it specifically one way or another. BUT I can't help but notice that Anti Christ appears to be the latest entry, or perhaps just the codifying entry, in a series of very well made films that revolve around inhumanity and savage violence.
The cinema of brutality.
I'm not talking about the Saw films or the Hostel movies or what have you, because who gives a shit about that stuff anyway. I'm thinking of the recently released Bronson by Nicolas Winding Refn, Michael Haenke's recent American remake of Funny Games with Naomi Watts, and Gaspar Noe's ouvre (I had the misfortune of seeing about half of Irreversable a few years ago, and I'm still recovering) among others.
In the fifties, and sixties there was a hemorrhaging of great world film makers into the popular culture, there was Fellini, and Passolini, and Rosselini, Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Antonioni, Visconti, Rivette, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Satyajit Ray and on and on. Some of them belonged to given schools or movements but in spite of this they generally made films that were all over the map. They were concerned with the human heart, human ambition, death, the poverty of pocket and soul. Each unspooled his subject with a touch and speed unique to his own character. If audiences found the films by these artists confrontational it was not necessarily because they were making any effort to confound, or offend it was because the audience never fit into the creative equation. They refused to engage audiences, and instead demanded that the audience engage with what they had created. When this engagement was successful it fused, artist, and viewer in a way that Hollywood pablum, no matter how entertaining, could not. The audience was let in on the process through the artists demand and in turn became a part of it.
I've always sort of thought that shock was the laziest form of audience engagement. Which is why I find the apparent rise of the cinema of brutality kind of troubling. Haenke, Von Trier, Noe, and Refn, are all ostensibly master craftsmen. That is to say that they know their lighting, their composition, their acting, their, pacing, and so forth. But if it's all to the end of punishing their audiences, as opposed to confronting them then I can't help but think something has really gone off the rails... Like Republican Party sized gone off the rails. I think I first started putting all this together when I was reading reports from some of the big film festivals this year. Cannes was apparently filled with art film horrors and the Toronto film festival was noted for its bleak offerings. Haenke won the Palm D'or for his White Ribbon, and Charlotte Gainsbourg won best actress for her role in Anti Christ (Von Trier himself was bizarrely awarded an "ad hoc" anti-award for most misogynist film). The reports tell of a mood of provocation at Cannes. The goal was to select films that disturb, and upset, to fuck up bourgeois notions of a comfortable experience of art. Fine, but to disturb, and upset, and provoke, these are means to ends, not ends in themselves, and I would argue that nothing is more bourgeois, and hollow, and superficial than an artist who makes this error. I also think I'm not falling back on my bourgeois sensibilities just because I don't want to watch a woman cut off her vaginal lips with a pair of scissors (Which occurs in Anti Christ.) Who knows though, maybe I'm wrong about that.
Then there is that movie Precious that Oprah got made about the obese black teenager from the ghetto who has been pregnant multiple times by her own father. This may be something else. Maybe there is a fine line between the cinema of brutality and socially responsible filmmaking. Bronson has been compared to A Clock Work Orange, but there is a reported disparity in the content. Clockwork is a highly stylized meditation on the nature of evil, in a society that relies on evil to reflect it's "positive" acts. And Bronson appears to be a highly stylized meditation about a crazy man acting weird and beating people up. Anyway, I don't plan to see Precious either, but one gets the sense that while it is no doubt a punishing film, the hearts of the makers are "in the right place" and that they are trying to put a genuinely troubling American story on display, and not merely pandering to their own depressive fantasies.
I don't want movies to be sunshine and rainbows, I've made no secret of my love of Bergman's best films, but there is a poetry in Bergman that transcends his technique. Cries and Whispers for example is not the most pleasurable of movie going experiences, but we watch the artist deftly peel back layers of experience from its opaque opening scenes, until, by the end, we are part of the pulsing core of the thing. It contains scenes that repulse, and nearly terrify but at the end it's not those feelings that linger. We may be exhausted but we are not beaten.
I don't have a problem per se with nihilism either. Bergman's Shame ends in an almost comically bleak manner, but the world of the film has been so honest and rich up to that moment that the end, instead of being simply incongruous, causes the viewer to reflect on just what it is he is doing with his life anyway. And again, there is poetry, resonate images that do not bludgeon, but instead throw their fingers back into our brains to feel the creases. Isn't nihilism in art almost always instructive anyway? King Lear? Requiem For A Dream? Even artists who think themselves genuine nihilists probably aren't because they can't help the fact that their work exists in a context that gives it meaning whether they like it or not.
Why am I so worked up about this? I guess I'm just worried about the death of the art film. I have a feeling that it, like America, is destroying itself from within. I'm worried that content is going away. I'm also a notorious alarmist so I dunno. Still though, these are the films that the world cinematic community want to take seriously?
Writing this has actually made me realize how ignorant I actually am of the current state of world cinema. I know there are great sensitive poetic films out there and I have no idea what any of them are because they are tilled under by the cinema of brutality which wins awards and recognition. There is almost something fundamentalist in its credo, we must trust that the punishment is good for us. Pleah.
All this from a guy who is about to draw the most unsparing torture scene in the history of comics.
"Good Joke"
There has been a lot of writing on the internets about Anti Christ, the new Lars Van Trier movie, and its over the top hysterical fever dream style mutilations and violence. Having not seen it, and not having any interest in seeing it, I obviously can't exactly critique it specifically one way or another. BUT I can't help but notice that Anti Christ appears to be the latest entry, or perhaps just the codifying entry, in a series of very well made films that revolve around inhumanity and savage violence.
The cinema of brutality.
I'm not talking about the Saw films or the Hostel movies or what have you, because who gives a shit about that stuff anyway. I'm thinking of the recently released Bronson by Nicolas Winding Refn, Michael Haenke's recent American remake of Funny Games with Naomi Watts, and Gaspar Noe's ouvre (I had the misfortune of seeing about half of Irreversable a few years ago, and I'm still recovering) among others.
In the fifties, and sixties there was a hemorrhaging of great world film makers into the popular culture, there was Fellini, and Passolini, and Rosselini, Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Antonioni, Visconti, Rivette, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Satyajit Ray and on and on. Some of them belonged to given schools or movements but in spite of this they generally made films that were all over the map. They were concerned with the human heart, human ambition, death, the poverty of pocket and soul. Each unspooled his subject with a touch and speed unique to his own character. If audiences found the films by these artists confrontational it was not necessarily because they were making any effort to confound, or offend it was because the audience never fit into the creative equation. They refused to engage audiences, and instead demanded that the audience engage with what they had created. When this engagement was successful it fused, artist, and viewer in a way that Hollywood pablum, no matter how entertaining, could not. The audience was let in on the process through the artists demand and in turn became a part of it.
I've always sort of thought that shock was the laziest form of audience engagement. Which is why I find the apparent rise of the cinema of brutality kind of troubling. Haenke, Von Trier, Noe, and Refn, are all ostensibly master craftsmen. That is to say that they know their lighting, their composition, their acting, their, pacing, and so forth. But if it's all to the end of punishing their audiences, as opposed to confronting them then I can't help but think something has really gone off the rails... Like Republican Party sized gone off the rails. I think I first started putting all this together when I was reading reports from some of the big film festivals this year. Cannes was apparently filled with art film horrors and the Toronto film festival was noted for its bleak offerings. Haenke won the Palm D'or for his White Ribbon, and Charlotte Gainsbourg won best actress for her role in Anti Christ (Von Trier himself was bizarrely awarded an "ad hoc" anti-award for most misogynist film). The reports tell of a mood of provocation at Cannes. The goal was to select films that disturb, and upset, to fuck up bourgeois notions of a comfortable experience of art. Fine, but to disturb, and upset, and provoke, these are means to ends, not ends in themselves, and I would argue that nothing is more bourgeois, and hollow, and superficial than an artist who makes this error. I also think I'm not falling back on my bourgeois sensibilities just because I don't want to watch a woman cut off her vaginal lips with a pair of scissors (Which occurs in Anti Christ.) Who knows though, maybe I'm wrong about that.
Then there is that movie Precious that Oprah got made about the obese black teenager from the ghetto who has been pregnant multiple times by her own father. This may be something else. Maybe there is a fine line between the cinema of brutality and socially responsible filmmaking. Bronson has been compared to A Clock Work Orange, but there is a reported disparity in the content. Clockwork is a highly stylized meditation on the nature of evil, in a society that relies on evil to reflect it's "positive" acts. And Bronson appears to be a highly stylized meditation about a crazy man acting weird and beating people up. Anyway, I don't plan to see Precious either, but one gets the sense that while it is no doubt a punishing film, the hearts of the makers are "in the right place" and that they are trying to put a genuinely troubling American story on display, and not merely pandering to their own depressive fantasies.
I don't want movies to be sunshine and rainbows, I've made no secret of my love of Bergman's best films, but there is a poetry in Bergman that transcends his technique. Cries and Whispers for example is not the most pleasurable of movie going experiences, but we watch the artist deftly peel back layers of experience from its opaque opening scenes, until, by the end, we are part of the pulsing core of the thing. It contains scenes that repulse, and nearly terrify but at the end it's not those feelings that linger. We may be exhausted but we are not beaten.
I don't have a problem per se with nihilism either. Bergman's Shame ends in an almost comically bleak manner, but the world of the film has been so honest and rich up to that moment that the end, instead of being simply incongruous, causes the viewer to reflect on just what it is he is doing with his life anyway. And again, there is poetry, resonate images that do not bludgeon, but instead throw their fingers back into our brains to feel the creases. Isn't nihilism in art almost always instructive anyway? King Lear? Requiem For A Dream? Even artists who think themselves genuine nihilists probably aren't because they can't help the fact that their work exists in a context that gives it meaning whether they like it or not.
Why am I so worked up about this? I guess I'm just worried about the death of the art film. I have a feeling that it, like America, is destroying itself from within. I'm worried that content is going away. I'm also a notorious alarmist so I dunno. Still though, these are the films that the world cinematic community want to take seriously?
Writing this has actually made me realize how ignorant I actually am of the current state of world cinema. I know there are great sensitive poetic films out there and I have no idea what any of them are because they are tilled under by the cinema of brutality which wins awards and recognition. There is almost something fundamentalist in its credo, we must trust that the punishment is good for us. Pleah.
All this from a guy who is about to draw the most unsparing torture scene in the history of comics.
"Good Joke"