Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Part Two of Bruce Hodsdon's new series on the history of art cinema

Last year at Marienbad

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a new series by scholar and critic Bruce Hodsdon in which he analyses the history and impact of Art Cinema. Part One appeared on March 10 and can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE.

                                       

Part 2: Art Cinema: a matter of definition?

 

Art cinema: genre, quality, alternative, marginal, pan-national, a mode of film practice, a form of film exhibition, an institution? Or what everyone understands, yet no-one until fairly recently has been prepared to specifically define, other than simply 'not being Hollywood'. The mode of narration is loosened from classical structures typically (but not necessarily) engaging the audience in a 'foreign' production including overt aesthetic formalism and/or an emphasis on verisimilitude over narrative drive.

 

André Bazin

Julian Petley notes that serious anglophone discussion of art cinema per se dates back to the late 1970s with the publication of David Bordwell's essay on 'Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice' (1979) and Steve Neale's 'Art Cinema as an Institution' (1981).  Bordwell called for the examination of the complex historical relation of art cinema to the classical narrative cinema. The term was then applied retrospectively to identify historical phenomena from 1908 as outlined in part 1. Petley lists a series of discussions through the 60s into the 70s going back to Alexandre Astruc's discussion of 'La Camera Stylo' in 1948 (the idea of  'writing with the camera'), André Bazin's critical work on neo-realism (Rossellini in particular), and Cahiers du Cinema's ranking of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Bresson and Dreyer in its directorial pantheon. By the early 60s there was a growing sense that a new kind of cinema was developing without agreement on what its specific characteristics might be. (Cook & Bernink eds. 106)

                           

In common usage the term art cinema has come to describe feature-length  narrative films  outside  mainstream cinema, located somewhere  between fully  experimental films  and overtly commercial products. They may typically include foreign  productions engaged in  unrestrained formalism or a mode of narration that is pleasurable but loosened from classical structures while distanced from its representations.(G & S 6)

Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell

                                                                                                      

At the radical end of the art film spectrum Last Year at Marienbad  has been described as a quintessential work of art cinema with, as Bordwell notes, “a plot so wrought that it becomes impossible to construct a story” (Narration 232). At the other end, as Bordwell further points out, by the 60s art cinema had so accustomed critics to looking for personal expression in films by Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni et al, that auteur critics “unproblematically applied art cinema schemata to classical Hollywood films.” By the 80s “the intense subjectivity of the 60s art film was less in evidence “with greater emphasis on an ambiguous play between objective    realism and authorial address.”  (ibid).

 

In recent decades there have been two forms of international art cinema offering a range of viewing experiences:  one centred close to the mainstream in its cinematic values and distribution centred in Europe, the other lower budget independent films coming from a variety sources including the U.S. What is most important about art cinema is “the room it provides for difference,” which Nowell-Smith seeks to release  by letting art cinema fragment.  ( World Cinema 573-5)  

 

In 1981 Steve Neale describes art cinema, both historically and contemporaneously  as “the attempts made by a number of Europeancountries both to counter American domination of their indigenous markets in film and also to fostera film industry and film culture of their own.”

Adrian Martin

 

Adrian Martin insists that “no distinction should be made between art cinema and so-called commercial/entertainment cinema – both are, or can be, cinematic art...In essence according to classicism, style exists to serve the subject or story. This is an expressive economy: style expresses subject.” (Mise en Scène 22)  A broad swathe of production with the label of 'art cinema' as a loose marketing term, Martin suggests, implies that other types of cinema are not art. This was associated with luminaries such as Bergman, Bertolucci, Resnais and Haneke, “a range of moments in their films racing ahead of the critical language. In the 70s mise en scène analysis began to stage a comeback.”(ibid 78)

 

It has been relatively easy to locate art cinema for simply being 'not Hollywood or even anti-Holly- wood', “Art films tend to be marked by a stress on visual style (an engagement of the look in terms of individual point of view rather than by institutionalised spectacle), by a suppression of action in the Hollywood sense, by a consequent stress on character rather than plot and by an internalisation of dramatic conflict” (Neale pp 13-14), and a tighter causal chain replaced by an episodic structure and more nuanced characterisation. These elements function as differentiation from what is perceived to be the Hollywood text, art features differing from classically constructed features. As Kristin Thompson has noted they can be more ambiguous, reflexive and stylised and at the same time more naturalistic.  Art filmsalso tend to be marked by the signifying presence of an authorial voice. Art is thus the space in which indigenous (or in the US, independent) cinema can develop and make its critical and economic mark.

David Andrews

The description by Peter Lev of art cinema as “what is shown in art theatres” (quoted G&S 65) might lead us to conclude that art cinema since its inception has been tantamount to most every kind of “alternative” or non-Hollywood cinema.” (David Andrews 65)  This represents a challenge to a formalist definition. Any complete history of art cinema and its discursive trappings, it is suggested, reveals a genre so eclectic that we might even be tempted to call it an “open” formal category.

 

As one follows them, however, according to Andrews, the lines of inquiry suggest how unlikely it is that theorists will ever develop a satisfying definition of art cinema that defines it only in the formalist terms of a specific kind of cinematic text and not the the unified body of work such analysis tends to imply.

 

There is also the question of the development in fields such as the philosophy of art which “have abandoned attempts to define “art” in evaluative formal terms (i.e. in terms of a preferred set of texts) some decades ago” (ibid 68). Further it is clear that dedicated art house circuits don't necessarily follow any film-as-art definition in their programming. Does it even make  sense, Andrews asks, to refer to art cinema as a form of high art (as classical music might be posited against jazz with its folk origins) apart from implying a sense of exclusiveness?

 

The following are some principles Galt & Schoonover nominate by which art cinema might be more clearly identified in relation to the mainstream and historically to classicism( 6-9).

Karl Schoonover, Rosalind Galt

The lack of strict parameters for art cinema is not just the ambiguity of its critical history but a central part of what it is: “a positive way of delineating its discursive space.” It is proposed by G&S that art cinema be identified for its impurity without losing its place as an alternative cinema between the main- stream and avant garde - “a difficulty of categorisation that is as productive to film culture as it is frust-rating to taxonomy.” To be impure G&S emphasise, “is not to be vague or nebulous.”  They further contend that art cinema, by its nature, “always perverts the standard categories used to divide up institutions, locations, territories, histories, or spectators.” They illustrate how this impurity can be understood in different ways such as an institutional space “that moves uneasily between the commercial world and its artisanal others, neither experimental nor mainstream.” At the mainstream end contemporary European art films, for example, can look more like the derided cinema of quality rejected by the French New Wave. In some cases art films can, as suggested by Lev, simply be those shown in art-house theatres, or at film festivals, so that their very existence as art-films is dependent on certain critics, programmers, or distribution models. 

 

Art cinema has an ambivalent relationship with location and identity. A mainstream film in its place of origin can become an art cinema release in another country (further signified by the addition of sub-titles) immersed in a sense of internationalism. G&S point out that art cinema always carries a comparativist (national) impulse combined with a transnational tenor (ibid 7). Canons of great films established by world polls are dominated by this sense of internationalism co-existing with nationalism. The format of this series links this co-existence with individual expressivity in the key role of the director as auteur.  In the designation of “art” within global art cinema, the local has played a key but shifting role. When a country's films are selected for foreign cultural screenings by a commission or similar agency, conformity with eurocentric notions of art cinema has tended to prevail in the process.

 

A film's positive international reception can become proof of its importance in the country of origin. This ambiguity/impurity also resists attempts to define 'art film' as a genre. International is often a code for 'foreign film' understood primarily in terms of its consumption. Leaving international festivals, with their predisposition to search out difference, to directly identify another country's talent from the outside has meant that the films so selected for screening have increasingly been recognised on their own terms in crossing the threshold from a national to an international art cinema.

 

Far from rejecting Hollywood systems of stardom and authorship, art cinema deploys these systems   in parallel if more ambivalent form, not necessarily with the same aesthetic criteria that mark their operations in the Hollywood system. Stardom, for instance, tends to adopt criteria such as bodily qualities with somewhat different emphases. The auteurist impulse in the role of the director also demands a different emphasis. Given the global spread of production and film cultures in the 50s and 60s, the role and nature of authorship with art cinema as a platform, particularly its political and cultur- al agency, can have a pressing significance.  

 

Issue #1 (?)

Art film has a more ambivalent yet central relationship with authorship than is the case with classical narrative. Auteur was initially deployed polemically by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics as a term for what they perceived as being too often critically unrecognised excellence within the confines of Hollywood's studio system. The critics, some soon to be making their own films, writing in Cahiers, found new ways of identifying authorship in the studios, most notably adapting the notion, adapted from the theatre, of mise-en-scène as a measure of a director's commitment, intelligence and sensitivity in naturalising the way emotions and ideas are thematically 'de-theatricalised' and conveyed 'cinematically' by the auteur's direction of the actors and the camera.

 

Sam Rohdie, in his posthumously published Film Modernism, suggests defining an auteur as “some- one who creates his or her own system rather than putting into play an existing one,” stand out examples in American cinema being Welles and Cassavetes. In classical Hollywood movies, cinematic means are subordinated to narrative and story... a great classical artist being someone who is great for his or her ability to imitate not to innovate, who obeys the rules with grace and style.” (26-7)  This dominance of narrativity involves the effacement of the forms deployed   in the telling of the story. In essence classical storytelling is objective, “imitative of nature,” as Rohdie puts it. Directors such as Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Sirk, Fuller, Ford, Preminger, and Howard Hawks, were singled out and praised by the Cahiers critics for the excellence of their filmmaking within the Hollywood system, not for subverting it. In this respect, Rohdie further suggests, they were more like traditional craftspeople but ones using the system by making it their own.

 

Sam Rohdie

 Authors in art cinema more often speak from outside America or Europe or are otherwise located outside the mainstream. The film festival circuit constitutes a major platform, both commercially and culturally, for the success of an individual film that is also closely tied to that of an often relatively small, or even almost non-existent national industry.

 

An Australian Intervention

The final problem for the classification of art cinema raised by G&S is the application of the notion of the impure spectator, “both at the level of textual address and in the history of audiences” (ibid 8). They note that the literature of the emergence of an art-house audience meshes with the sense of a hybrid audience.

 

Queuing out the door.
The Savoy Theatre Sydney, 1950s.
The film screening was  La Ronde

Initial potential for audience hybridity in Australia was heightened by postwar migration which generated the increased inflow of European feature films in the 50s and 60s through ethnic based distribution and even the American distribution majors in the 60s and 70s whose head offices, in response to the international art house boom in the 60s acquired world rights (for the first time?) to selected foreign language titles. The story in these decades, however is as much one of parallel rather than of intersecting audiences for foreign language cinema.

 

The ongoing rigid, often arbitrary application of the censorship code by the Commonwealth film censor in the 60s served to increase the notoriety of so-called “continental” films attracting a predominantly male audience in search of erotic content in inner city cinemas, most often in ex-newsreel theatrettes. Expectations were continually thwarted by the censor until the introduction of the 'R' certificate in the early 70s.The first art house film to break the drought in Sydney cinemas, I seem to recall, was Pasolini's The Decameron.

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini as Giotto, The Decameron

A growing art house audience was concentrated in the above average income socio-economic bracket with an otherwise seeming preference for British rather than Hollywood films, plus a small but growing number of tertiary-educated and student filmgoers looking for an alternative or supplement to Hollywood-dominated screen entertainment. This widening spectrum of cinema audiences was also the product of the postwar influx of migrants from Europe with screenings in the large Italian and Greek clubs equipped with 35mm projection, for members of smaller ethnic clubs organised in cinemas, or the regular programming of sub-titled films in suburbs with a concentration of migrant populations.In Sydney and Melbourne, film festivals made their first appearance, film society initiatives over a weekend in the early to mid 50s, becoming major cultural events by the late 60s in packed 2000 plus seat cinemas over two weeks by the late 60s, also spreading to other capital cities, and later a travelling film festival for regional centres.

 

“The openness of art film to aesthetic experience,” conclude G&S, “is not unconnected to its openness to minority communities who have formed a significant part of art cinema's audience as well as its representational politics.” They find in this “the kernel of art cinema's significance as a category of cinema brings categories into question and holds the potential to open up spaces between and outside of mainstream/avant-garde, local/cosmopolitan, history/theory, and industrial/formal debates in film scholarship” (9).

 

The bibliographic references for this part are combined with those of part 3 to be posted shortly.

"Everybody has to do the work they feel they have to do" - Part Two of Tom Ryan’s conversation with Ken Loach about the British cinema and working in "an absolutely collective enterprise".

If there’s one thing that distinguishes your work from that of your contemporaries in Britain at the moment – I’m talking about films like Billy Elliot (2000) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002) –  it’s that they deal with the exceptions while, as I see it, you deal with the rule.

Well, yes. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s probably true.

 

What do you think about those other films?

 

Oh, well. It’s hard enough to make them without somebody coming along and knocking them really. I mean everybody has to do the work they feel they have to do. I mean, if you go so heavily for comedy or sentiment or whatever, I think inevitably you coarsen the subtleties of the way things are. 

You know, the result is you steamroll around the nuances of behaviour and the subtleties of relationships that reveal a lot because you’re driving hard for the comedy and you have to play it in a certain way. So I just find them less interesting. I don’t want to knock them because it’s tough enough to make them anyway.

 

Can I ask you another way? If you were making a film like Billy Elliot, what changes would you make? How would a Ken Loach Billy Elliot be different?

 

Well, first of all, it was set during the miners’ strike and I did a documentary during the miners’ strike [Which Side Are You On? (1984)] and met a lot of people there at the time. And the one thing that was apparent was that it was a very culturally-aware time. I mean, the mining communities had creative writing circles. They exchanged poems, particularly the women who were involved, with other mining communities and people who supported them. There were concerts, people came to perform. And the idea that a group of people who were doing that would force a man to cross a picket line for the sake of the 10 or 15 quid it would take for him to get to London is just false. It just wouldn’t happen. I’m not saying that you wouldn’t find one or two idiots who would jeer at what he was doing – I’m sure you would – but, as communities, they were the most artistically aware group of workers I’ve ever known. 

Loach (left) filming Which Side Are You On

And the evidence is there. It’s a matter of record; it isn’t my romanticism. So I just don’t believe it. Although it would feel it was being quite progressive, there’s some very reactionary, ill thought-out, ill-researched work and ideas behind it.

 

I actually expected the issue you would call attention to was that the father might suffer far more than he does for his betrayal of his union principles. I was accepting that on face value.

 

He wouldn’t go through it. He wouldn’t have to. I can’t imagine circumstances in which that would happen. I just don’t believe it.

 

I also felt you would have ended the film with Billy driving away in the bus. He wouldn’t have got to leap around in the West End.

 

Ha-ha. I dunno. I think the whole premise is flawed. That’s the problem.

 

I can imagine a Ken Loach film about an older Chantelle [Liam’s sister in Sweet Sixteen, played by Annmarie Fulton]. Maybe you’ve already made it, Ladybird, Ladybird [in 1994])…

 

Um, yes. That’s an older woman who didn’t have Chantelle’s strength in the crucial years of her life. I mean, Liam’s mother is more in the vein of Crissy Rock [in Ladybird, Ladybird], except that Liam’s mother isn’t a fighter like Crissy Rock. She would take on all comers; she would fight the world. And that was part of the problem, whereas Liam’s mother is defeated and she just has to cling on to whatever support she can find. They’re different responses to similar situations. 

Ladybird, Ladybird

 

Would you ever consider making a film about the Stans of the world and what’s led them to where they are? [Stan is played in Sweet Sixteen by Gary McCormack]

 

Um, yeah. Stan was a kid once. He comes from somewhere. He’s learned the world’s a tough place and you’ve got to be pretty tough to survive. He’s a man of limited intelligence and limited ambitions and he’s useful to the bigger guys. His vanity is one of the major features of his character. 

 

I was thinking more of whether you might consider placing him in the centre of things and making an audience deal with this character. I mean, I’m talking about a very “uncommercial” kind of film.

 

Yes. He loves the idea of himself as a gangster, that kind of guy with street cred and style and all that. And the sad thing is that he’s nothing of the sort. He’s another guy who’s full of illusions about himself. And that’s the kind of myth he’s built around himself. So, yes, Stan’s an interesting character.

Martin Compston, Sweet Sixteen

 

What do you think about the fact that Sweet Sixteen was given an MA rating in Australia?

 

That’s OK. That’s OK. In Britain, it was 18! And that was ludicrous. It wasn’t because of any violence or story. It was just because of one word in the dialogue which they said was used aggressively. I mean it’s pathetic. So I think 15 is what we were expecting. I mean, it’s not a film for young children, obviously. But kids the age of Liam should be able to see it because it’s their world.

 

How do you go about finding young actors like Martin Compston? You find them all the time.

 

Well, you just look and look, you know. Try them out and look again. We must’ve seen several hundred, I suppose. There’s always a lot of talent around, really. I mean, again, that’s axiomatic. Every school you go into you’re gonna find half a dozen kids who’re quite bright. So you just keep looking and looking until you get a shortlist and then somebody emerges as the one who’ll really make it work. It’s not so difficult, Tom. It’s just a question of using your common sense really.

 

Behind the camera, you tend to work regularly with the same people. You know, Barry Ackroyd, Rebecca O’Brien and the others. How important is this kind of collaboration (a) to you and (b) to your working methods?

 

I think it’s very important because we sort of work out things together really and it relies on everybody’s craft to carry it through. I mean, Rebecca is very important, Barry, Martin Johnson, the designer, the editors, the sound recordist. Everybody’s contribution has been honed over the years. Take them away, I can’t do anything. 

I mean, it’s an absolutely collective enterprise which is why I hate it when it says, “A Film By…” and then the name of the director. I suppose you could say “A film by Kodak” and that’d be about as accurate as you could be, but it’s certainly not “A Film By Me”. I mean, it’s a film by a bunch of us really.

 

Yes, but everybody always has to blame somebody and it’s always easier to pick on an individual.

 

Ha-ha. 

 

Thanks for your time. 

 

OK, it’s been nice to talk with you. All the best and thanks for not speaking about the cricket.

 

Ha-ha. Well, India has New Zealand on the ropes at the moment.

 

Oh, do they? I haven’t heard the scores.

 

Yes, they’ve got them three for 30-something.

 

Yes. India look a good bet to me. I mean they’re the only ones who might challenge Australia. 

 

Yes. And I was politely avoiding the cricket too. 

 

Ha-ha. OK. All the best.

*******

Editor's Note: This is the second part of an interview with the director Ken Loach. It was recorded by Melbourne film critic Tom Ryan as the basis of a feature article for The Age when the film Sweet Sixteen was first released. Part one can be found If you click here  The Previous posts in this series have been devoted to conversations with Colin Firth (Part One) Colin Firth (Part Two) Lawrence Kasdan (Part One), Lawrence Kasdan (Part Two) Costa-Gavras Jonathan Demme (Part One)  Jonathan Demme (Part Two) Click on the names to read the earlier pieces

The Film Censors Grilled at Senate Estimates - "animal torture, violent death and alcohol consumption" ...and what is "the Netflix tool"?

"animal torture, violent death and
alcohol consumption"

Editor's Note: This a complete and unabridged transcript of a part of proceedings at recent Senate Estmates hearings. It is the first I have ever heard of something called 'the Netflix tool', apparently some sort of application by which Netflix does its own classifying ad this is accepted by what a Polish film-maker once described to me as "the authorities".

Senator HANSON-YOUNG: I'm wondering about a specific film on Netflix. It follows on quite well from the questioning that both Senator Urquhart and Senator Van have put to you already. I'm interested in whether you've had any complaints about the film Cats, produced in 2018, directed by Gary Wang. It's on Netflix animation. Have you received any complaints about Cats?

Ms Ryan : I'd have to take that on notice.

Mr O'Neill : Yes, we will have to take that on notice. I'm not aware of any complaints on that title. We usually keep fairly good tabs on titles.

Senator HANSON-YOUNG: If you could take that on notice, that would be good. The cartoon is rated PG but it shows animal torture, violent death and alcohol consumption. I'm asking this from both a general public perspective and as a mum. I can understand that sometimes when there is something in an animated form, the themes are perhaps, at times, seen through a different lens than if it was a live drama production. But I know for a fact that this film has actually created great distress amongst a number of small children. That's why I'm asking this; it's been put to me by a constituent.

I'm fascinated as to how we're going to manage these things going forward, considering more kids' content is going to be moving to the streaming services. The ABC has been a very good place to access good quality kids' TV, and I think it's right to say that parents would feel quite safe about putting their kids in front of ABC Kids. But our kids are accessing a lot of content on streaming services now, and I'm just not sure whether we're educating parents and families enough about what these different classification types are or how we monitor and ensure that, when they are put in front of a screen, that it is appropriate. Just because it's a cartoon doesn't necessarily mean it's safe. So, from a classification perspective, how do we manage this? More kids are going to be logging on to Netflix, on to Stan, on to other streaming services. The government is putting up money so that content can be made on these services. How do we ensure that there is a correct level of classification and knowledge from the consumer's perspective?

Mr O'Neill : With regards to your question about the correct level of classification, the acting director is properly better placed to respond to your query there.

Ms Ryan : For a Netflix decision on this particular title, we'd have to absolutely take that on notice and see whether there's been any other information that we've received or any complaints that we've received. In assessing impact of the classifiable elements, the board is required to apply the act, the code and the guidelines when making decisions, and that's no different for the Netflix tool as well. When assessing impact, our guidelines do talk about the fact that when things are more realistic rather than stylised that the impact could be higher. It's not always higher. It's a matter of assessing each film or computer game on its own merit and assessing the context around that. Our guidelines also tell us that context is crucial. So if we were trying to determine whether classifiable elements are justified by a particular story line or a particular theme, that would—

Senator HANSON-YOUNG: But what work is being done to ensure that consumers know that there is the same level of ability to complain about classification on streaming services? This is a bold, new world in many regards, so there has to be some type of effort being put in to ensure that parents would know, for example, in relation to Cats, if they have problem, it should be raised. I don't think people would have a problem with raising it with the ABC. It's their ABC. They know what to do. They can ring up and lodge a complaint. I'm not sure, not convinced, that consumers have the same level of awareness about what they do if there is a problem on Netflix.

CHAIR: In the interests of time, would you be happy with Ms Ryan to come back to you with an answer on notice about how to address that?

Senator HANSON-YOUNG: That would be helpful, but the acting director was about to respond with something.

Ms Ryan : The board shares your concerns about that. We feel that there hasn't been a lot of information made publicly available to people to know they can complain to the board, to the department about decisions of the Netflix tool.

Senator HANSON-YOUNG: Take on notice if there has been a complaint about Cats. It's called Cats—2018, Gary Wang. I'd like to know whether it's been reviewed for classification? Is it still on air? Obviously you'll look into that.