Film is an art form that invites the pretentious to participate. Up until very recently cinema was always conceived of being displayed on the largest of screens in front of large numbers of audiences. The scale of it alone gave it a pomposity that was hard to avoid. Recognition of this inherent phenomenon is the mark of an ambitious filmmaker, regardless of which direction they may chose to go in – but to try to hide it or avoid it demonstrates a lack of understanding of culture, time, and the medium. So many of the Hollywood prestige films try to deny that they think themselves important, but whether it is the moody lighting, the overwrought performances, or the burnished tones to the sets, we know what they want us to feel, even before we hear their score cue us. An alternative is to let it all hang out and let the audience know that you want to be thought of as Art from the get go. I adored Atom Egoyan’s films for precisely this reason: every aspect of their design and presentation cued us that what we were watching was important and unique. The current trend of overt “naturalism” in independent cinema carries with it a form of pretension delivered by the filmmakers’ disavowal of any pretentious devises – its lack thereof becomes the very thing it runs from, but at least it is directly on the surface and acknowledged by the filmmakers from the start. But it is an embrace and not an ignorance that those filmmakers have chosen and the fact they have made a choice to acknowledge pretension lifts those works above many others.
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I can’t let the Tedster’s latest pass without some kind of basic questioning. Like one of Bill O’Reilly’s talking points, it seems so mealy-mouthed as to defy coherence. Or at the very least, it is a producer’s concern, trying to maquerade as a filmmaker’s. First, why on earth, exactly, should filmmakers worry about pretension? Does anybody think Bela Tarr or Tarkovsky or Kiarostami ever got up in the morning thinking: “is this shot too pretentious..?” Is it the case that the more ambitious a filmmaker is, the more certain of his particular expression (however sophisticated, naïve, or faux naïve)– the less he worries about reception theory? There is a historical continuum of how much filmmakers “care” about the audience – Hitchcock, Spielberg and Haneke are on one end, and Sokurov, Brakhage, and the guy switching out surveillance videotape at the convenience store on the other. But this is ultimately a sort of myth, anyway. The whole pseudo-issue of “pretension” is an exclusively American or at best faux-democratic anxiety — because “artistes” have an ambivalent, barely-surfing-above-contempt position in a democratic society, they have to, like Ted, periodically genuflect to the pseudo-power of the mass (which no longer exists, in any case, due to the balkanizing effect of the variety and urgency of modern media), in order to sneakily engage in their essentially anti-democratic art practice. The only thing that “liberates” an artiste in a democracy is “popular success”, the cost of maintenance of which is, paradoxically, a treadmill of eternal slavery. In the unusual Michael Bay-like circumstance that you get to marshal an expensive army of technicians to bring a studio’s vision to The Money Store, you might indeed lose some sleep about getting too high-brow or cutesy for your audience. But in the age where any bozo can make a film and stick it on youtube – pretentiousness surely doesn’t enter into it. It’s democracy.
I’d like to ask Ted, honestly, who is really has the dynamic force in the current anomalous situation: Is it the “audience”, whatever that is? Or is it the media-industrial complex who gathers and purchases its film-serfs for the manufacture of “content” to validate its other matrices of consumption? Or is it the protean Heston-like artist who hijacks the system and the audience for his or her personal vision? Or is the situation indeed more fluid and anomalous than all that? Also, if film is no longer a “popular art”, that is, no longer a vast continent, and increasingly experienced in private, or rather something like Jazz, an academic or aficionado province, do we keep having to keep acting as if it is? It seems that at least part of the trouble is that people are still using 19th century conceptions of “the artist” and “the mass audience” to describe a political-historic situation that has moved way beyond this inadequate industrial age iconography.
Comment by bishopric - June 9th, 2009 at 2:24 pm