New Independent Films

Above: Cyd Charisse from "Party Girl"

I recently returned from the Torino Film Festival, a festival which I adore for its dedication to art cinema, where I was engaged as a juror. As my job was to watch competition films, I saw more new films in a week than I normally do in a year, and so I got an instant impression of the themes and styles of new independent work. I must add that my innocence in this regard is much like a time traveler who has recently found themselves in the twenty-first century, as I've spent so much time studying classic films that my viewing of newer independent work has been somewhat lacking.

To begin with, let me say that although the films seemed very disparate on the surface, what was most striking was the similarities between many of the films. If I were to catalogue what seems to be the aim of many of the films, it would seem to be to capture a certain sense of virtuousness through a means of storytelling that leaves out the ordinary parts of stories, and leaves in the parts that are in between. This is in an attempt, I gather, to surprise us by calling our attention to the truth in the minutae of everyday reality.

Indeed, in most of the films, this search for the "truth," coming directly from neo-realist tradition, seemed like a primary concern. Truth in acting is equated with creating unglamorous and inarticulate characters; truth in lighting is achieved by trying to light as little as possible; truth in storytelling is telling the non-dramatic bits of a story; truth in editing is trying not to edit at all, as this pollutes the purity of events as they happen in real time; truth in camerawork is the hand-held camera, without the intervention of storyboards, tripods and cranes; truth in writing is to tell as little as possible, so as not to trample on the viewer's own impressions. Also, incoherence often seemed to be aimed at, I suppose in order to reflect directly the incoherence of experience, and the impossibility of getting at meaning. As well as direct meaning, symbolism seemed to be an element that was avoided (when symbolism, artifice, and self-dramatization were used as devices, they were frowned upon).

The other thing I noticed was that direct pleasure was avoided most of the time, and in its place was the indirect pleasure of self-denial or self-immolation, and the sado-masochistic pleasure in the starkness or ugliness itself. So in the end, this cinema was more striking in terms of what it rejected than in terms of what it embraced: rejection of artifice and all overt devices, rejection of overt pleasure, rejection of meaning. What I was often left with was a cleverness in the filmmaker's ability to seem invisible as a stylist or creator of meaning. So it's a cinema of negation, of what's left when content, form, and desire are taken away.

Looking at all of the films, and at one Nicholas Ray film I caught in between other screenings, which approached cinema from exactly the opposite direction, I felt a pang of grief. I'm so fascinated by older forms of cinema, in which all possibilities were...well, possible. I have literally been told that it's "impossible" to do cinema in a pre-World war II Style, and the reasons why have been explained to me: "because of the way consciousness has been fragmented...because old ways of thinking about identity have been exploded." In Deleuze's books Cinema I and Cinema II, he talks about the postwar shift in cinema, in which the history of cinema can almost be divided into two halves. Deleuze speaks about an older cinema of movement and a newer cinema of time. Neo-realism is discussed, as well as the French new wave, and these forms have remained entrenched in art cinema forever since, seeking new ways to produce glimmers of meaning outside of narrative conventions, always in search of the new. And yet avant-garde practice, up until now, has rejected the previous generation's truth in favor of its own truth, often looking back to much older forms to do so. The newer cinema is almost beyond reproach, as one is seen as a philistine if one questions it, whereas anything else of a more sensuous or direct nature is instantly mistrusted.

Looking at the Nicholas Ray film, "Party Girl," through the eyes of contemporary festival audiences used to this new cinema, I couldn't help but thinking that the Ray film would seem ludicrous, and just WRONG, to them. Full of artificial pleasures, in the form of sets lit with three-point classical lighting, rear-projection in moving cars, the smashingly beautiful and almost otherworldly Cyd Charisse, characters in general that are more glamorous, daring, or attractive than we are, fantastic musical numbers, colorful gangsters, very carefully scripted dialogue and camera work, heavy-handed symbolism, all the dramatic bits left in and everything else left out, a sweeping musical score highlighting the drama, fantastic costumes color-coordinated with the sets, and a strong moral ending.

While I deeply enjoy "serious" art cinema, I am also a hopeless decadent. I refuse to reject entertaining material on the grounds that it's unimportant artistically. I have come around to the other side of art, in which I can find momentous meaning in the choreography of Cyd Charisse's overwhelmingly erotic dance, in much the same way that Apollinaire found more meaning in the lace panties of music hall dancers than in the greatest works of art in museums.