A few months ago a mutual of mine DM’d me in relation to a minor argument I had semi-accidentally instigated. While we were hashing it out he told me that, as an undergrad in cinema studies, he was “kinda having a crisis” over the value of filmmaking, even radical filmmaking, and asked me what, if anything, I think is “vital right now” in filmmaking as a political practice. We had a fairly scattered but fruitful conversation, which I’ve attempted here to flesh out and develop into something a bit more focused and coherent. I figure if you’re reading this it’s almost certainly because you follow me on Twitter, or at least move in the same general “spheres,” which means you almost certainly already have an interest in either cinema or left theory (or both). Given this, a brief polemic of sorts on the intersection of these subjects seems like a good way to inaugurate this new exercise in vanity. And so:
I once scrawled my guiding philosophy as a scholar of the moving image in the front of my edition of a particularly thick reference tome of some canonical cinema studies texts: “Cinema is an invention with no future.” Not just economically: the very material of cinema is the past; the “now” recorded is always a “then” by the time it can be seen. Time embalmed, etc. etc. In this sense it is the inverse of politics, whose material is of course the future. This is a rather substantial problem for any non-reactionary project of “political filmmaking,” but it is not an insurmountable one. All that is really necessary is to stage the images such in the act of viewing their temporality collapses forwards, towards the future, without losing their historical materiality (to see this in action, watch Fortini/Cani). So radical cinema is possible. But it’s difficult, and genuinely great, genuinely radical filmmakers have always been rare. What is unique about the present moment, though, is that most of those we have (Godard, Straub, Adachi) are very old. What will happen when they’re gone?
If we want to look for a cause for this situation, an important one is certainly the long, terrible left-melancholic hangover from May ’68, which turned much intellectual production towards thought that, whatever its merit (and I am not saying there is none!), was and is fundamentally non-threatening to capital. The institutional structures that distributed this kind of thought are today no longer able to exert the sort of hegemonic control they once were, but we’re still stuck with generations of artists/filmmakers who were raised on that stuff and, while some of them do manage to make good work despite it, how many of them have learned the lessons, say, Straub & Huillet did? How many have that commitment and that clarity or purpose? It’s not the sign of a healthy film culture when the most strident radicals working qualify for senior discounts at the multiplex, is my point.
I’m not someone who believes in the “death of cinema” (already dead; no future, remember?), but the old paradigm is outmoded and whatever new one is emerging has little use for “cinema,” that techno-ideological emblem of the 20th century. You can’t just start making movies like La chinoise again, much less Oktybar. The reality is that while cinema remains an important arm of the culture industry, it seems of little use for agitprop these days. The space for openly radical work in the “film world” (what little still exists) is becoming smaller and more isolated, despite the barrier to producing moving image work being lower than ever. Thus Connor O’Malley’s Howard Schultz videos, posted on Twitter and then edited together for YouTube, end up being a more incisive and necessary work of political art than pretty much anything screened at a festival last year (much less that had any sort of distribution). It seems to me the best cinema as-such can hope to do now, politically, is help create better, smarter radicals. No one is becoming a communist because of Film socialisme, is my point. This is not to denigrate Godard or any of the “old guard,” I love thorny, difficult art and would attribute a great deal of the development of my own political thought to repeated exposure to these sort of films. But any young filmmaker who wants their art to matter should probably forget about “the cinema,” and if they’re really fine just making challenging work for their fellow travelers they had better be sure they actually have the grit to challenge them.
The name of this blog is also that of a short by anti-colonialist filmmaker René Vautier, from 1974. It consists of a conversation between a film director and a younger woman (perhaps his mistress) in her apartment. He has just seen an Algerian man (“properly dressed, almost no accent”) attacked and savagely beaten by two police officers for tapping one on the shoulder to ask for directions. The director, watching, stood frozen in place, unable to move until one of the cops told him to fuck off, or he’ll be next. He says that he feels violé, that he was somehow “forced” to watch. Now, he has resolved that he must make a film about this outrage, to strike back against this injustice. But not right now, in five years or so, because, or course, if he made it right now it would be too incendiary, no one would finance it, he would have to sell everything he owned. If he was lucky enough to show it to some critics when it was all finished they wouldn’t dare say anything positive about it, and then his career would be over. Maybe a former colleague would buy him a drink in a café from time to time, in memory of the old days. So no, he has to wait. And when he does make it he has to make sure not to attack the police too directly, because of course police will still exist in five years and they’ll suppress the film if it’s too militant, so instead it will be about “the fact that I, right now, immediately, couldn’t do anything.” Vautier wrote the script for Le remords in 1957, but did not actually shoot it until 17 years later because, as the story goes, every actor he approached to play the filmmaker recognized in the character a real director they worked with, and refused out of fear of losing work. Ultimately, Vautier played the role himself, which in the final analysis might be the only honest way to do it, really. For me, this is the character that the “radical filmmaker” today most often resembles: the man who witnesses an atrocity, does nothing to stop it, and wants to do nothing but dissect his own inaction. It is not a universal condition, but it is an extremely common one, and, I fear, becoming more so by the year.
le remords 