(Audio version at the end of the piece.)
(Costa-Gravas’ The Confession, 1970)
Seeking Goodness in the Devil’s Medium
I have recently, tentatively, suggested that good movies (or good TV shows), if they are to be ethically as well as aesthetically good: a) should not represent extreme forms of violence or evil, at all; b) cannot be popular or celebrated works; or at least, should have failed, in the end, to have been embraced or assimilated by popular culture.
This pretty much disqualifies all my favorite movies and TV shows.
In tandem with this recalibration of my own definitions of good art, since theory without practice tends towards onanism, I have recently been watching only obscure, forgotten films, that I would have been largely or totally unaware of, except for the fact that Pauline Kael wrote about them.
In some cases, these are still somewhat well-known, celebrated works that are still relatively marginal, such as two films by Louis Malle (Murmur in the Heart and Lacombe, Lucien) or films by Ingmar Bergman (Shame, The Magician). Some of the films I have selected to watch based on this criteria (many have proven difficult to download, but not impossible) are:
Christ Stopped at Eboli, The Moment of Truth, Hands Across the City (Francesco Rosi)
Going Places, Femmes Fatales, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Bertrand Blier)
Un Femme Infidel, Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol)
Umberto D (Vittoria de Sica)
The Confession (Costa Gravas)
The Emigrants, The New Lands (Jan Troell)
Absurd as it may sound, I have been feeling a lot more virtuous about (or at peace with) my evening viewing time as a result of this policy. Partly, it is that watching “arthouse” foreign movies feels more discerning and exclusive, less escapist. Since I have to work a bit to get into these films, rather than just let myself be carried away by Hollywood tropes, the experience feels more “virtuous.”
But there is something about many of these movies that seems objectively more wholesome, or less toxic, and that is inseparable from their not “catching on” with mainstream audiences, and their winding up (now, if not at the time) outside the current zeitgeist. They taste relatively fresh and untainted. (Not to mention that, while they may still emerge from—or reach us via—the organized crime military-intelligence-occult networks behind world cinema, the actual people involved in their creation are perhaps less likely to be ground agents of the agenda.)
Not all of these films have met this standard, however. Bertrand Blier’s Going Places, for example (and to a lesser extend Get Out Your Handkerchiefs), is a morally repellent “sex comedy,” replete with all manner of sexual depravity and violence played for laughs. Handkerchiefs is less grotesque, but still hinges upon some questionable elements, including a female protagonist finding happiness with a 13 year-old boy lover, who impregnates her. This is a development which Kael described in her review as “bewildering but mysteriously right, satisfying” (When the Lights Go Down, p. 461).
Ergo, an unexpected (though I am sure fairly predictable, to my readers) side effect of this policy has been to undermine my trust in Kael’s discernment, and begin to question my firm conviction as to the benevolence of her influence. All the idols must fall. (More on Kael next week.)
One film I saw via Kael’s recommendation that was especially enjoyable was Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. The film was made in 1976 by Swiss director Alain Tanner with his co-writer, art critic John Berger (author of Ways of Seeing). It is about a group of relatively ordinary people doing relatively ordinary things. At least I thought so, and relative to average movie protagonists at least, though Kael describes them as post-Marxists in her review: “the sorts of fantasists and obsessives who were considered marginal before 1968” (Lights, p. 180).
Jonah is a little like some of Robert Altman’s films of the 1970s, or an early John Sayles film like Return of the Secaucus Seven. It is not about remarkable people doing “important” things or facing unusual challenges. It is just about souls discovering and developing unexpected connections. As Kael puts it, the film “doesn’t operate on identification with a hero or on suspense. Yet it provides the kind of pleasure that one can generally get only from movies that involve us by those primal means” (Lights, p. 182).
This seems to me an essential distinction, when it comes to evaluating the ethics of aesthetics.
Similarly, and even more observably, the film I watched this week, The Emigrants (1971, directed by Jan Troell), is a three-hour Swedish epic about a family emigrating to the US. The film begins so slowly that I would normally have found something else to watch, had I not been waiting for my wife to join me. As it was, I let it run on, and let my mind wander, thinking that my wife might have a different view of it, or if not, that we’d switch to a more interesting film once she arrived.
After my wife joined me, we carried on watching for a time, and after getting at least half an hour in, still nothing much had happened. But then, gradually, events began to unfold with more tension, and by the time we stopped watching for the night, halfway in, we were both fully engaged to an unusual degree. By that time, the long and boring introduction seemed like an essential bit of world-building, as in a novel, that allowed us to become more fully ensconced in the story and characters than usual.
You could say that the film gradually earned my interest, while I, in turn, earned the experience of enjoyment the film gave me, in a kind of attention symbiosis.
This process of slow, steady involvement is closer to how life unfolds, and people and places grow on us, with very little dramatic drive. The film doesn’t use the usual “primal means” to hook and draw the viewer in, so it required patience, a “leaning in” to the film, to meet it halfway. (Paul Schrader describes this as “the transcendental style in movies.”)
Both films depict life, and human beings, as intrinsically interesting and of value, and they do it without obviously dramatic development curves or superficial action, or even much actual story. They emphasize the compelling qualities of ordinary, everyday life without “celebrating” them, and without either excluding the darker undercurrents or overly dwelling on them. And while achieving an unusual degree of realism, they don’t sink to the sort of “slice of life” “social realism” that make Mike Leigh or Ken Loach films such a drudge.
Most charmingly of all, these films have been all-but completely erased from the cultural landscape. And what better pedigree is there than that?1
(Over the Paywall: Gibson’s Passion of the Christ as religious torture porn, Greek theater and mimetic violence, how The Counselor breaks the Hollywood contract.)
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