Anyone deserves the West who arrives with fresh energy to break up the deadly, antiseptic boredom of its civilization.
Joseph Roth- The Wandering Jews.
This West, particularly the English speaking West, under the sway of truthless materialism, produces practically nothing of any merit in film. Even its supposedly best, most acclaimed films like There Will Be Blood are in real artistic terms, lifeless. Such films a series of transcribed set-pieces, the gap between the written scene and the visual film minimal. Everything is functional, utilitarian, nothing organic and alive, despite the wonders a Daniel Day Lewis can perform. The West uses technology, inevitably given its hypnotising ambient ideologies, as mechanisms for producing unreality.
Thankfully, however, there are infusions of fresh energy to break up Roth's deadly lifelessness, and one such film is the Iranian Colours of Paradise, somewhat reminiscent of Sanjit Ray's Apu films. Watching films like this and the French-ArmenianVodka Lemon, and contrast with the lifelessness of the West's effluences, it is inescapable that the economic first world is in its sense of living life the third world. The West's ( speaking in broad terms) films are not art. They do not exist within the autonomous language of film, for which to exist as art must intimately relate to awareness of the living moment. The living moment is a foreign element to the West's unreality, and so its filmic art not art at all. Functional, arid while the Iranian director Majid Majidi has the living moment as his natural element, as of course it should for all. Technical knowledge is essential obviously for art, but this living awareness is the real primordial ground, on which everything depends.
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3 comments:
There are good film makers in the West, just are there are good musicians; it's just that the sheer quantity of shit tends to obscure them. Also i think in the West film makers are ashamed of what Wallce Stevens would call 'nobility', they have to ironize everything. So we have Kaufmann (Adaptation) who is a fantastic scriptwriter but can only approach things obliquely, ironically. He IS very good, but i sometimes long for directness.
Spielberg - as well as being a technical master - does directness, but tends to slip into cloying sentimentality (at least 2 films end in graveyards with much weeping) and easy answers. 'Munich' breaks away in that it deliberately complicates everything and ends not in a single thread and weeping but in a sense of everyone being to blame and no way out. i wish he could have allowed himself this discretion with Schindler's List - for me, the ending is so heavy-handed and didactic it spoils the brilliance that preceded it.
i recall Raymond Chandler saying that the writer learns all the tricks but then has nothing left to say. A decadent art is of this kind, perhaps, that the exponents have learnt all the tricks, are technical masters, but have nothing left to say. Then you read a Medieval poem or a see a film from the 3rd World and gasp, and think 'that's what was lost.'
Or to put it another way, Giotto or Cimabue lacked the sophisticated understanding of perspective of ater artists, but had instead a clarity and simplicity that is often lacking in post-Medieval art, where the figures look recognisably human but somehow don't have any soul
What about Stanley Kubrick's work?
You are very right Elberry about the shame attached to nobility in the West and the oceans of irony that we drown in.
It is becasue our lives are fictive and deep down we know it; but we are frightened of reality - and so we spurn and shun it
I'm afraid I generally find Kubrick's work very cold. For me, the out & out genius of film, Tarkovsky, felt the same, & broadly that film generally didn't exist as an artform- to exist within its own autonomous language, rather than a kind of literature with a camera added. That film was the recording of times, & within that space of time, infinity existed. Unfortunately putting it crudely, but that comparatively in Kubrick I'd say the sense of life is controlled, mechanical. Not organic & living.
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