WORDS Diogo Serafim
PHOTOGRAPHY Luiza Herdy
against
the new
cinephilia,
encore
(AND IN FAVOR OF CINEMA, BE IT ALIVE, DEAD OR UNDEAD)
It fell to him, as to all other men, to live in the worst of times.
Jorge Luis Borges, Inquisiciones
The contemporary state of cinema and cinephilia (1) is systematically called into question by the generation that is passing through it. It has already become a tautology for film critics to be willing to swim against the tide by admitting a progressive decay of the artistic experience in cinema, but it seems that it remains the only path to maintain a dialectical lucidity in an increasingly conformist and insensitive world, as we can perceive in the majority of texts that go in the direction of cultural forces (which are little other than a manifestation of economic and political forces), whose ideas often denounce a conformist complacency and passive naivety which I vehemently oppose to.
The reason for this progressive decline is that the great problem of the 21st century concerning cinema and art in general remains fundamentally the same as it was in the 20th century: people are progressively unlearning how to use their senses. We look without seeing because we no longer know how to see, or hear, or feel, let alone think. To turn on a light, you flick on a light switch; to get from one place to another, you go through a turnstile and get on a train; to light a fire, you press a button; every experience of the world is interrupted by the existence of cell phones and digital billboards; instead of listening to the sound of the city, we arbitrate the music we listen to on our headphones: there are so many intermediaries for everything concrete in the world that we are constantly under the impression that everything is relative, fleeting, ephemeral. Of course, one can't see anything beyond their own navel, their experience of the world being filtered more by inattention and the profusion of distractions than by a real confrontation with what surrounds them. Plato never thought his cave allegory would feel more objectively prescient with the march of time.
The problem is only intensified by technological advances (television, computers, cell phones, digital imaging, artificial intelligence), culminating in a state of disproportionate democratization of images, an abundance that empties visual interactions of all analytical, sentimental, material or transcendental meaning. Just as to some extent the Enlightenment period resulted in the instrumentalization of reason for the sake of social control, the forces of economic domination have indirectly transformed the spectator into a Pavlovian animal seeking comfort stimuli insouciantly, in a dynamic of relentless consumption.
Nothing else remains of the film and the experience it proposes: it has become a pretext, a subterfuge where personal ghosts and moralistic preconceptions are projected onto the screen in a one-way street, almost completely ignoring a sine qua non of the cinematographic experience: the ontological alterity of the screen. We don’t open ourselves to an image anymore; we limit and imprison the image inside ourselves. We don’t see an image anymore; we simply consume it.
The reception of the work of art in modern audiences is commonly abstracted to the point of paroxysm, often to the point of delirium. Nothing else remains of the film and the experience it proposes: it has become a pretext, a subterfuge where personal ghosts and moralistic preconceptions are projected onto the screen in a one-way street, almost completely ignoring a sine qua non of the cinematographic experience: the ontological alterity of the screen. We don’t open ourselves to an image anymore; we limit and imprison the image inside ourselves. We don’t see an image anymore; we simply consume it.
Cinema was reduced to the novelization of a narrative, where its form gets erased by a disproportionate importance given to the plot, frequently making us forget its most powerful tool: cinema’s formal possibilities and the way they mold, enrich and even justify narrative. No one in their right minds would read a book awfully written just in order to follow a plot, nobody would appreciate an useless painting just because of the theme it portrays, nobody would listen to a badly composed song solely because of the content of its lyrics. Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr once said that if you want to make a movie in order to say something, it is much better to write what you want to say: it would be cheaper, faster and much easier.
Cinema is a dialectic deprived of synthesis, and there is no discourse in the world strong enough to expropriate the expansive and absolute nature of an image, because they share the matter of the world itself: the injunction point of contact between nature and dreams, materialism and idealism.
But of course, this impoverishment of the artistic experience is also accompanied by an impoverishment on the part of the films, this is not a phenomenon exclusive to spectators: the creative fecundity and formal mastery of the golden years of cinema gave way to a period of standardization by the industry. The tactics used are as follows: a progressive increase in production costs; a rigid division between the various cinematographic crafts such as direction, art design, cinematography, sound and editing, rendering the dialogue between them difficult; and strict control of production standards in the areas of screenwriting, directing, casting and editing for the film to be in accordance to market demands. As a result, creativity is confused with schematic reproduction; and irreverence is confused by self-indulgent, axiomatic political discourse.
Private funding is entirely dependent on manipulative market dynamics that dictate cinema as a means of consumption, as alienation, as a product that exists only in order to distract us from boredom. We watch a movie like we eat a fast-food burger or a sugary dessert: to satisfy a craving for pleasure.
On the other hand, public funding is dependent on the creation of government funding institutions, the main source of income for films where the standards set by the state are met, and it has served the same function: a progressive impoverishment of the artistic apprehension of the world in order to fit the state’s discourse. This is most frequently the case in European arthouse cinema (2), fully servant to film festival tendencies where their rich audiences can indulge with these films’ gullible political discourse from a distance, frequently paternalistic and compliant to an essentially alienated and comfortable worldview that hides an insidious core. In other words, priorities became political and by no means artistic.
Cinema was developed simultaneously as an industry and as a utopia, but lately it has been treated simply as an ungrateful substrate of culture, which is a nightmare from which we are trying to wake up - just like History (3).
During a sequence inside a bus in his short film Songy Seans, Darezhan Omirbayev shows us contrasting shots of the city outside the window and the content that each person consumes on their cell phones: self-help, music, an interview between Fritz Lang and Godard, Instagram photos of a beautiful girl, political commentary on the advanced state of capitalism. There is a divide between the concrete matter of the world and the content that each person creates on the small screens they carry in their hands.
The film defends the idea that art must necessarily be on the back foot of reality, and the artist's hard choice is to accept this self-righteous suicide. The brief exchange of glances in the last scene of the film between the old and young filmgoers is so bitter precisely because there is no reconciliation with reality. Everyone remains closed in on themselves, secretly moving in the same direction, but fundamentally alone, without reconciliation with the world.
The idea of collectivity in today's cinephilia practically doesn't exist. The cinephilia of the new century is necessarily fragmentary, individual. It is just the same with filmmakers, working within a cinematic landscape that is living its own death, incarnating a progressive individualism that mirrors the world where it evolves.
The death of cinema is far from a new concept - Wim Wenders, for instance, made an entire career out of the idea that the dissolution of the studio system and the advent of new cinemas in the 60s and 70s caused the death of cinema alongside the advent of television. His film Im Lauf der Zeit seems to be the best one to express this train of thought, and his sedated output in the last few decades seems to further prove his point with a bitter irony, reflected in the films’ simultaneously prolix and perfunctory decrepitude. French critic Louis Skorecki, in his famous article Contre la nouvelle cinéphilie, argues that the death of cinema has occurred for three main reasons: the advent of television, a conformism between the film market and an amorphous idea of auteur cinema (4), and the death of the cinematic experience in front of a movie. Today, his article is as relevant as when it was written, with the difference that television is now the one breathing through a respiratory system with the advent of TikTok, Instagram, Youtube and streaming networks.
Watching a film isn’t quite the same thing as reading a book, but we should do so with the dedication, concentration and posture analogous to reading: one must immerse in the textures of a film, in its universe, stare in the eyes of its characters, absorb the distance between them, feel the intonation in which each sentence is spoken, plunge in the sounds, the music, be riveted by the camera movements and the editing cuts and dissolves. Often a gesture or a detail is worth more than a whole speech.”
What they forgot to tell us is that this wasn't the first time cinema died: it was in 1929, with the advent of sound. And there have been other deaths since, for example with the advent of digital, which worried Serge Daney(5): "As long as you are dealing with the audiovisual recording of the world, you are in an emission of light, your suffering is infinite. When we move on to video art, television and computer-generated images, nobody suffers. The fact of being in light belongs to the past. [...] I am convinced that the moment when light disappears, the moment it is no longer a pertinent tool of creation, the moment when it comes from somewhere other than the sun, we lose a part of our humanity. All kinds of hokum are then possible."
Cinema has died and been reborn several times, each time with new possibilities, even if they are not always treated with the best they have to offer. We must accept the death of cinema as the greatest paradigm of the image, death as a framework of images. It is an extreme act of faith to place death as a rupture and to project it simultaneously as a means of recovering all ruptures, of compensating for all losses. A way of dialectically including its own negation, by making death a rite of passage, a mediation towards the absence of all death.
Azevedo Gomes’ A Portuguesa, Godard’s Adieu au langage, Oliveira’s O Estranho Caso de Angélica, Barley’s Sleep Has Her House, Bressane’s Garoto, Brisseau’s La fille de nulle part: these are all films that found ways to renew the beauty of cinema at a time when much of what made this wonderful invention was already in disuse, forgotten or even impractical. Because finally, cinema is a feeling filtered through gaze, and as long as there are still things to feel, there will still remain possibilities to see.
In order to truly see a movie, one must believe in cinema. To have faith in a flow of images and the predicaments it carries in its colors, illusory associations, formal ideas. Just as in life, nothing is insignificant. Cinema is a medium of visual craftsmanship, a way of seeing that replaces our own to give us a world that corresponds to our desires (6). Films are poetic objects whose rules for understanding them are unique to each film and must be rediscovered by each viewer at each screening. Rules that can neither be described a priori nor a posteriori, that must be discovered as a revelation at each viewing.
A film is the transposition of a state of mind into a flow of images that is absorbed by the spectator through their body and soul, not just their eyes. Watching a film isn’t quite the same thing as reading a book, but we should do so with the dedication, concentration and posture analogous to reading: one must immerse in the textures of a film, in its universe, stare in the eyes of its characters, absorb the distance between them, feel the intonation in which each sentence is spoken, plunge in the sounds, the music, be riveted by the camera movements and the editing cuts and dissolves. Often a gesture or a detail is worth more than a whole speech.
Everyone must build their own cinephilia, and not blindly rely on their experience as a closed circuit incapable of dialectic. We must dialectize without hope of synthesis: internalize what is shown, always putting everything in check, the ideas of others and especially our own. Until the phenomenon can transcend discourse. And finally, cinema can end up becoming something like the final scene of Edward Yang's Mahjong, when in a capitalist chaos of colors, movement and anonymity, without any plausible causal link, two people can meet and, in an act of faith, fall in love.
Photography by Luiza Herdy
(1) Cinephilia is the term used to refer to a passionate interest in films, film theory, and film criticism. The term is a portmanteau of the words cinema and philia, one of the four ancient Greek words for love.
(2) Arthouse cinema is a term that refers to film productions that are typically of smaller scale and aimed at a niche market.
(3) “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” - Quote from Ulysses, book written by the Irish author James Joyce.
(4) An auteur in cinema is usually a film director whose filmmaking control is so unbounded and personal that they are considered to be the "author" of the film, thus manifesting their unique style or thematic focus, representing their personality through their work. The term originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s and derives from the critical approach of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, but it was finally coined by François Truffaut in his 1954 essay Une certaine tendance du cinéma français.
(5) French film critic who was a major figure of Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1970s.
(6) “Cinema is a gaze that replaces our own to give us a world in line with our desires” is a quote from Michel Mourlet’s 1959 article Sur un art ignoré, written for Cahiers du Cinéma.
Diogo Serafim is a Brazilian film critic and writer based in Paris, France.
Luiza Herdy is a photographer and producer based in São Paulo.