Art Review - February Issue - (Page 92)

Warning : session_start : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : session_start : Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 FIL M AND VIDEO FILMS ARE PRIMARILY REVIEWED LIKE NOVELS, NOT LIKE PIECES OF VISUAL ART of distribution and exhibition. “Celluloid cinema is essentially dead, no self-respecting filmmaker really films on celluloid anymore,” he told a BBC interviewer in 2003, as the first installment of his multilayered multimedia digital project The Tulse Luper Suitcases made its debut. Forty years on from Six Figures Getting Sick, Lynch recently came to the same conclusion. Launching his new digital feature Inland Empire 2006 in Venice, Lynch echoed Greenaway who once cited Lynch’s Blue Velvet as the only worthwhile film of the past 40 years : “For me, film is completely dead.” Lynch’s declaration may depress celluloid purists, but format probably isn’t the point. The extent to which cinema challenges itself, creates space for an alternative discourse of its own – the issue of what, finally, gains access to those darkened rooms and benefits from being screened in them – is perhaps the more pressing concern. The explosion in independently financed and distributed cinema – exemplified by the rise of the Sundance Film Festival as a commercial marketplace, the aforementioned expansion of major studios into specialist distribution and the presence of films such as Brokeback Mountain, Crash and Capote on the 2006 Oscar shortlist – has been viewed by many as an exciting development in terms of the breadth and quality of product on o er. Yet those ‘independent’ films now occupying precious time slots in arthouse cinemas are unlikely to be much comfort to Greenaway. Conventional narrative dominates, while the primacy of the box o ce and the might of the star system have ensured that film festivals are regarded from the outside as locations for deal-brokering and celebrity appearances. Much alternative moving-image work – from music video to obscure cult film and artists’ work – has been relocated to museum and gallery spaces. Film theory and film criticism fixate upon narrative and theme; films are primarily reviewed like novels, not like pieces of visual art. In a comment-driven culture, boldly experimental filmwork su ers; ‘pretentiousness’ is viewed with arch suspicion. A flawed, wayward, idiosyncratic film is liable to get booed at Cannes ask Gaspar Noé, whose flamboyantly violent Irréversible was the Croisette scandal of 2002; or Vincent Gallo, whose drifty, indulgent The Brown Bunny was rated as the worst-ever Cannes competition entry in 2003 . The limited engagement of current ‘art’ film with the secret world of the imagination might be exemplified by Steven Shainberg’s film Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus 2006 . Arbus is played by Nicole Kidman; the demons that drove her to photograph society’s rejects are personified as cuddly fairytale freaks, who draw her out of her rarefied middle-class world and into a cosy acceptance of the peculiar. Arbus’s psyche becomes mere fodder p ARTREVIEW for a straightforward beauty-and-the-beast fable, and her photographs are neat manifestations of her oh-so-human need to belong. Psychological reading is easy here; the mystery of personality is solved, not illuminated. The inexplicability that Godard cited, when he characterised cinema as ‘a saturation of magnificent signs bathed in the light of their absence of explanation’, is resisted. Where, then, are the magnificent signs in the darkened rooms? Film festivals – including the Edinburgh Film Festival, which I programme – tend to bracket o ‘experimental’ work into separate sections which mingle filmwork and video art, gallery-commissioned and cinema-specific pieces. Edinburgh’s experimental section is called Black Box, which is a play upon spaces – black box as opposed to white cube, darkened cinema in opposition to white-walled gallery – but which also calls up the use of the term black box in physics, to indicate that which cannot or need not be explained: if part of an equation is too complex, and full clarification of it not required, it’s ‘black boxed’. Suppliers of cinema to the masses, meanwhile, have broad definitions of what constitutes ‘experimental’. Click on Arthouse in Amazon.com’s DVD section, and you’ll be o ered such titles as Superman II 1980 , Love Actually 2003 , Ali G Indahouse 2002 and The Muppet Movie 1979 . As film education broadens, via DVD and the Internet, the public hunger for the margins of the art is arguably more avid than ever before. Yet the drive for profits and the fear of elitism or obscurity is also pushing film artists either out of the cinema market altogether, or into forcibly conventional modes of expression. To deploy only examples from the UK, Greenaway is at odds with the whole form; Terence Davies has sunk into silence; John Maybury has shifted decisively towards mainstream projects; Lynne Ramsay, once feted as an inheritor of the finest in British art cinema, has been quiet a long time. Meanwhile, in strong and highly praised recent British features like Red Road, London to Brighton and This Is England all 2006 , one senses a nervous need to quench any ambiguity in the service of mainstream palatability. A pat on the back from an informed ‘arty’ elite is a booby prize; a wide, mainstream audience is the Holy Grail. Perhaps the most positive analogy is with artistic patronage: the film industry provides artists with a space to express themselves; the artists, accordingly, disguise their artworks as safe mainstream fodder, in which more radical meanings can be concealed. But it may just be that the capacity of that mainstream audience to accept more forthright challenges to their comfort is being underestimated, and that we’re ‘black boxing’ art cinema more than we should. 90-92 Special Focus AR Feb07.i92 92 5/1/07 00:06:00  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0 http://Amazon.com?s

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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