Lecture II-7: Formal Resistance: The Art Film
Lecture Structure:
1) Introduction: how alternatives to Hollywood employ form as resistance
2) Art Cinema in the context of modernism
3) Modernism: origins, aims and methods
4) Cinematic Modernism: why and when it emerges
5) The Art Cinema:
i) as a distinct mode of film practice
ii) narrative and stylistic traits
iii) how to explain the art cinema’s deviations from classical norms
Introduction
Providing alternatives to Hollywood involves formal resistance, not simply new
subject matter or novel attitudes.
The Art Cinema as an Example of Cinematic Modernism
The art cinema possesses its own distinct formal procedures which oppose
those of the classical cinema.
The context of modernism links the art cinema and other cinematic alternatives
to classicism, such as the avant-garde.
Art Cinema
vs.
--film-specific term relating
to a particular body of films
with their own conventions
Modernism
--general term describing broad tendencies
within art, typically of the early-mid C20th
Modernism
Historically, modernism represents a break with two 19th-century art
movements—Realism and Romanticism.
Modernism’s break with the past amounts to a crisis of faith in art’s truth value.
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Modernism questions art’s ability to capture a truth which may not exist; art
abandons its previous mimetic role (i.e. art no longer tries to faithfully
reproduce reality as a way of expressing its essential truth). Modernist art is
defined by a pervasive relativism.
Modernism’s increased formal difficulty challenges the comprehension and easy
appreciation of its beholder/viewer, often resulting in shock and disorientation.
Modernist art’s increased reflexivity (i.e. art about art itself) announces its
awareness of its own constructedness and a willingness to declare that.
A second way to understand modernism: new ways of seeing as a response to
the changed terms of existence embodied in modernity (i.e. modernism as a ‘new
realism’).
Cinematic Modernism
The aims & means of modernist cinema resemble those of modernist art:
--formal complexity
--rejection of pre-existing conventions
--extreme self-consciousness and stylization
--the elevated role of the artist
The Art Cinema
i)
The Art Cinema as a Distinct Mode of Film Practice
art cinema
--narrative
vs.
avant-garde
--often non-narrative
--conforms to conventional running --no set running time
times
--conventional distribution and
--alternative distribution and exhibition
exhibition
--limited experimentation
--unbounded experimentation
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Art films, as a distinct mode of film practice,
1) possess a distinct historical existence
2) employ a distinct set of formal conventions
3) invite a distinct set of viewing procedures
ii)
The Art Cinema: Formal Features
Art films deviate from classical narrative construction by breaking down
its tight causal chain.
The apparently random structure of the art film plot translates the disconnected
nature of existence into a narrative form.
Narrative structure in art films is indebted to a sense of experiential realism,
while characterisation derives from a sense of subjective/expressive realism.
Art film characters demonstrate greater psychological depth, revealed through
dreams, flashbacks, etc.
Art films deviate from the self-effacing style of classicism by foregrounding style to
a much greater degree.
iii) What Explains the Art Cinema’s Deviations from Classicism?
How to account for art cinema’s deviations from classical norms? Either by
recourse to: 1) realism OR 2) authorial expressivity
The “realism” of the art cinema differs from classicism’s realism (i.e. versimilitude)
or the realist cinema of social observation (e.g. Italian neorealism).
The art cinema auteur does not remain submerged within the text (like the
classical auteur); he is deliberately foregrounded. We come to know the art film
through an understanding of the art film auteur’s (proudly stated) aims.
Art cinema’s auteur needs to be read as an obtrusive narrator; we understand
the film’s over narration/style as the marks of the self-expressive art film director.
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Classicism’s ‘what next’ gives way to art cinema’s ‘why and how’, which is to say
the emphasis shifts from story (narrative content) to plot (narrative arrangement).
Art cinema’s ambiguity is the result of an artistic strategy, not simply a reflection
of reality.
Art films oppose classical norms and rely on notions of realism and authorial
expressivity to do so. The resultant gaps between these two explanations produce
a textual ambiguity.
Art cinema’s formal difficulty and the centrality of its self-consciously expressive
author link art cinema to modernism.