Bordwell-the-Art-Cinema-as-a-Mode-of-Film-Practice
Identifying a mode of production/consumption does not exhaustively characterize the art cinema, since the cinema also consists of formal traits and viewing conventions. To say this, however, is to invite the criticism that the creators of such film are too inherently different to be lumped together. Yet I shall try to show that whereas stylistic devices and thematic motifs may differ from director to director, the overall functions of style and theme remain remarkably constant in the art cinema as a whole. The narrative and stylistic principles of the films constitute a logically coherent mode of cinematic discourse.
The art cinema is classical in its reliance upon psychological causation; characters and their effects on one another remain central. But whereas the characters of the classical narrative have clear-cut traits and objectives, the characters of the art cinema lack defined desires and goals. Characters may act for inconsistent reasons (Marcello in La Dolce Vita, 1960) or may question themselves about their goals (Borg in Wild Strawberries and the Knight in The Seventh Seal). Choices are vague or nonexistent. Hence a certain drifting episodic quality to the art film’s narrative. Characters may wander out and never reappear; events may lead to nothing. The Hollywood protagonist speeds directly toward the target; lacking a goal, the art-film character slides passively from one situation to another.
How does the author come forward in the film? Recent work in Screen has shown how narrational marks can betray the authorial code in the classical text, chiefly through gaps in motivation.7 In the art-cinema text, the authorial code manifests itself as recurrent violations of the classical norm. Deviations from the classical canon—an unusual angle, a stressed bit of cutting, a prohibited camera movement, an unrealistic shift in lighting or setting—in short, any breakdown of the motivation of cinematic space and time by cause-effect logic—can be read as “authorial commentary.” The credits for the film, as in Persona or Blow-Up, can announce the power of the author to control what we see. Across the entire film, we must recognize and engage with the shaping narrative intelligence. For example, in what Norman Holland calls the “puzzling film,”8 the art cinema foregrounds the narrational act by posing enigmas. In the classic detective tale, however, the puzzle is one of story: who did it? How? Why? In the art cinema, the puzzle is one of plot: who is telling this story? How is this story being told? Why is this story being told this way? Another example of such marking of narration is the device of the flashforward—the plot’s representation of a future story action. The flashforward is unthinkable in the classical narrative cinema, which seeks to retard the ending and efface the mode of narration. But in the art cinema, the flashforward functions perfectly to stress authorial presence: we must notice how the narrator teases us with knowledge that no character can have. Far from being isolated or idiosyncratic, such instances typify the tendency of the art film to throw its weight onto plot, not story; we play a game with the narrator.
The art cinema seeks to solve the problem in a sophisticated way: by the device of ambiguity. The art film is nonclassical in that it foregrounds deviations from the classical norm—there are certain gaps and problems. But these very deviations are placed, resituated as realism (in life things happen this way) or authorial commentary (the ambiguity is symbolic). Thus the art film solicits a particular reading procedure: whenever confronted with a problem in causation, temporality, or spatiality, we first seek realistic motivation. (Is a character’s mental state causing the uncertainty? Is life just leaving loose ends?) If we’re thwarted, we next seek authorial motivation. (What is being “said” here? What significance justifies the violation of the norm?) Ideally, the film hesitates, suggesting character subjectivity, life’s untidiness, and author’s vision. Whatever is excessive in one category must belong to another. Uncertainties persist but are understood as such, as obvious uncertainties, so to speak. Put crudely, the slogan of art cinema might be “When in doubt, read for maximum ambiguity.”
If the organizational scheme of the art film creates the occasion for maximizing ambiguity, how to conclude the film? The solution is the open-ended narrative. Given the film’s episodic structure and the minimization of character goals, the story will often lack a clear-cut resolution. Not only is Anna never found, but the ending of L’Avventura refuses to specify the fate of the couple. At the close of Les 400 coups (1959), the freeze frame becomes the very figure of narrative irresolution, as does the car halted before the two roads at the end of Knife in the Water. At its limit, the art cinema creates an 8 1/2 or a Persona, a film which, lacking a causally adequate ending, seems to conclude several distinct times. A banal remark of the 1960s, that such films make you leave the theater thinking, is not far from the mark: the ambiguity, the play of thematic interpretation, must not be halted at the film’s close. Furthermore, the pensive ending acknowledges the author as a peculiarly humble intelligence; she or he knows that life is more complex than art can ever be, and the only way to respect this complexity is to leave causes dangling, questions unanswered. With the open and arbitrary ending, the art film reasserts that ambiguity is the dominant principle of intelligibility, that we are to watch less for the tale than the telling, that life lacks the neatness of art and this art knows it.
Not that the period proved unproductive elsewhere. Russia and Eastern Europe contributed to the tradition of philosophically weighty works with Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) and Nostalghia (1983) and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s coproductions, notably the Three Colors trilogy (1993-1994). Aleksandr Sokurov created mournful, quasi-mystical works (The Second Circle, 1990; Whispering Pages, 1993) that paralleled the elegiac music pouring out of late Soviet and post-Soviet composers like Artymov and Kancheli. In Hungary, Bela Tarr (Satanstango, 1994) and Gyorgy Feher (Passion, 1998) created harsh, palpably grimy tales of rural life. France continued to support Philippe Garrel, Claire Denis, and others of ambitious bent, whereas Belgium sustained the regional realism of the Dardennes brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc. Denmark provided Europe’s newest Cinema of Quality, with well-carpentered scripts, thoughtful themes, and versatile actors, as well as, thanks to the Dogme 95 impulse, some films pushing against the ethos of professionalism
Suspending our awareness of the protagonist’s goals forces us to focus on minutiae of the story world.