[kino] NYTimes.com Article: What Is a Foreign Movie Now?

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Pattern formation outside of equilibrim in in contemporary foreign movies, or The Non-equilibrium thermodynamics of the "modernist" cinema according to A.O. Scott

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What Is a Foreign Movie Now?

November 14, 2004
 By A. O. SCOTT 



 

One night during the Toronto film festival earlier this
fall, I slippedinto a buzzing multiplex theater decked out
with all the amenities of 21st-century moviegoing --
stadium seating, molded plastic cup holders, digital
surround sound, decent concession-stand cappuccino. I was
there, along with a gratifyingly large number of curious
and enthusiastic Canadians, not to catch an early glimpse
of possible Oscar contenders but to see a new movie from
China called "The World," directed by Jia Zhangke. I'd seen
Jia's two previous films, "Platform" and "Unknown
Pleasures" -- films that have won him a devoted following
among critics and festivalgoers. 

But his name is unlikely to be widely recognized either in
the United States, where his films have received only
brief, limited releases, or in his own country, where he
has, at least until "The World," worked independently of
the official state production system, a decision that has
kept his films out of most Chinese cinemas. 

Jia is the kind of director who tells small stories with
big implications, examining the lives of individuals
(usually sullen young women and the sullen young men who
tolerate their company) in a way that suggests large,
invisible forces pushing them through their passive,
melancholy lives. "Platform" (2000), for example, is about
a troupe of performers in a provincial Chinese city who
start out, just after the Cultural Revolution, as the
Peasant Culture Group From Fenyang and evolve, by the end
of the 1980's, into something called the All-Star Rock and
Breakdance Electronic Band, a mutation that captures, with
a deadpan precision at once mocking and tender, China's
awkward post-Maoist embrace of Western-style popular
culture. 

In "The World," which is set in present-day Beijing, that
embrace, long since consummated, has taken on the weary
familiarity of a long, loveless marriage. The film's title,
provocative in its ambition, is at once literal and layered
with metaphor. The young lovers, like the consumer goods
they covet and flaunt, are products of globalization, and
also of China's transformation into a largely urban,
fitfully capitalist and uneasily cosmopolitan society.
Without lifting his eyes from their modest, hectic daily
lives and inchoate aspirations, Jia embeds these elements
of experience in a vast cosmos of similar stories. Tao and
her sometime boyfriend, Taisheng, the film's ordinary and
unheroic central couple, are stubbornly particular and, at
the same time, implicitly universal. They are the world. 

They are also, more mundanely, the workers of the World,
which is the name of a theme park in Beijing whose main
attractions are scaled-down replicas of foreign tourist
attractions -- the Arc de Triomphe, the Taj Mahal, the twin
towers of the World Trade Center. ("Ours are still
standing," one character boasts, in a perverse expression
of national pride.) Taisheng is a security guard, while Tao
is a dancer, shuffling in and out of various garish
pseudo-traditional costumes for tacky song-and-dance
routines. To an American viewer, the World, with its
monorails and loudspeakers, is like a looking-glass version
of one of our homegrown theme parks, and like those places
it is at once a free-floating, featureless abstraction of
what it represents and the peculiar artifact of a
particular cultural situation. If "The World" is partly
about the loss of a rooted, traditional identity based on
kinship and place, it is also about the stubborn
persistence of place in the age of telecommunications and
transglobal travel. Though Tao spends her days dashing
between simulacra of Paris, London and New York, neither
she nor anyone she knows has ever ridden on an airplane or
visited a foreign land. When she meets Anna, a Russian
woman who briefly comes to work at the park, Tao expresses
envy for her new friend's freedom to travel, oblivious to
the fact that her globe-trotting is part of a grim
international traffic in coerced labor. Not that Anna can
understand a word Tao says. Since their relationship is one
of the few in this bleak landscape that shows genuine
warmth and fellow feeling, their mutual incomprehension is
another of Jia's double-edged worldly metaphors. We can
appreciate each other even -- or perhaps especially -- when
neither one of us has the faintest idea what the other is
talking about. 

That, at any rate, might describe my own response to Jia
Zhangke (whom I know only through his movies) -- a mixture
of intuitive understanding and obdurate bafflement. 

To me, his world, in its various meanings and dimensions,
is at once immediately recognizable and emphatically
strange. This paradox is part of the structure of human
experience, of course -- other people are necessarily both
familiar and mysterious to us -- but in its modern
incarnation, it is one that film as a medium seems uniquely
empowered to illuminate. Because the camera is a surrogate
eye, what it captures is immediately comprehensible, even
if it is nothing we have seen before. Filmed images do not
require translation; we know what we see. Narratives, of
course, are another story; even when they seem to be
transparent, they come encrusted with local meanings,
idioms and references, some of which will inevitably be
lost as they move from one audience to another. 

Movies, in other words, may be universal, but they are
universal in radically distinct ways. Some of them we
regard as foreign, a word I use with some trepidation.
Though my purpose here is to wave the flag for movies from
around the world, it is a banner whose slogans make me
cringe a little. The phrase "foreign film" is, after all,
freighted with connotations of preciousness and snobbery,
and too often accompanied by dismissive modifiers like
"difficult," "obscure" and "depressing" (all of which I
happen to regard as virtues, but never mind). Our own
commercial cinema is increasingly devoted to dispensing
accessibility, comfort and familiarity -- which can also be
virtues. It is not necessary to rank, or to choose. As Atom
Egoyan and Ian Balfour point out in their introduction to a
new collection of essays and interviews called "Subtitles,"
"Every film is a foreign film, foreign to some audience
somewhere." 

In any case, I am most concerned with American audiences,
and in particular with the parochialism that results from
living in a country with a film industry so powerful and
productive, so frank and cheerful in its imperial
ambitions, that it threatens to overshadow everything else.
It is not just the setting and content of a movie like "The
World" that may seem foreign but also its visual strategy
and storytelling methods, and above all its unsentimental
commitment to the depiction of ordinary life, to a kind of
realism that is in some ways more alien to us than the
reality it construes. Hollywood studios, as they try to
protect their dominant position in the global entertainment
market, are ever more heavily invested in fantasy, in
conjuring counterfeit worlds rather than engaging the one
that exists, and in the technological R &D required to
expand the horizons of novelty and sensation. And while we,
along with everybody else, often go to the movies to escape
from the pressures and difficulties of the actual world, we
also sometimes go to discover it. 

Whether it takes the form of armchair tourism or of a
harrowing, life-altering philosophical quest, such
discovery has formed part of the appeal of movies from
elsewhere -- a specialized appeal, to be sure, but also a
remarkably protean and durable one -- since the beginnings
of art-house film culture just after World War II. In the
late 1940's, foreign movies began to arrive on our shores
unencumbered by the restrictions of the Production Code,
promising a frankness and sophistication, especially in
sexual matters, far beyond what the studios were allowed. 

Even sober works of Italian Neorealism were sold with a
nudge and a wink, their print advertisements featuring
suggestive line drawings and breathless exclamation points:
Shocking! Daring! Uncensored! There was a degree of
bait-and-switch in these come-ons, which were partly a way
for the independent theater operators who booked the
pictures to fill up empty seats, but there was also some
inadvertent truth. Moviegoers who ventured to see "The
Bicycle Thief" or "La Terra Trema" would encounter shocking
glimpses of urban and rural poverty, the daring use of
nonprofessional actors and real-world locations and an
uncensored critique of European social conditions. 

Not that Italian Neorealism was the only outward-looking,
far-seeing lens that curious Americans could peer through.
And neither were all the vistas bleak and harsh. In any
case, the art involved in capturing those images was at
least as fascinating, as seductive and as new as the images
themselves. Indeed, it was foreign movies that taught
Americans to regard film as an art -- and, eventually, to
appreciate the art that had been flourishing in American
movies all along. It is hardly accidental that we still use
a French word -- "auteur" -- to evoke the creative
authority a director wields over his work. The film culture
that emerged in the shabby art houses and cinema clubs
where dubbed and subtitled prints of exotic movies were
shown was organized not around the worship of stars, but
around the connoisseurship of filmmakers, who became the
objects of a sometimes fiercely partisan critical
discourse. Were you for Ozu or Kurosawa? Antonioni or
Fellini? Could you reconcile a taste for Bergman with an
enthusiasm for Godard? 

Why did these names have such resonance? What did these
auteurs give American movie buffs -- or cinephiles, if you
prefer -- that the Hollywood studios, for all their
inventiveness and eclecticisim, did not? What, in other
words, made the category of "foreign film" something more
than a convenient, catch-all phrase? Or, to echo Egoyan and
Balfour, what made these films foreign to this audience? I
think there are two answers, which suggest the existence of
two linked, occasionally antagonistic cinematic impulses,
neither of which has quite taken root in the United States.


On one side you find movies mainly concerned with the lives
of the rural peasantry or the urban proletariat, movies
that emphasize the social situations of their characters
and whose mode of representation is realist. On the other
are movies about middle class or bohemian city dwellers, or
wandering souls in evening dress with time on their hands
and no visible means of support. The emphasis is not on
social conditions but on psychological states and
existential moods, and the narrative and visual style, in
order to capture those moods, dispenses with realism in
favor of something more expressive and oblique. 

For argument's sake, we can call the first kind of
filmmaking humanist, the second modernist. Humanism's great
prewar exponent was Jean Renoir, whose example and personal
tutelage informed several Neorealists and also the Bengali
director Satyajit Ray. Ray's "Apu" trilogy, with its
meticulous attention to the details and rhythms of
traditional Indian life and its quiet but unstinting
concern with poverty and injustice, may well represent the
apotheosis of cinematic humanism. Informed by a mild,
melancholy form of Marxism, Ray's films are sad without
slipping into pessimism or depression. The director and the
audience, though not always the characters, are inoculated
from despair by faith in the incremental but ultimately
benevolent progress of history. This kind of filmmaking is
fundamentally concerned with dramatizing, through close
observation of individual lives, the process of historical
change. Its subjects are at once dauntingly abstract -- the
shift from agriculture to industry, the coming and going of
colonial powers, the advent and aftermath of wars and
revolutions -- and intimately concrete: a family, a child,
a village. 

In Europe, modernist cinema emerged in the wake of this
humanism, and partly in reaction to it. The economic
rejuvenation that followed the scarcity and anxiety of the
immediate postwar years and the emergence of a generation
of younger filmmakers with their own brand of restless
cosmopolitanism produced a creative ferment. From the
mid-50's to the mid-60s, American audiences witnessed the
rise of an extraordinary collection of world-class
filmmakers -- including Bergman, Kurosawa, the
critics-turned-auteurs of the French New Wave, new Italian
maestros like Antonioni, Fellini and Pasolini -- who
seemed, with each new film, to expand the formal and
expressive possibilities of the medium. Their predecessors'
emphasis on social realities could feel a little
restrictive when there were other possibilities -- sexual,
psychological and aesthetic -- to explore. Like modernist
literature, modernist cinema reveled in self-consciousness
and reflexivity. Each new film was not just a new window on
the world but also, at least potentially, a world of style,
sensibility and invention unto itself, with its own rules,
its own language, its own syntax. To see a movie like
"L'Avventura," say, with its oblique, highly charged
eroticism and its gorgeous vistas of alienation, was not to
bear witness or to experience empathy -- the ethical and
emotional bases of humanism -- but to immerse yourself in a
state of altered perception. 

Of course, not every foreign film fits neatly into the
humanist-modernist schema. Plenty of directors -- Fellini
and Visconti, for example -- moved easily from one to the
other, and many beloved foreign movies -- costume dramas,
action, crime and horror movies, star-heavy international
co-productions -- don't fit comfortably within either one.
But humanism and modernism together account for the
foreignness of foreign films, for the sense of strangeness
and discovery that kept both diehard cultists and idle
curiosity-seekers lining up at the art house doors through
the 70's, when VCR's began to shut the art houses down. 

The aftershocks of that golden moment continue to ripple
through the world of film appreciation, not least because a
number of the old masters, including Bergman and Godard,
are still around making movies. But like the period in
which it is embedded, and like the Hollywood new wave that
followed on its heels, that heady moment in the history of
world cinema -- the moment at which it became possible to
use a phrase like "world cinema" in conversation -- has
become encrusted with legend and nostalgia. Those who
witnessed it firsthand look with pity on those who came too
late and had to catch it all on DVD instead of at the New
Yorker or the Thalia. We can never know an equivalent
exhilaration of discovery, the frisson of seeing
"L'Avventura" or "Persona" for the first time and trembling
in awe and recognition. 

Except that we can, if only we will seek it out. The
modernist and humanist impulses are both alive and well,
flourishing and cross-pollinating on every continent and in
new, transnational formations. The world is, if anything,
much bigger than it was 40 years ago, even if the audience
has shrunk and dispersed. What happened to that audience --
Did it age? Did its attention migrate toward homegrown
"independent" cinema? Is it alive and well on the Internet
or in the burgeoning DVD culture? -- is a topic of endless
concern. But my point is that wherever the audience is, the
movies are out there, trickling across our borders in
numbers that only begin to suggest the volume and diversity
of global film production today. 

This may come as news, since the cinematic story that is
told again and again is one of Hollywood triumphalism, of a
blockbuster globalism dissolving all vestiges of the local,
the particular and the strange. 

The decline of state-subsidized film industries was
supposed to accelerate this trend, but predictions of a
cinematic Pax Americana have proved premature, to say the
least, since they have failed to take account of the
continued vitality of the world's largest popular movie
industry -- India's -- or the emergence (and resurgence) of
vibrant commercial moviemaking in countries like South
Korea, China and Mexico. While it is true that, on a given
Friday, most of the world's multiplexes will be playing
franchise products from American studios, it is not hard to
imagine a future in which an American suburban marquee will
boast a Chinese martial-arts picture, a Korean action
thriller, a Mexican cop drama and a French romantic comedy.


Among the harbingers of that future are the domestic
box-offices successes of movies like "Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon," "Amelie" and last summer's "Hero." Of
course, if you count remakes, homages and rip-offs --
retooled versions of Japanese pictures like "The Ring" and
"The Grudge," say, or even Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill"
movies -- then that future has long since arrived. What we
think of as Hollywood is already a hybrid of influences
from elsewhere to an extent not seen since the great wave
of emigre talent that was European fascism's inadvertent
gift to American culture. Anime, J-horror, Bollywood,
telenovelas, chopsocky -- whether or not you are familiar
with these terms, the visual languages they represent are
already part of the movie lexicon. 

But at the same time, just as a lingua franca of reciprocal
influences takes over the mass audience, the art-movie
traditions of humanism and modernism continue to thrive,
perhaps with greater urgency, and certainly in greater
variety, than ever before. The humanist belief in
dramatizing ordinary lives, in fashioning narratives that
follow the quotidian rhythms of childhood, work and
domesticity, has been the foundation of the extraordinary
renaissance in Iranian cinema in the past 15 years, but it
also shows remarkable tenacity in its European birthplace.
The flowering of Iranian cinema has produced at least two
stars of the festival circuit -- Abbas Kiarostami and
Mohsen Makhmalbaf -- but it has also opened Western eyes to
a remarkably eclectic national cinema characterized by
fierce social criticism and surprising sensual beauty. 

Iranian filmmakers have also provided some of the most
powerful examples of how to make art that is at once
formally innovative and ethically engaged -- movies that
alert audiences to the plight of women, the poor, ethnic
minorities and refugees without lecturing or preaching, and
without denying them worldly pleasures or aesthetic
challenges. Similarly, the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre
and Luc Dardenne ("Rosetta" and "La Promesse") and the
French director Laurent Cantet ("Time Out") have exposed
the sorrows and cruelties of the postindustrial economy,
bringing a strange, almost spiritual poignancy to
naturalistic studies of work, immigration and other
persistent social issues. 

Humanism, which is rooted both in human unhappiness and the
capacity for hope, is an impulse that is unlikely to fade
from screens, and indeed it has been showing up, adapted to
local problems and traditions, in places as far-flung as
South Africa, Brazil, China and Uzbekistan. The modernist
impulse has undergone a simultaneous resurgence, in Iran,
in Latin America and especially in the work of Asian
filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hou
Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Kim Ki Duk and Hong Sang Soo.
They have explored the drift and loneliness that
characterizes the lives of city dwellers, who navigate the
gleaming world of modern capitalism in a state of moody
perplexity. 

In the work of these filmmakers, the strains of modernism
and humanism have begun to mingle, as the boundaries
between individual melancholy and social misery become
harder and harder to trace. The cities they depict --
Seoul, Taipei, Beijing, Hanoi -- are at once teeming and
desolate, full of the noise of history, commerce and
tradition and at the same time governed by the silence of
the emotionally stunted. This impression can be gathered
from the fractured, sexually anarchic families in Tsai's
movies ("Rebels of the Neon God," "The River") and the
superficially more settled household of Yang's "Yi Yi."
Whatever held people together -- filial piety, cultural
identity, religious practice -- seems to have melted away,
and they drift toward one another like downcast atoms,
piecing their lives together out of stray bits of feeling. 

But are they really alone? A defining modern mood -- one
that is often evoked but hasn't adequately been named -- is
the anxious, melancholy feeling of being simultaneously
connected and adrift. In a recent essay in Salon, the film
critic Charles Taylor identified this condition -- "being
in a world where the only sense of home is to be found in a
state of constant flux" -- as a central motif in movies
ranging from "Lost in Translation" to the films of
cinephile cult figures like Tsai and Wong Kar-wai. Taylor
identifies an unstable blend of anxiety, curiosity and
longing as the emotional condition that links the solitary,
alienated heroes and heroines of the modern cinema of
loneliness, among whom Tao and Taisheng in "The World"
surely belong. There may be a measure of comfort in joining
the international fraternity of the lost -- at least for
audiences. The experience of dwelling in these movies is
replicated, and to some extent redeemed, by the experience
of watching them, of feeling estrangement and
disorientation not only vicariously through the characters
but also in relation to them as well. They encounter one
another, in strange, indifferent cities, by chance, and
their relations are at once affectless and charged with
latent emotion -- all of which is just how we encounter
them, alone in darkened rooms in the midst of our hectic
and decentered lives. 




A.O. Scott is a chief film critic of The Times.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14WORLD.html?ex=1101402543&ei=1&en=964ad2df62fa7eea


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