rethinking how we watch european film

At the mention of European cinema, most people think of the rich, masterful story-telling tradition that includes Bergman, Truffaut, Renoir, Visconti, Fassbinder and Godard. One may even flash forward to current European filmmakers like Lars Van Trier, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the Home Movies As Art crowd also known as Dogme 95. The perception is that European cinema equals not just art, but serious art. With masochistic reverence American intellectuals have for ages clung to the belief that European cinema must be ingested with the same humble awe that one would show knelling in an ancient cathedral to receive the Host. Even when confronted by the more playful or obscene elements of foreign film, the guilt-ridden American intellectual assures us that while it may at times seem strange or humorous or outright goofy, there is always some somber, important subtext that we’re failing to grasp. Hence, the endless parade of circus clowns that pass through Fellini means something infinitely more complex than clowns could ever mean here, the joyous scatological blasphemy of Luis Bunuel should never, ever be mistaken as anything less somber than important political commentary. This penitent’s reverence has defined (and limited) the present film theory offered in publications and universities.
The official party line is that European cinema is serious, important art exploring the political and social issues of our day, while American movies have never risen above the cheap sentimentality and special effects exhibitions. This is why, I suspect most ‘indie’ movies are so utterly dull and unwatchable-a generation of young filmmakers has been taught the superiority of European masterworks in contrast with the lowest of American pop culture. It is not uncommon to encounter film students intimate with “A Bout De Souffle (Breathless) and “Bande A Part (Band Of Outsiders)”, while wholly ignorant of the American film noir classics Godard was paying tribute to. Aside from the risk of creating filmmakers so discouraged by the unlikelihood of Americans making interesting, intelligent movies that they simply give up and make formulaic tripe for Hollywood (the Criterion release of Kurosawa’s 1958 “The Hidden Fortress” includes an introduction by George Lucas, where he identifies that film and the 1952 release “Ikiru” as the two movies that really fueled his drive to become a director), there’s something deeply dishonest about this take on European cinema, and the movies cherry-picked for American audiences.



There is another European cinema, one that is either ignored or dismissed by cinemaphiles, as being too ‘populist’ for serious consideration. I’m not suggesting that directors like Argento, Franco, Carbucci, Damiani or Leone should replace the existing canon of European cinema, but I do think their work deserves to be elevated out of the ghetto of ‘cult’. It’s easy to dismiss these directors because of the fact they seem to have sometimes released movies with an eye toward a quick cash-in (excluding Sergio Leone, who’s body of work is smaller than Orson Welles). Yes, Radley Metzger’s “Little Mother” (1971), a soft-core retelling of the Evita Peron legend, does seem a little hurried, but have you seen Fellini’s “Ginger And Fred”, or “The Clowns”? Certainly Jess Franco output sometimes reaches a Roger Corman-like level gimmickry, but is that so bad? Like Corman, Franco has an implicit understanding of what makes for enjoyable viewing, using the spaces between the audience gratifications for brief passages of inspired genius. And anyway, ask yourself, honestly, how many decades have passed since Jean-Luc Godard made a movie you actually thought was worthwhile? “Masculin Feminin” is undeniably a masterpiece, but what about “Hail Mary”, or “In Praise Of Love”?
There is, I suspect, an element to critical attitudes regarding European movies that they need to be difficult viewing; like the bitter taste of medicine, the uncomfortable suffering is an essential part of the healing experience. This attitude reflects something maybe a little disturbing about how we as Americans view high art. There is an implicit agreement between intellectuals and the rabble about how anything challenging, anything smacking of ‘culture’ needs to be dull and alienating to earn the title ‘art’. That even when confronted by an enjoyably goofy work of high art like “8 ½” or “Belle De Jour” we need to translate them with the drab language of importance and subtext. God forbid any discussion of the “I Am Curious” movies suggest that there is anything as base, as popular, as eroticism in the endless scenes of Lena Nyman naked or getting porked. This is the same lie they told us as children when they took us to the art museum; all those nude bodies of classical art certainly had nothing to do with sexuality or arousal-it was all about studying the human form, or examinations of light’s patterning. Only the dirty-minded sees a nude figure as naked.
Until we develop a new way of seeing, we will never have a new cinema. Until we smash the ghettoizing of genre-thought we will never have an honest canon of film, one that admits Sergio Leone’s “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” is a better spent three hours than Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard”. Until we stop romanticizing Europe as the sole generator of legitimate cinema, we will never understand the accomplishments (or possibilities) of our own. The great irony of all this is that while selection of widely released and critically analyzed European film skews toward the finest and most prestigious of their productions, we respond by only exporting only the most banal and embarrassing of American crap. What deep sense of self-loathing is expressed by the fact that we limit the world’s understanding of the American Voice to the formulaic bombast of “Titanic” and “Oceans 11”?