Christmas Pot-Pourri, Volume 13 #6

Hollywood's Poet Rides to the Rescue

In this year of the movies' one-hundredth-anniversary celebrations, three pretty big movie "things"--the films that dominated last May's Cannes Film Festival, Batman Forever (gulp) and John Ford--stand out for me as almost caricatural symbols of what movies can be, what they have been, what they are right now, and maybe where they are headed.

If Cannes can be taken as an indication of what quality international cinema is up to, the 1995 festival was anything but comforting. Le Monde of Paris summed it up dramatically: Cannes has inundated us with a plethora of images of a desperate, broken world. This was manifested at two cinematic levels.

There were the films that resonated to a terribly familiar beat, an intensification and magnification of what is obsessively served up everyhere by the media as the culturally relevant thing today. Toronto's Rude and Soul Survivor, Montreal's El Dorado, Spain's Historias del Kronos and the U.S.'s Kids all join into a veritable litany of alienation and desolation, with only slight variations on the hope/despair scale. That the sights and sounds are recognizable--"reality" or "media reality"?--lends tragic overtones to the phenomenon. Never was this more painful to experience than in France's La Haine (Hatred), a movie that followed up on its prize-winning Cannes showing with smash box-office success in Paris: all of young Paris, it seems, was dutifully lining up to share vicariously in the dark ritual. Remember once upon an innocent time when youth also stood for joy, celebration, the life force?

At a second cinematic level, more mature and accomplished and less derivative of TV and video clips, Cannes screens afforded little relief. The festival's official top winners, Emir Kusturica's Underground and Theo Angelopoulos's The Gaze of Ulysses, are both seriously flawed by esthetic self-indulgence and excess. Defeat and hopelessness pervade, as both films sing their Requiems to the Balkans--expressing, to be sure, Europe's richly deserved feeling of guilt and frustration over the Sarajevo tragedy.

Even Ken Loach, that extraordinary British director who never abandons the good fight for those in our society who are less well off, seems touched by the general loss of spirit. Loach's latest film, Land and Freedom, is still a thing of intelligence, beauty and love for humanity. But note the shift: this is Loach's first historical movie, an elegaic reminiscence on the romanticized icon of the international Left, the Spanish Civil War. One senses Loach's sadness at its failure and, by extension, at today's mostly disheartened and disorganized Leftist aspirations. The contemporary West, it would seem, simply does not have the energy and belief and love for fellow human beings that permit anything like positive action.

So much so that the one western director who broke out of this soul state, Britain's John Boorman, went to Asia to direct Rangoon. Despite the derivative commercialism that reduces Boorman's serious intent, Rangoon is still an exciting movie, a welcome rallying cry for justice and human rights, and a stirring tribute to Aung San Suu Kyi, the inspiring woman who has become the living symbol of opposition to Burma's totalitarian military regime. Turning to another "nonwestern" part of the world, Souleyman Cissé's marvellous Waati (Time), shot in South Africa, the Ivory Coast, Mali and Namibia, is a pan-African poem singing its song of hope in a new Africa in the midst of dramatic evolution. Here is a film breathing life, beauty, mystery and human aspiration, demonstrating that the cinema need not be constricted by the cultural limitations of the "First World."

Bang! Wham!! Swoosh!!! But surely there is something else in the West--some force that controls movie viewing all over the world. In 1995 this force was best symbolized by Batman Forever. "Hollywood," as we know so well, has more or less always controlled world movie distribution. And today the control is greater than ever, made more feasible by the explosion in new technology, total advertising immersion, multimedia financial control, sophisticated distribution techniques (illegal block booking and so on) and commercial spinoffs. Each nation struggles desperately merely to survive, even in its own home country, in the face of American competition.

The information superhighway, infonet, cyberspace, ancillary commodity selling--all of these and more create a new way of life. More than three quarters of U.S. movies' total revenues come from outside the movie theatres. The financial turnover is colossal, with the result that the carefully orchestrated megablockbuster phenomenon drives the whole industry. Even more spectacularly, the new technology takes over the screen as content. In key films that then set the production pattern, the superb talent of the creators is placed in the service of beating the viewer's mind into numbness.

With the now universal violent, no-pause rhythm, images hurled at the screen, overwhelming sound and nightmare sets, sensation becomes the be-all and the end-all, paralysing mind, judgement and discernment. There can be no belief in anything up there on the screen except the technology itself, the demonic energy, the power and domination. The danger is that freedom of the mind is seriously inhibited. Millions really have no choice: they are programmed into having to see Batman Whatever. And in the ensuing spiritual emptiness, the "content" of necessity becomes what maximum impact demands: violence. Death, extermination, chaos--that is what the imagination is fed. The only defence left is nervous laughter at the very excess, a postmodern shield that sees it all as one big sick joke.

That so much of world-dominating cinema (almost all of it from the U.S.) has come to this is perhaps not terribly surprising. Remember the Gulf War turned into a tribal glorification, a technogame worshipping power? Think of the "truth" content of commercials, those calculated bits compelling the consumer to buy. Experience the frenzy of acid rock, rap, video clips: sex and violence as power games. Poor Batman becomes the Bad Guy, symbolizing a situation that can be culturally disastrous.

But all is not lost. Fortunately, there is a Really Good Guy who can, or at least used to, ride to the rescue. In its lavish celebration of the international film centenary, Cannes chose John Ford to represent film history at its glorious best.

We are speaking here of a commercial moviemaker who worked in the old Hollywood Studio System that has been so severely criticized. Ford was a populist, of and for the "common people," a constant box office value and at the same time one of film history's great poets. He played the leading part in creating the Western genre, poeticized it, idealized it, and progressively became its major critic, the severe judge of his own role in developing a myth that has its dark side. He was a high school graduate of enormous cultural insight, subtle irony and sense of history, and at the same time a profound believer in an eternal human destiny--an artist always on the edge of laughter, and yet for whom history itself is both sublime and tragic.

Look at a typical Ford exterior and you see that reassuring horizontal line dividing heaven above from earth below, containing a world with values, guided by moral order, existence experienced as mysterious yet intelligible. Follow a Ford movie and you resonate to a benign rhythm, with highs and lows, moments of intense movement and action and moments of contemplative repose. Emotion and thought, experience and judgement--Ford's stage contained all the human passions, hopes and fears. His was a wisdom that judged all with love and understanding, seeing in his fallible and limited human protagonists the stuff of the eternal and the limitless. And all without pretention, a poet whose mind and heart could reach everyone in the audience, and who somehow incarnated the kind of yes to life and to art that has been a chief glory of our culture.

At Cannes, I managed to attend three Ford movies that had previously eluded me. Three Bad Men, Steamboat Round the Bend and The Sun Shines Bright surely are not numbered among Ford's many masterpieces. No matter, it was always the same phenomenon: the theatre was full, the audience mixed in background and age, from veteran film specialists to young people from other continents, and Ford had all of us enthralled. I was watching the audience almost as much as the movies, amazed as the old rascal made us love his world which we recognized as our world, taking us all the way from laughter to tears and back. And in sharp contrast to the surliness that was often part of the contemporary film showings, people left those theatres smiling, renewed by a vision that was at once so realistic and yet so idealized: look at the possiblities of life when it is attuned to those realities that, deep down, I like to think we all share.

I sense this universality of response in my students whenever I teach Ford, or, for that matter, any of the other great film masters. That may be the ultimate answer, I choose to think, to a film situation so much of which has gone pathological--the fashionable exploitation of pessimism, impotence and darkness and the obsessive cult of violence in a despiritualized universe. Give people real freedom, let them experience, in our cinema, the complexities, the different levels of existence, and the human spirit will cope, all the richer for it.

Marc Gervais SJ teaches film in the communications department at Concordia University in Montreal and is a contributing editor of Compass.