The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Why Arthouse Movies Suck

Like it or not, there is still a distinction between arthouse and mainstream cinema. The war was perhaps won in the summer of 1977 with the release of Star Wars, and whatever vestiges of resistance were slowly co-opted through the Indiewood 90’s and the creation of the salon mini-studios like Fox Searchlight, but the rhetoric is still there, even if the guns have been put down. Notions of ‘real’ movies still get bandied about, the idea of ‘too good to be popular’ is often behind a lot of critiques, and ‘selling out’ as a phrase still has cultural weight, as do words like ‘serious’ and ‘prestige’. There is still a thing as the concept of an ‘arthouse’ movie, and the term is often conflated with the word ‘good’. Well balls to that.

Before things get to iconoclastically contrarian, of course these are generalisations, of course a lot of mainstream movies are barely lowest common denominator product, and of course a lot of the greatest movies ever made are ‘arthouse’. I’m here to have a go at certain concepts that crop up from this, often purely political, distinction between arthouse and mainstream. The main one I’ll be tackling here is the fetishisation of obscurity.

When you are a kid, picking your nose in school, you are given examples of ‘great literature’ and, I’d wager, it’s all pretty boring and difficult to understand. Most (good) teachers will admit that most teenagers are not going to get the subtleties of Shakespeare, even when they can be bothered to parse the language. Romeo and Juliet maybe, but the old man ruminations of Lear or The Tempest? Come on. Kids are exposed to this adult literature so that they are at least exposed to the possibility of that richness, so when they encounter it as an adult they’ll have a better grounding for appreciating it fully. If they are exposed to that level of depth, even if they don’t understand it, they will at least know it’s possible and, hopefully, have a desire to seek it out in the culture they consume when they have had enough life-experiences to get it. If they grow up eating only McDonalds, how will they know why a perfectly cooked steak is so good?

'Eat your greens!', says your mother. You know that idea that if it tastes bad, it must be healthy? I love Broccoli now.

Anyway, this idea of ‘what is good is difficult’ comes to us early. The idea that quality is defined by a work containing things we don’t understand is an inherently immature one. Yet look at the lyrics of a thousand Dylan wannabes. Look at the drivel that came out of Jim Morrison’s ‘muse’. Teenagers will spend hours looking for the deep meanings in it as they are still under the belief that, if it is obscure, it must be deep. He was on drugs, kids, and a twat.

But these are just a child's mistakes, surely. Maybe the first film/book/album by a posing teenager will be vague and obfuscationary just because that’s what they think ‘good’ is, but adults wouldn’t do that, right?

There was a contemporary dance conference attended by a friend of mine where a piece of work was criticised for not being obscure enough. In the piece, a grid was on the floor and, as the dancer moved over the squares, they would be lit up and the order in which they were lit revealed a poem. It was too obvious, said the luminaries. There should be a couple more levels of abstraction before the piece could be really good, as if a work of art were a logic puzzle or crossword clue.

And here is the break from any sense. It is not that the increased abstraction would reveal nuances of the meaning of the piece – let’s say if someone always gets angry when talking about authority it reveals a psychological block about his dad, which is better than someone saying, on the nose 'I have issues with my dad' – no, it was just an arbitrary rule that equated opaqueness with quality.

So – forced symbolism, empty surrealism, arbitrary non-linearity, dense, random, referentiality. It happens all the time.

Complicated things are difficult to understand, but that doesn’t mean that the difficult to understand is complicated. Sometimes it very simply doesn’t make sense. And if you have an artist functioning under that second, false premise, they will look at something they are working on and think ‘Let's throw some wierd shit in there. I don't know why, but it'll make it seem more 'arty'.'

Every creative person I’ve ever spoken to has admitted to this activity. The good ones admit it a little shame-facedly, thinking it a mistake of youth.

This is all very negative so far. What then, would I use as a definition of ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’? I’ll step up. here goes:

All creative work is there to communicate with its audience. Entertainment is there to tell the audience what it already knows. Art is there to tell them something they don’t. It is the artist’s responsibility, therefore, to have something to say and to say it as clearly as is possible.

Generalisations are great, aren’t they? But then all definitions should be regarded as ‘rules of thumb’ and judged on how useful they are rather than how ‘true’ they are.

‘Mainstream’ movies can be art and ‘arthouse’ movies can just be product, tailored to appeal to the prejudices of arthouse film goers. The accepted distinctions are unhelpful and inaccurate, so reacting against them (i.e. ‘Fuck Hollywood!’) will only lead to defining yourself as the opposite of a phantom – an enemy that doesn’t quite exist.

Ingmar Bergman’s films, for example, are commendably clear headed. They know what they want to express and they do so as straightforwardly and efficiently as possible – it’s just that he wanted to express some fairly abstract, usually metaphysical, ideas.

There’s an argument to be had whether his overly rational films are truly suited to the medium. Reason functions outside of time, being purely abstract, and so best suited to artworks that can be appreciated outside of time, like paintings or, perhaps, books. A medium so wed to the unstoppable passing of moments is more suited to experiential subjects, and the hurtling trajectories of emotions, than the stiff formulations of intellectual ideas. But hell, at least it’s an argument. A genuine discussion. It is not a question of ‘what the fuck was that all about?’

Nicholas Roeg, I feel, despite being awesome in many ways, fannied about with opaque symbolism a little too much. That recent French western, Blueberry: what the fuck was that about? Anime and, yes, The Matrix sequels. Coppola, whose Apocalypse Now (his ‘Hollywood Art Film’) is desperately opaque at times, I feel, doesn’t really fall in to this trap as it’s fairly obvious he was desperately trying to communicate with the audience at all times. It’s just that he was trying to say so many things at once, on such a huge canvas (and the sets Marlon Brando was on, lol), that he got lost.

Akira Kurosawa, famously, was always very specific on set. He spoke with his crew on of practicalities. He never used vague terms like ‘I want it more intense! More, you know, like drinking water with a hangover! Kind of!’ He knew exactly what and how he wanted to communicate.

Yet I had ‘Fuck Hollywood!’ thrown at me just this week at work. Blowhards, ‘artists’ and academic received wisdom still contain these useless distinctions. If debates over the most important things in the world can be de-railed by partisan ‘us or them’ line-drawing, leading us down deadly, stupid cul-de-sacs, it can happen in art too.

It is about communication in the end, I’ll argue, and if you believe part of your job is not to be as clear as possible about what you are trying to express, or that if you just throw some vaguely ‘arty’ stuff together it will kind of say what you want it to, whatever that is, then fuck you – stay in film school. The world does not need you.