Day for Night Magazine

Post-New Wave Blues

by Jeff Deutchman

Serious [films]…are moving into the modernist predicament in which an art has lost its natural relation to its history, in which an artist… is devoted to making an object that will bear the same weight of experience that such objects have always borne which constitute the history of his art…. When in such a state an art explores its medium, it is exploring the conditions of its existence; it is asking exactly whether, and under what conditions, it can survive. -Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (1971)

Surrealism, expressionism, impressionism, neo-realism: each was important to the movie-universe only insofar as they corresponded with a world of ideas outside the cinema. These movements existed across art forms, reflecting the dominant philosophies of their day or, in certain cases, catching up with philosophies of yesterday. Pre-New Wave Cinema—especially the avant-garde, but also Classic Hollywood Cinema, which, I think, can be considered a movement in its own right—participated in a cultural dialogue. One of the highest achievements of silent cinema, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, was a collaboration between a filmmaker and a visual artist that suggested new cinematic techniques to correlate with the surrealist movement in the arts, a movement that revolutionized artistic form, as well as the ways we view the world.

New Wave and Post-Modernism

New Wave Cinema might be the last trend to sustain such a correlation with the extra-film world. Highly personal, self-conscious, and often very political, the films that were released in France from 1959 on, and everywhere else from 1964 on, reflected the general post-war artistic resistance to anything that made a claim to objectivity or “illusionism” (André Bazin’s term for the Hollywood tendency to create the illusion of reality). In this way, New Wave cinema was influenced by postmodernism, which many have described as a response to the atrocities of World War II.

After World War II and the Holocaust, artists questioned how these atrocities could have occurred, and many, believe it or not, blamed themselves. Their conclusion was that people had been reading and writing incorrectly. As a result, the ever-perplexing “postmodern” became dominant, which, for my purposes, I will define as the increasing use of “I” as opposed to “one” or “we.” In other words, works of art were produced from a distinctive and personal point of view: that of the artist or, in the case of films, of the auteur. To the modern reader, this might seem self-evident. After all, what started as a complex and controversial prism through which to view movies has spiraled out of control into the generally accepted mode of film criticism, and even film viewership. The average multiplex patron knows to wait for the director’s name at the end of the film. However, before the 1950s, Hollywood was a more complex place in many respects. Though film historians now claim to see patterns in the oeuvres of Howard Hawks and George Cukor, the fact remains that films were produced by, and received as being by, a host of a different contributors (e.g., the writer, the producer, the studio-head, the actors, the cinematographer, the editor, etc.). Film continues to be the most collaborative art form, but it is only recently that people have tended to ignore this fact.

Another facet of postmodernism was the rise of irony, which would allow artists to say things without saying things, or in other words, to always maintain a veil of uncertainty as to what exactly they did mean. With such candid artistic subjectivity, there could be no interpretations that involved the extermination of whole peoples because now, everything was clearly biased, clearly flawed and refutable.

Subjectivity and self-reflexivity found a way into New Wave cinema through a variety of different aesthetic techniques. The open-ended freeze-frame at the end of The 400 Blows, the jarring jump-cuts in Breathless, the academic juxtaposition of an interracial couple having sex and documentary footage of the bombing of Hiroshima in Hiroshima, mon amour, the purposeless narration in Band of Outsiders, and the imposing use of music in Week End are all famous examples of how New Wave filmmakers made their audiences painfully aware of the process of viewing films itself. Each filmmaker would also develop his or her own distinctive subject matter—Chabrol’s domestic satire, Truffaut’s fascination with children, Godard’s girls and guns—so that audiences would be aware of exactly who was speaking to them when they went to the movies.

Contemporary Cinema

What has happened in cinema since the New Wave? Not very much. There was the Independent Film movement, but that was essentially an importation of European auteur theory, an excuse for American filmmakers to demand final cut. Indie film’s most significant contribution was its addition of new ethnicities, genders, and sexualities to the movies, thus extending the subjective points-of-view that New Wave cinema has to offer.

Dogma ’95 was self-proclaimed the only completely legitimate movement in recent decades. But Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s dogmatic principles seem to be tied only into their own arbitrary iconoclasm, perhaps mixed with a traditional attraction toward artistic authenticity and realism.

Most of the films that are given attention and praise by critics and cinephiles—whether the films come from America, Spain, or Taiwan—are essentially New Wave. They are made by auteurs (most often written and directed by the same person), intended to express something personal about themselves. They often make reference to other movies, or to the movie itself, in an attempt to be about filmmaking, or the act of watching, or exactly which and how many movies the filmmaker has seen before making his own film. This is a trend in cinema that might best be embodied by Bernardo Bertolucci, who started his career as Godard’s assistant and is still making movies that frequently reference Godard.

Order Out Of Chaos

Postmodernism, the philosophy that New Wave Cinema can be said to reflect most directly, has become somewhat of a nuisance to contemporary philosophers and academics. Though perhaps originally intended to introduce greater tolerance of multiple perspectives, postmodernism has also served as a chaotic justifier of any and all perspectives: if all is relative, how can a civilization impose rules? As a result, the deconstructionists and relativists who inserted “post” into our culture’s dictum have all but destroyed rational thought.

Though there has been no sweeping cultural response to postmodernism as of yet, the backlash has been underway as philosophers cautiously attempt to put together the pieces of the pre-post emphasis on reason and order. According to philosopher Hilary Putnam, “There can be no deconstruction without reconstruction.” Philosopher Jurgen Habermas has been engaged in such an act of reconstruction since 1980 when he decided to show how the postmodernists who critique Enlightenment rationality “buy into a fundamentally irrationalist claim, which makes us more and not less vulnerable to the threat of fascism.”

Of course, creating order out of chaos is no easy task, not least because of the semantic dilemma of following a phenomenon called “postmodernism.” Similarly, how do you follow “New Wave”? Are there writers or directors who have the same concerns as those in the academic field? Or are filmmakers simply reveling in the attention that New Wave Cinema allows them? Case in point: Charlie Kaufman’s newfound notoriety due to his self-reflexive film, Adaptation.

The New World

Some think that the tragedy of September 11th, like World War II, will play a role in the way we view the world. Since that historic moment, irony, a piece of postmodernism, has already been proclaimed dead and alive again by the magazines and comedians who shape our common wisdom. How has the film industry responded to September 11th? Aside from the initial apprehension to depict terrorism on-screen or the lunatic effort to erase the Twin Towers from all of film history, has there been a visible change in the movies we see?

In her 2003 essay on contemporary underground cinema, Joan Hawkins suggests that September 11th could have a profound effect on movies. She writes about how many of the “East Village” avant-garde filmmakers “were evacuated from their lofts and apartment buildings, told only to ‘go north’”:

The geography of downtown Manhattan has changed. So has the mood in the USA. And it’s not at all clear what new avant-gardes and cult films might rise up to address what seems at this point to be a new era (one in which irony, for example, may not be considered an appropriate response to anything).

The “new era” to which Hawkins refers is vague, to say the least. Whether avant-garde, cult, independent, foreign, or Hollywood, there has been only a small handful of filmmakers who have dealt with the post-9/11 world. Most explicitly, there was Sept. 11, an international effort put together by such heavy-hitting “world art” auteurs as Youssef Chahine, Alejandro Gonzalez-Innaritu, Shohei Imamura, Ken Loach, Amos Gitai, Mira Nair, and Sean Penn—many of whom, by the way, are important figures in the New Wave movements of their respective national cinemas.

25th Hour, though based on a novel written before September 11th, has the tragedy lurking in its shadows throughout. Despite the moments of explicitness, like when Frank (Barry Pepper) and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gaze mournfully upon Ground Zero from a nearby undamaged high-rise, the entire film is implicitly charged with a sense of mourning that may or may not have been in the original text.

The film is about a white drug dealer named Monty (Edward Norton) who is busted and has twenty-five hours before he is incarcerated. The film sets up a triumvirate of possibilities for bourgeois New Yorkers: you can be a school teacher like Jacob, a stock-broker like Frank, or a drug dealer like Monty. Even though Monty is the only one of the three who is a convicted felon, each of the three characters harbors an intense sense of guilt. One might say that Jacob’s guilt is from succumbing to the advances of one of his under-aged students, or that Frank’s guilt is from taking advantage of women. But there is something deeper. Like Monty, who has taken up a working-class occupation (one that is often used in art to allegorize the corrupt American Dream), Jacob and Frank, though on the “right” side of the law, have taken up jobs that are morally questionable. Jacob teaches privileged children at a New York City private school. Frank is in the epicenter of sleazy Gordan Gekko-esque greed. I admit, both cases are less directly morally bankrupt than selling drugs, and this is not the place for a detailed analysis of why New York private schools and Wall Street can be problematic job prospects, so it will have to suffice to say that I believe this to be the case.

Even deeper, however, is the sense that these three characters, each a metaphor for the next generation of powerful white American men, are guilty of living in excess; of living in a world in which people starve, fight for their lives, and desperately turn to fundamentalism as a solution; and, finally, of living with general ignorance to the other, struggling, half of the population. Spike Lee, always the spokesperson for the oppressed, is having fun with this: he gets to incarcerate one of these infidels.

Though September 11th is not in any way represented in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, the tragedy haunts its purpose. Von Trier delves into an analysis of America—one that might not have been marketable in the pre-9/11 world (since anti-Americanism has only become a hot topic after it was so charitably demonstrated on our soil). In the tradition of great European filmmakers who have captured something distinct about America (Hitchcock, Lang, Wilder, Sirk), Von Trier spends most of the picture depicting the good intentions of a loving American man (Paul Bettany). The apocalyptic ending, and middle-finger-launching end credits, are tolerable only because the film depicts such a substantial love for American idealism before declaring that nothing is sacred.

Though powerful and rich in content, it remains to be seen whether Sept. 11, 25th Hour, or Dogville are powerful and rich in aesthetics. It is one thing to dramatize a revolution of thought, and quite another to actually contribute to such a revolution (like Buñuel and Dali, like the New Wave). The most likely candidate of the three would seem to be Dogville for its unique combination of surrealistically theatrical mise-en-scène and jerky digital camerawork. The question then becomes: what does this aesthetic mean? Might it signify a break from irony, a clash with subjectivity, or a derision of reflexivity? Could Dogville be post-po-mo? Sadly, I have no idea.