Junk for Code

After Fox: scrambled thoughts

These are not just dark days for a critical film culture in Australia. The Australian film industry appears to be on the ropes as well. The academic enclaves of film studies continue to remain inward looking, enclosed and disconnected from the public culture. Film culture policy in Canberra is concerned with commercial film industry, money and a lack of concern with the inward flow of American culture.

Sorry days indeed.

Maybe it is an opportune time to tease apart the buried strand of a marginalized film culture from its 1980s incorporation into the concerns of a commercial film industry, that is now increasingly concerned with its place in the global film/media economy.

Certainly the old talk about cultural uniqueness (ie., more than local shading and inflexion) has been blown apart by Fox Studios in Sydney. Even if there is still an ongoing concern about Australian identity in the light of the proposed Free Trade Agreement with the US, the old critical edge of film culture has been well and truly blunted. The contours of this culture have been flattened, as it is commercial imperatives that govern film production and distribution in Australia. Consequently, many people now difficulty in picturing the existence of a viable critical film culture or even a non-commercial public sphere in spite of the Howard Government's attempts to the undermine the ABC).

We need to remember what has been forgotten about our film culture and an active forgetting" ---a willfull abandonment of some of the film industry's past. As Nietzsche says:

'We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people—we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it's been said that "where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also." Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures—collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with only one thing, to "bring something home." As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call "experience"—which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been "missing the point."

Our hearts have not even been engaged—nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself "What exactly did that clock strike?"—so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed "What have we really just experienced? And more: "Who are we really?" Then, as I've mentioned, we count—after the fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being—alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: "Each man is furthest from himself." Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not "knowledgeable people.'

We need to become knowlegeable about our film culture to overcome our being strangers to ourselves. We need to understand ourselves as a people or nation.

I decided to do that whilst we are down at the side shack over Xmas. We are doing the big clean for guests after Xmas, and we are taking the opportunity to watch some film videos. They are our break from cleaning as well as our becoming a part of formation of the video-educated cinephile. So far we have watched Scott Hicks' Hearts in Atlantis and Gillian Armstrong's Oscar and Lucinda. Two films that did little more than tell a story with an emphasis on character. I was so bored.
Despite it being about historical remembering, I walked out of the Armstrong film, even though it was a contribution to our national cinema.

Lucinda and Oscar was a film of a book by Peter Carey, whom I've never bothered to read. The film was so old-fashioned literary, as it was all about narrative and character. I guess it was an attempt at an Australian tragedy. But the disturbing was reduced to the quirky. Sexuality, sexual expression and desire was muted.

And where was the critical reflection on our film culture? Or the role of film culture in our public culture? Or the references back to earlier films on Australian identity?

I was less bored with the Hick's film as I managed to stay the distance. It too was a film of a story, this time a story in a Stephen King book about personal remembering.
As I sat through it I kept on thinking that it was such a contrast to the brillant Snow Falling on Cedars.

Hearts in Atlantis was favourably reviewed. As I sat through the video I became ever more restless. It was a superficial and nostalgic account of late 1950s/early 1960s suburban working class America. There were gestures to the disturbing---to a patriarchal, liberal society whose anxieties, instabilities and conflicts were bubbling to the surface in unpredictable ways. But the gestures to the disturbing undercurrents---the security apparatus of the state---remained gestures.

It was nostalgia in the form of a remembering of a childhood. What was forgotten was the disturbing social undercurrents. Little or nothing was done with photography in US society --the central character remembering was photographer. Nor were there any references to the seminal images of US photographers such as Rober Frank to locate the film within the visual culture of the US:

Robert Frank, Parade, 1956

Frank abandoned conventional beauty and photographed mundane scenes of America's urban and roadside life:

Robert Frank, Butte Montana, 1956

I turned to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive with relief, even if it turned in on itself and was hard to make sense of. In this tragic love story in the city of dreams the disturbing undercurrents under the surface of everyday life are in the forefront. It plays havoc with the narrative, plays around with realities and dream states, and takes a big swipe at the Hollywood industry and its role as a ‘Dream Factory" along the way. A cinematic film with a critical edge.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 24, 2003 04:44 AM | TrackBack