Globality without Totality in Art Cinema

 
It has been ten years since the publication of Global Hollywood, in which Toby Miller et al. characterize Hollywood not so much as a place but as a fundamentally international organization of cultural labor and resources. I mention this as a way of introducing Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, for two reasons. First, like many of the contributors to this collection, I take art cinema as purposefully differentiating itself from Hollywood cinema. Global Art Cinema takes a bold step toward understanding art cinema as having the same order of ambition and scope as does its commercial alternative. But in approaching the world’s art cinemas globally, this collection faces different questions than concern Hollywood. Global Hollywood eschews formal analysis or textual interpretation in favor of critical political economy and cultural policy analysis. In claiming globality, Global Art Cinema is also forced to contend with the designation “art,” which evokes a long history of ideas regarding cinema aesthetics. Even if we understand “art cinema” as produced by institutional arrangements and critical discourses, its claims to “art” status typically rely on some aesthetic criteria. Indeed, we might even understand art cinema’s self-conscious formal deviations from Hollywood as part of its institutional differentiation from the mainstream.
 
“Difference,” then, is key to Global Art Cinema, and this point is forcefully elaborated in the book’s introduction, co-written by Galt and Schoonover. Drawing from the long and variable history of the type, it positions art cinema as an “elastically hybrid category” (3); the authors write that “the lack of strict parameters for art cinema is not just an ambiguity of its critical history, but a central part of its specificity, a positive way of delineating its discursive space” (6). Art cinema is thus a zone of cinematic alterity, which “always perverts the standard categories used to divide up institutions, locations, histories, or spectators” (6-7). Galt and Schoonover designate this internal difference as a productive “impurity” that destabilizes these zones.
 
This theoretical positioning could make the book appealing to scholars engaged in different kinds of cultural analysis, where there continue to be debates about “difference,” alterity, and hybridity; more particularly, it will interest those who are concerned with cross-cultural exchange. Although the book is centrally about cinema, its terms of discussion are relevant to debates in literature and art history. In positioning global art cinema as internally different or impure, however, Galt and Schoonover also contend with other descriptions of the world’s art cinemas; here I am thinking specifically of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. In the preface to that volume, Ďurovičová singles out the rhetorical and political valences of the term “transnational,” which she contrasts with the “global.” She writes, “In contradistinction to ‘global,’ a concept bound up with the philosophical category of totality” (ix), the transnational facilitates analysis and understandings of “modalities of geopolitical forms, social relations and … the variant scale on which relations in film history have occurred” (x). And it may be true that “transnational” has had more discursive purchase than “global” in recent scholarship, as scholars have looked for ways to describe the fluidity, mobility, and hybridity of contemporary culture in non-essentializing terms.
 
However, Galt and Schoonover’s use of the term “global” does not obscure the highly varied terrain or ideological complexity of the world’s art cinemas. Indeed, they make a compelling case for the geopolitical importance of art cinema. They assert that, along with their other impurities, art films are troubled and productively propelled by twin impulses to be different and yet also to be universally legible. Thus the punch line: “art cinema demands that we watch across cultures and see ourselves through foreign eyes” (11). In this formulation, art cinema does not make a claim of totality, but rather displaces us, dislocates us, and marks our lack of unification. Seen this way, global art cinema provides an exciting way to think through the heterogeneity of lived experience, making such art political as much as aesthetic.
 
With these stakes set, Global Art Cinema makes a substantial contribution to contemporary film scholarship in general and to scholarship about the world’s art cinemas in particular. In addition to the Introduction, it features twenty new essays as well as a brief but characteristically insightful Forward by Dudley Andrew. Although there is some variability in the chapters’ aims and complexity, they are consistently cogent in their arguments and accessibly written. The book is divided into four Parts: 1: Delimiting the Field, which “outlines new shapes and boundaries for art cinema” (21); 2: The Art Cinema Image, which analyses “the art in art cinema” (22); 3: Art Cinema Histories, which complicates “the conventional trajectory of film historiography that installs postwar European cinema as the predominant aesthetic and industrial basis around which other art cinemas develop” (23); and finally 4: Geopolitical Intersections, which undermines the Eurocentrism of conventional descriptions of art cinema. And although the essays within each section contribute to the larger topics, I want to suggest a number of other through-lines that occur in the book, as this volume takes up, continues, and alters a number of conceptual issues that have characterized discourses about art cinema for some time. These include a mobilization of “the auteur” as a critical frame, an attention to film form and style, a contrasting interest in institutional and industrial questions, flirtations with cultural elitism and, by contrast, essays that explicitly seek to undermine the loftiness of “art cinema.”
 
One of the longstanding features of art cinema has been an alignment with the auteur, and this volume demonstrates an ongoing interest in discussing specific film directors as coherent figures that help organize discourse about film. While some of the essays analyze particular directors as a matter of course, others are more reflective about the ways in which auteurs get created as such. In her contribution to the book, Manishita Dass discusses Ritwik Ghatak, whose career history has generally been overshadowed by Satyajit Ray, but who also has been intermittently “rediscovered” by various critics. Dass explains why this has happened, asserting that Ghatak’s idiosyncratic style, which fuses melodramatic excess with political commentary regarding the partition of India and Pakistan, has made him difficult to comprehend or categorize. Ultimately, for Dass, the case of Ghatak compels us to broaden our notions of “art cinema” by reconfiguring the “global” through a new openness toward the local and the regional. Jihoon Kim’s essay, on the other hand, compares the feature films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul with his video installation works. Kim asserts that Weerasethakul, like a handful of other artists, creates bridges between these two forms and in fact develops a “cinematic” style of installation art while simultaneously invigorating his features with an installation-inspired sense of time and place.
 
In looking at these non-European directors, both Dass and Kim demonstrate the expansion of auteurist analysis outside of Europe. Jean Ma takes up the issue of Eurocentrism in her essay, which looks at the films of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang. Ma asserts that Tsai’s films provide means for reassessing the Eurocentrism of conventional art cinema historiography through the director’s accumulation of references to his previous films and overt dramatizations of cross-cultural encounters. In a somewhat similar vein, Rachel Gabara discusses Abderrahmane Sissako, a director who was born in West Africa, educated in Moscow, resides in France, and yet returns to Africa to make his films there. Gabara asserts that Sissako’s films blur boundaries between “Second” and “Third Cinema,” and that he expands the possibilities for revolutionary films beyond these categories. Dennis Hanlon uses Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés toward similar ends in his essay, “Travelling Theory, Shots, and Players: Jorge Sanjinés, New Latin American Cinema, and the European Art Film.” Hanlon shows how Sanjinés critiques both Hollywood and European art cinema, and further, deviates from much of what is considered “Third Cinema,” as the director tries to create beauty as well as inspire his viewers toward political liberation. Hanlon argues that in his attempt to create a populist cinema that speaks to Bolivian workers, the director undermines the individualism normally associated with auteurist analysis.
 
In conventional international cinema scholarship, certain directors have become emblematic of entire national traditions and styles; Ingmar Bergman’s relationship with Swedish cinema is one of the most prominent examples. Patrick Keating contends with this conflation of artist and nationality in his essay, which examines films directed by Emilio Fernádez and Luis Buñuel, both of whom won awards for films they directed in Mexico. These films were both shot by cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Keating shows how Figueroa’s “national” style of cinematography was framed differently in a transnational context, in part depending on the director he was working with and also depending on how European critics wanted to frame “Mexican-ness” vis-à-vis world cinema. John David Rhodes’s “Pasolini’s Exquisite Flowers: The ‘Cinema of Poetry’ as a Theory of Art Cinema” likewise reframes an auteurial position. Instead of looking at the director’s films, Rhodes provides a detailed and insightful analysis of one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s theorizations of film aesthetics. Rhodes makes a compelling case that, first, when Pasolini talks of a “cinema of poetry,” he refers to the corpus that others have designated with the phrase “art cinema.” Second, Rhodes asserts that Pasolini’s characterization of art cinema is implicitly political. Specifically, in Rhodes’s treatment, for Pasolini film style reflects class consciousness. (This assertion strikes me as quite strong, particularly when thinking about Porcile [1969], and the radically different styles that characterize the film’s two narrative lines.)
 
Rhodes’s essay is connected to a discussion of film form and style that occurs in many of the essays in Global Art Cinema. Of course, the role of formal analysis has been strongly debated in film scholarship for some time. David Bordwell stands as the figurehead of the contemporary “neo-formalist” approach, which vehemently disengages from textual analysis and interpretation. Bordwell was also among the first to designate a frame for analyzing art cinema in general, and, not surprisingly, he drew upon films’ formal features to organize the type. Mark Betz engages Bordwell’s notion of “parametric” cinematic narration, observed in films by such directors as Mizoguchi Kenji and Robert Bresson. Betz re-theorizes and relocates this “tradition” to include a number of directors from South America and the Middle East, among other regions. To get there, Betz closely examines formal, stylistic features of these films, but unlike Bordwell, is adamant that film form only matters to the extent that it is legible to a social public of viewers.
 
Thus not all formal analysis falls under the “neo-formalist” umbrella, nor does attention to film form necessitate that one disengage from interpretation, be it ideological, psychoanalytic, cultural, or inter-medial. In his essay, Adam Lowenstein suggests textual alignments between Un Chien Andalou (1929) and eXistenZ (1999) in order to show the ways in which both films relate to interactive gaming, specifically through their respective uses of surrealist logics. Angela Dalle Vache also takes up linkages between art cinema and surrealism in her essay “Surrealism in Art and Film: Face and Time.” She argues that, in order to better understand the cinematic techniques of directors Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, “we must return to the histories and aesthetic concerns of the historic avant-garde” (181).
 
Combining an analysis of film form with a rigorous engagement with critical theory, Angelo Restivo provides a wonderfully unexpected description of film history in his essay, “From Index to Figure in the European Art Film: The Case of The Conformist.” Restivo argues that the particularly “plastic” images of The Conformist anticipate the odd surfaces of postmodern commercial culture. The film deviates in its politics, however, through its representation of repressed queerness. Along these lines, Maria San Filippo makes a case for the representation of bisexual and/or bi-suggestive spaces in art cinema. Due to the tendency to be ambiguous typical of art cinema more generally, she asserts that such films reveal “how we might undo compulsory monosexuality and unthink heterocentrism” (89). Along a different tack, E. Ann Kaplan explores film style closely in her discussion of affect in cinema to show “how cinema structures screen emotions and look at techniques that produce emotions between embodied spectator and screen” in films by Werner Herzog, Claire Denis, and the Dardenne brothers (285). Kaplan discusses how different forms of postcolonial contact occur in and around these films to assess how these interactions are intertwined with emotion and affect.
 
Like these essays, Randalle Halle’s chapter looks at film form, but situates the formal conventions of contemporary European art cinema within an institutional frame. After detailing the mechanisms for European state support for media production, Halle delineates three aesthetic strategies of contemporary co-productions. First, “a multicultural logic emerged that consciously sought to undermine national specificity” (306). Then there was a “transnational scenario approach,” where the narrative “seeks to represent directly a quasi-transnational situation” (307). The third type, which began in the mid-1990s, disguises its transnationality by telling national stories from “non-national” perspectives.
 
Taking up questions of genre and national cinema through another institutional context is Azadeh Farahmand’s “Disentangling the International Festival Circuit: Genre and Iranian Cinema.” Following a deliberation on how the film festival circuits of the world work, she argues that specific film festivals led to the crystallization of two different Iranian film “waves,” which were programmed as such at subsequent festivals. Phil Rosen also focuses on institutional questions in his analysis of Sub-Saharan African cinema. Given the process of decolonization in that part of the world, and given the theoretical currents of that era, Rosen asserts that “African cinema should have emerged as a third cinema” (256). And although many films were aligned with the struggles of decolonization and postcoloniality, they took up formal devices that were more typical of “Second Cinema.” As Rosen indicates, this situation is fascinating because of the financing and exhibition infrastructures that undergird this cinema, which are typically located in Europe.
 
Moving away from conventional art cinema institutions, Brian Price’s chapter looks at cinema in the most rarified sites of culture, the museum and the gallery. Discussing works like Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, Price analyses and endorses what he calls “limited access cinema,” where works by fine artists are held outside the circulation of popular media (113). And although Price is conscious of his privileged place in making this argument, his essay raises the issues of elitism and anti-populism that have inflected the history of art cinema. David Andrews’s essay, “Toward an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema,” takes what appears to be a diametrically opposed view, by looking at art cinema “in a contextual, value-neutral way so that it is truly inclusive, capable of covering all permutations, past and present” (64). He expands upon Steve Neale’s work on art cinema as a set of institutional practices, and advocates that “art cinema” should include the “highbrow” films from any number of other genres, including horror and pornography. In this, he looks at how certain films are considered to be of “high quality” through various paratexts and discourses.
 
This inclusive logic can be seen in Global Art Cinema itself. One essay that expands the boundaries of art cinema, in terms of formal features and cultural status, is Sharon Hayashi’s “The Fantastic Trajectory of Pink Art Cinema from Stalin to Bush.” Hayashi details the historical conjunctures of two pink films, Secrets Behind the Walls (1965) and The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2004), with more conventional art films from the different eras. Rather than emphasizing formal similarities between these films, however, Hayashi shows that both pink films and more highbrow fare have been distributed and exhibited in similar ways. However, one can contrast Hayashi’s inclusion of “low status” films in the realm of art cinema with Timothy Corrigan’s discussion of essay films as a “cinema of ideas” (218). Marking out an insightful genealogy of the genre, Corrigan eloquently makes the case that essay films engage in a dialogic aesthetics, providing “an active intellectual response to the questions and provocations that an unsettled subjectivity directs at its public” (222). In this, the individual and the public come into contact, talk to one another, and think.
 
The contrast between these two essays demonstrates that Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories is indeed inclusive, ranging (at least) from an institutional history of soft-core pornography to an aesthetic analysis of films that convey ideas. The terms of “art” are certainly expansive here. Although some of the essays are quite focused on their topics, each evaluates how “quality” has been constructed in certain instances. David Andrew’s essay happens to be the most self-consciously broad interrogation of the “art” in art cinema. Inclusive, yes, but is Global Art Cinema global? In the sense put forth by the editors, it certainly is; it figures global art cinema in many of its diverse geographic, institutional, and formal occurrences, making it global but not universal. In strictly geographical terms, the book contains essays about regions that are not considered immediately within the conventional Euro-centrism of “art cinema.” Nevertheless, I wonder how this book’s aims and focus would shift had there been an essay about art cinema directors from the United States, such as David Lynch or Gus van Sant. Is American art cinema “global” in a different way?
 
But this objection is minor. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories provides an abundance of thought-provoking essays. Looking at material from a wide variety of locations, the book offers an astoundingly broad snapshot of what has been called “art cinema.” Given that art films have, traditionally, formally deviated from Hollywood films, thus perhaps asking audiences to approach them with a greater sense of intellectual curiosity, it is not surprising that the essays in this volume are enlivened by a high level of sophistication. Looking at the world’s art cinemas has prompted these writers to engage in a world of ideas, which are a pleasure to explore.