Talking about films is a way of talking about the problems we find in our society today, and making films is a way of resolving some of the conflicts in an active way. Film criticism confines itself to talking, but it should always be seen as a step towards the activist role, not a suostitute Tori.
Film criticism should take individual films and attempt to relate them to a general theory of the cinema as a medium of consciousnesschanging potential. Most films negate this potential, either deliberately (the commercial films doing the rounds of the ABC-Odeon circuits, etc.) or because of the confusion of the film-maker in relation to his audience and his materials. The heritage of film criticism we have been blessed with can safely be rejected en bloc. All those debates around Hollywood movies and their auteurs were productive in their time-they shook a few people up-but they act only as mystifications now. The primary concern of film-makers like Straub, Rocha, Garrel, Robert Kramer, and more importantly, the group efforts like Newsreel, Cinema Action, even Tattooist, is to fuck the system up while living off it. And that's how their films should be talked about. New problems then, that require new solutions.
Film/Art/Individual Expression The cinema began as a weapon of the peoplethe early 1900s in the U.S. saw the birth of a socialist cinema, that depicted working class life as it really was. But this cinema was quickly subverted by the entertainment industry, and was snubbed by the bourgeoisie for fifty years before Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, etc. could be hailed as "artists"-i.e. propagators of sophisticated bourgeois ideals through sophisticated technique. This art cinema was the ultimate repository of bourgeois individualism-one man's fantasy to be lived by millions. But by the revolutionary tactic of Smashing big crews and big budgets, a real cinema of personal expression has emerged, one that can relate directly to the consciousness of both film-maker and spectator.
Calling the cinema an art is only another bourgeois mystification wrapped around the essentially simple operation of pointing a camera at something and pushing the button. Further mystifications are audience alienation, participation and involvement. For just as the image is the direct representation of reality, so our perception of the image is direct and complementary to our experience.
The question we must always be asking is: what is a revolutionary film? Of course the question can't be answered in an article, but only in the praxis of making films within a revolutionary context (e.g. new forms, new materials, new situations). Obviously a revolutionary film is not one where its politics are readily identifiable, where its ideology is rigidified. Its first task would be to jolt the spectator onto a new level of political consciousness, to promote a greater awareness of the causal relationships acting in society. If it's to jolt it can't be dull, and to promote awareness it can't be clouded in obscurity and mystifications. That's about as far as you can take rules, and even that far is dubious. Because it is also true that a film can only have political impact on an audience if it has political impact on the film-maker-and the impersonal products we call feature films do not qualify.
Film/Language If the cinema ie a language it communicates through the cultural connotations of the image. This image is really a mosaic of coded information, and our perception is a process of decoding this information. The code is socially determined, and so is our perception. Thus it becomes meaningless to talk about films in the traditional terms of plot, story-line, characterisation-these are entities imposed by an individual on a social milieu, and as such are external to the message carried by the social code of the film. The world of the western is one of values; so too is the world of the gangster movie-both sets of values ate false, in that they represent the class interest of the artists and technicians who formulated them. And our comprehension of the western or gangster movie is contained within the framework of these values-whether the hero gets killed or comes out winning.
Thinking of the cinema in terms of language is very fruitful because it makes us question all the assumptions that go into our everyday communication. It makes us aware for example of the heavy political overtones of a Hollywood film-through the simple technique of universalising the motivations of a fictional character, we are compelled to accept a contrived plot as "destiny". Which is the same as accepting a historically-determined class situation as something rigid, or absolute. This has always been the ideological role of the cinema-the pacification of mass revolt. And we can no longer put up with such crude repression of our potentialities.
Cinema/Politics The general perspective of what is a revolutionary film needs to be put in dual perspective. The art we have been brought up on is bourgeois art, and the only revolutionary art we have been told about is some dreary, censor-ridden "socialist realism". We don't need either. It was easy enough to formulate this doctrine of socialist realism after the Russian revolution, but because this "art" carried over into the revolutionary regime so many bourgeois connotations, the contradictions fast become untenable. The emphasis shifted from the role of art to that of the artist-should he be free, or repressed. But the myth of bourgeois art as an agent of social change (surrealism, etc.) has been exposed by the middle-class phenomenon of the alternative life-style. If artists have always been thought of as creative people, then the artists today are the builders of this life-style-the yippies, diggers, squatters And the so-called "artists" are the parasites on this creative source-rock musicians turn pot into gold, and film-makers, novelists, poets, journalists, scramble for the pickings. They all contribute to a massive counter-culture, one whose promotion and profits are sately in the hands of a few entrepreneurs and pop celebrities.
Bourgeois art is now in the last stages of being incorporated by the media. They are instant, available to everyone, and operate on the lowest cultural denominator. Who reads novels now anyway?
We go on talking about sociat reality but in fact the "reality" we mean is what comes to us through the media. By excluding feed-back, this mediated version of events imposes its own interpretation on them. Of course objective analysis is supposed to be the staple of the media, but in fact it is the subjective analysis of a camera, tape recorder or reporter-these are all as much involved in the events they portray as the participants themselves. Ignoring this central fact leads to such great critical fallacies as "cinema verite".
This transition from individual "artistic" expression to corporate media expression is only a product of our fucked-up view of things There is no transition at all, in reality, because the artist's position of creator" has always been one of observer-he indirectly reproduces his environment, while the camera, tape recorder, etc. "directly" reproduce it. And this "direct reproduction" is yet another myth, for the media's interpretation of events is as much a distortion of reality as the artist's vision. The camera is an ideological apparatus, the screen an ideological front.
Audience/Politics An audience is a collection of people mystified by events in which they have no participation. The relationship between members of the audience is as dehumanised and aggressive as that between citizens of the wider industrial society, and their collective relationship to the screen is one of passivity and numbness. A feature film, like any work of art, is enclosed within itself-it manufactures conflicts and resolves them artificially. In this way drama fiction has come to act as a substitute for life itself-the vicarious realisation of goals impossible to attain in reality The most basic question we can ask here is: what would an audience be doing if not watching a film? On the face of it, drama must always act as a fantasy escape from action in the streets, since people spend most of their leisure time watching a screen. The function of a revolutionary cinema then is to drive people away from this screen, onto the streets, where perhaps their relationship to each other will improve. And this means infiltrating the media that reach most people-commercial cinema an television.
It is important to realise how drama contain: action within its own terms, for this is the fundamental danger of films like Praise Marx... Guerrilla street theatre is not a containment of action, beeause it forces bystanders to participate, to come into real contact with other members of the audience.
This is the briefest possible resume of some of the problems involved in looking at films. A critic can only point them out, and perhaps illuminate them-it is up to the film-makers themselves to resolve them.
John Matthews John Matthews is an editor of Cinemantics, a new journal concerned with films: copies can be obtained from 117 Hartfield Road, London S.W. 19, 2/6d post free (Pay blank).