Foreign films
Jul. 31st, 2007 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusMy favourite Ingmar Bergman film is The Silence.
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He was a very great director, but I wouldn't say "the greatest" -- for me that's Fellini, for the idea that flamboyance and charm and imagination and love for eccentricity can save us. Bergman is almost too Northern, too post-Protestant, too existentialist, and those are all things I understand too well. For those of us in the Anglosphere he's "a foreign film director", and yet perhaps he's not foreign enough. He doesn't stretch us enough.
I really appreciate that both Bergman and Fellini always used their own languages in their films. A language is a way of seeing. And -- as film shows us particularly well -- that way of seeing can be valuably foreign even if we don't speak the language, or even if the film uses language as little as The Silence does. (This is a film filled with "ambient Scandic sensibility".)
Only half-understanding something -- like this Italian blog, for instance -- is a great pleasure to me, much greater than wholly understanding it. Foreign-ness is something worth holding onto in art as in life. Half-understanding something is an invitation to stretch your mind around a new way of seeing life, to find universal themes in an unfamiliar set of particularities. A great "foreign" artist should give us a sense of a "learnable otherness". She should give us a doorway into another world. And she should remain, on some level, slightly threatening to our present way of life.
Where once a northern European might have found foreign-ness in films from southern Europe -- Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni -- now he has to go to Iran to get the same fix of otherness. And so we have no famous Italian directors any more -- can you name one? -- (seconds after writing his name, I learn that Antonioni has just died too), but we have several famous Iranian directors. This is no accident. It is about otherness, foreign-ness. And one guarantee of Iran's current otherness is that the US continues to threaten the country.
I went to my local library last week and came back with 12 films. They were all marked IR and JP: Iran and Japan.
We cannot learn anything from a country that does not threaten us, on some level, with its utter difference from our way of life. And cinema -- still -- is the best way to immerse yourself not just in universals, but in the specifics of foreign-ness. The tactile details of a way of life whose difference irks and attracts us, and whose erasure would impoverish us.
This isn't just a geographical or cultural otherness. It's also a temporal otherness. As a film slips further into the past it becomes more valuably strange. It's possible that Bergman films I watched twenty years ago will be stronger now, like old wine, because their otherness has doubled in the interim. Our daily world gets less and less like a Bergman film. Even the old idea of "Sweden" is perhaps lost in our blended, blanded Ikea world; we're all surrounded by Swedish furniture which has compromised with us as much as we've compromised with it.
If Bergmanland really is strange and threateningly different, perhaps it's time to start rattling our sabres, threatening to invade it. Can we arrange Dick Cheney's chess game with Max von Sydow right away?
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He was a very great director, but I wouldn't say "the greatest" -- for me that's Fellini, for the idea that flamboyance and charm and imagination and love for eccentricity can save us. Bergman is almost too Northern, too post-Protestant, too existentialist, and those are all things I understand too well. For those of us in the Anglosphere he's "a foreign film director", and yet perhaps he's not foreign enough. He doesn't stretch us enough.
I really appreciate that both Bergman and Fellini always used their own languages in their films. A language is a way of seeing. And -- as film shows us particularly well -- that way of seeing can be valuably foreign even if we don't speak the language, or even if the film uses language as little as The Silence does. (This is a film filled with "ambient Scandic sensibility".)
Only half-understanding something -- like this Italian blog, for instance -- is a great pleasure to me, much greater than wholly understanding it. Foreign-ness is something worth holding onto in art as in life. Half-understanding something is an invitation to stretch your mind around a new way of seeing life, to find universal themes in an unfamiliar set of particularities. A great "foreign" artist should give us a sense of a "learnable otherness". She should give us a doorway into another world. And she should remain, on some level, slightly threatening to our present way of life.
Where once a northern European might have found foreign-ness in films from southern Europe -- Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni -- now he has to go to Iran to get the same fix of otherness. And so we have no famous Italian directors any more -- can you name one? -- (seconds after writing his name, I learn that Antonioni has just died too), but we have several famous Iranian directors. This is no accident. It is about otherness, foreign-ness. And one guarantee of Iran's current otherness is that the US continues to threaten the country.
I went to my local library last week and came back with 12 films. They were all marked IR and JP: Iran and Japan.
We cannot learn anything from a country that does not threaten us, on some level, with its utter difference from our way of life. And cinema -- still -- is the best way to immerse yourself not just in universals, but in the specifics of foreign-ness. The tactile details of a way of life whose difference irks and attracts us, and whose erasure would impoverish us.This isn't just a geographical or cultural otherness. It's also a temporal otherness. As a film slips further into the past it becomes more valuably strange. It's possible that Bergman films I watched twenty years ago will be stronger now, like old wine, because their otherness has doubled in the interim. Our daily world gets less and less like a Bergman film. Even the old idea of "Sweden" is perhaps lost in our blended, blanded Ikea world; we're all surrounded by Swedish furniture which has compromised with us as much as we've compromised with it.
If Bergmanland really is strange and threateningly different, perhaps it's time to start rattling our sabres, threatening to invade it. Can we arrange Dick Cheney's chess game with Max von Sydow right away?
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 05:09 pm (UTC)"No music as accompaniment, support or re-inforcement. No music at all."
And a footnote: "Except, of course, the music played by visible instruments."
Then: "The noises must become music." Which is very Cagean, but also, I think, what Bergman is doing in that scene from The SIlence I embedded. The sound is so great, so musical without ever turning into music.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 06:35 pm (UTC)Bresson again: "Silence, musical by an effect of resonance. The last syllable of the last word, or the last noise, like a held note."
He would also exaggerate certain sounds in the mix. Like the knights armor in Lancelot of the Lake. Some times comic and at other times ominous.
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And sorry. I can't resist posting this one:
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