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 10:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 10:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 11:10 am (UTC)And where are the, for example, English directors making films about "the other" in England? There is still *some* of it about. We had that spate of British-Asian films from the late 80s onwards, but that's hardly "other" nowadays.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 11:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 11:50 am (UTC)I suppose the obvious point is that "otherness" doesn't have to be geographical or temporal. Also, I wonder whether what makes a foreign director a success with English-speaking audiences is when they cut across that otherness. It would be interesting (actually, it WOULDN'T) to look at every bit of culture you like and work out what percentage of it is "otherness" and what percentage is "reflecting your life."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 11:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 12:03 pm (UTC)I dunno if Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair fit in there too.
Re:Bergman, I discovered him at the Edinburgh University Film Society in the late 70s tipped of by my German teacher. Did you ever attend those screenings three times a week?
Memories of standing in queues at 15 years old with strange academics on cold wet October Sunday mornings at the back of the George Square Theatre for a years membership for 6 quid or something. For guys like me in the housing schemes it was a great release where I brutalised myself into an intellectual otherness and enhanced my dating life.
I always remember the little programme card was abbreviated to EUFS.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 12:13 pm (UTC)The line "brutalised myself into an intellectual otherness and enhanced my dating life" will make me smile for a good while. Thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 12:32 pm (UTC)Oh, I also wanted to say that I disagree that these deaths -- Bergman and Antonioni -- are the severing of "the last link with the great days of European art cinema". (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, quoted on the BBC site just now.) There's still Godard, Herzog, the Straubs. They're alive. There are also the Dogme Danes, a younger generation with some of the same bite and fight in them.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 12:41 pm (UTC)Didn't realize Huillet had died last year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Straub).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 12:45 pm (UTC)Absolutely bizarre quote from the BBC site there. They just make it up as they go along these days.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 01:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 02:21 pm (UTC)Also, if Bergman is not "foreign" enough for you, then who are the Bergman-esque British directors? I think that whole austere existentialism is in fact pretty foreign to the British mentality. The "greats" of British filmmaking a far more commercial and non-intellectual (and surprisingly image-centered for a supposedly talky, non-imagistic culture, ie Chaplin, Hitchcock, Lean etc.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 02:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 03:13 pm (UTC)I worry about Godard kicking the bucket. Mainly because his recent films are some of the best of his career.
Hadn't heard about Straub's death.
They're dropping like flies.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 04:35 pm (UTC)The Great Danes also owe a lot to Bresson as well.
But then as Dean Martin almost sang - Everybody Owes Somebody Something.
(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 05:16 pm (UTC)(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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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 09:40 pm (UTC)(And if "the past is a foreign country" does that mean that nostalgia is a substitute for foreignness, by extension explaining why retro-cool is so often a substitute for novelty?)
I sort of think that the difference in this sense between a Northern (or Southern) European director's work and an Iranian or Japanese director's work isn't necessarily qualitative: if we accept the above as a working definition for art, then it ultimately has to be some sort of alchemy of the 'familiar' and the 'other'. That alchemy is, as you implied, subjective to the audience, but it's always the same basic alchemy - some balance of familiarity and otherness - and all that really changes is the ratio.
Perhaps that's an oversimplification, though...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 11:35 pm (UTC)He has been in my thoughts somewhat lately, since I saw what was, to me, a very moving and fascinating television documentary/interview on/with him very recently.
In that documentary was a sense of quietness and waiting for death. He talked about this explicitly, too.
He said he was looking forward to meeting Ingrid again.
In this case, rather than words, silence. I wish him the wonderful silence that he spoke of in his interview, which was already part of his life before he died.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-01 07:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-01 10:51 am (UTC)Ingmar
Date: 2007-08-01 09:52 pm (UTC)My personal sadness at his passing is compounded by the hidebound sentiments of most of the obits I have read - 'The poet of gloom', 'depressing', 'anguished' etcetera.
The BBC News obituary - which pivoted on a French and Saunders sketch indicating that his films seriousness made them easy to satirise - was particularly galling.
Somewhere along the way the intelligence, sensitivity, humanity and humour that characterise Bergman work has irrevocably been ignored in favour of a lazy, prejudiced and ultimately incorrect critical appraisal that defines his work as 'depressing' - mainly propounded by hacks who have never seen his films or self-appointed critics who haven't made it past 'The Seventh Seal' and did not understand it anyway.
Thomas Scott.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-02 12:48 am (UTC)isidore isou est mort aussi
Date: 2007-08-02 04:01 pm (UTC)