How Can We Make Jean-Luc Godard Happy Again? 1 comments

By Santiago Ramos

The concluding thoughts in Bradford’s recent post about the early temple-like status of the movie theater, and the religious nature of cinephilia (“Finding Real Religion,”), struck me, when I first read them, as both true and wrong:

“But given the trends in domestic technology...with HD flat-screen TVs getting bigger and better and ever more like home altars, I wonder if we’re already trying to recover what he claims has been lost.”

What has been lost is the majestic, temple-like movie theater, replaced by the vulgar and curtain-less multiplex. What I think is true is that we are trying to recapture the old sacredness with the enormous HD flat-screens and surround sound technology. What is wrong—and Bradford would most likely agree, I’m guessing—is thinking that we can capture that old sacredness without community. Having friends over to watch Airplane on the big screen doesn’t quite cut it. I’ve tried it.

Actually, we’ve tried it. I lived in a house with two other hard-core cinephiles (and a few fellow-travelers) for several months, and we would host “Movie Nights” every Wednesday evening, for the enjoyment of the greater CUA graduate student community. The head cinephile of the house, let’s call him “Jose,” was able to borrow from his place of employ a projector, which he hooked up to his Mac. Two slabs of wood procured by “Stephen,” our resident carpenter, became the frame for a screen, a white, thick bed sheet. On that bed sheet, Clint Eastwood shot and killed several outlaws, blonde Scandinavian femme fatales bemoaned the death of God, and Stanley Kubrick recapitulated the history of man. We had some great times.

Naturally, however, we wanted something more. Some thing more public, perhaps. It’s hard to get a lot of people to attend regularly a series of films that are so eclectic—the Bergmans weren’t as popular as the Spaghetti Westerns, and in the time I was there, I can’t remember a bigger crowd than the one we drew for Once (feel free to correct me, guys). Luckily, however, Washington, DC is full of delights for the young cinephile with no family to care for and a few bucks to burn, and the greatest among these is the American Film Institute [http://www.afi.com/silver/new/].

For me, it started with the first Ingmar Bergman Film Series back in January. Since that month, I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of money on overpriced tickets to watch a full third of Ingmar Bergman’s expansive oeuvre. At the AFI, you get the curtains; they open proudly before every film. One can wax nostalgic, looking at the old film projectors from the 1940s on display, as well as the old Steenbeck editing suite. The popcorn tastes better than at the multiplex. My friends and I began to feel part of a community of recurring AFI attendees. Sometimes, we even interacted with them—for example, after a Holy Saturday showing of The Silence, a man in the back told us, “That was like watching paint dry.” Jose, as serious as one gets on the morning after Good Friday, responded dryly, “No. No, it wasn’t.”

Really, we weren’t as pretentious as it sounds. And when we’d return home, happy, I would still sometimes feel a bit sad that, in our time, the type of films I am so passionate about aren’t a central part of our culture. Fancy-schmancy foreign “cinema” (that is the word to use) is, after all, a specified consumer-commodity just like any other in our fragmented marketplace. We wish it wasn’t so—and that’s why the NEA funds the AFI—but it is. Just like going to the opera.

Consider Jean-Luc Godard, legendary French filmmaker and Sixties icon, who was not as ideological in his storytelling as some current critics would like to make him out to be. In an interview a few years ago with the Guardian, he whimpers like a kicked puppy:

“He remains adept at coining polished one-liners, but now they tend to have a melancholic undertone. Ask him whether he still takes pleasure in Nicholas Ray’s films and he admits he doesn’t watch them any more. ‘It’s not possible to see the films. You can only see them on DVD, which I don’t like very much, because the screen is too small.’”

You’d think that with the residuals he’s making from his DVD sales, he could afford a projector; Bradford could maybe fill me in on that. Godard’s despondency, however, is absolute: “It’s over,” he sighs. “There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed.”

In lieu of an argument, I’ve written down anecdotes, and perhaps my only contribution the conversation is to up the ante on the implied question in Bradford’s post: namely, what will it take to make film-going once again a religious experience? Community, certainly, and that is a point I tried to make. But the community gathers around something beautiful, and perhaps only a series of dynamic, beautiful new films—a new wave—will transform the multiplex back into a temple.