This post was first published August 6th, 2007, shortly after two of the greatest filmmakers who every lived died on the same day. In many ways the sentiments of hopelessness are just as much with us now, haunting our world, as then. I feel this post still resonates. Therefore, I am republishing it again.
If I should cast off this tattered coat, And go free into the mighty sky; If I should find nothing there But a vast blue, Echoless, ignorant— What then?
– Stephen Crane
The recent deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, on the same day no less, highlighted two realizations for me: 1) I am, in many ways, a “high modernist” in my aesthetic tastes and passions, and 2) the prevalent and particular questioning of the concepts of truth and hope found in high modernism seems to have disappeared as a noble pursuit. In other words, I long for the days (which were before my time) when artists and filmmakers saw the modern, industrialized, nuclear world as harsh and bleak, but believed that art could truly change that world for the better – even if only by asking the tough questions. (Of course we all imagine the past as we wish.) Today, artmaking is too often viewed cynically, that is, there is no point in tackling the grander themes, rather art is merely about what is only personal and private, and therefore essentially non-transferable, and therefore merely kitsch. That filmmaking can no longer change the world seems to be the prevailing perspective.
There was a kind of hopelessness in both Bergman and Antonioni, but there was also a sense that at least art and human creativity meant something, and therefore it was worth giving it a try anyway. It was also true that each of them, in their own ways, saw that the big questions of life – is there a god? what does it mean to be human? is there a viable salvation for humankind? etc. – were worth asking and pondering and turning inside out. I believe those are still live questions. I am inclined to think, however, that for the most part, filmmakers (except maybe some at the fringes) today do not see those questions as worth being asked.
Consider Antonioni.
Maybe no other filmmaker captured the alienation of humanity in (and to) the modern world as well as Antonioni. He cut to the heart of the difficulty of people loving each other, and finding authentic love, within the world that humanity had created for itself. According to Stephen Holden:
He was a visionary whose portrayal of the failure of Eros in a hypereroticized climate addressed the modern world and its discontents in a new, intensely poetic cinematic language. Here was depicted for the first time on screen a world in which attention deficit disorder, and the uneasy sense of impermanence that goes with it, were already epidemic.
This condition has not left us. In many ways we are still profoundly alienated from this world and from each other. The alienation may even be greater now than when Antonioni first portrayed it on screen. And although he did not give us an outright solution, the response should not be to throw up one’s hands, exclaim life is just absurd and devoid of answers, and then fall into hedonism, consumerism, narcissism, or suburban apathy.
When Anotnioni won the Golden Lion award at the 1964 Venice Film Festival for The Red Desert (1964), the crowd had mixed feelings.
What is great about such contrasting responses is that it signals that people cared about the outcome, that what Antonioni was creating had meaning, that he was saying things that required a response – love them or hate them. Four years earlier he was also booed at Cannes for L’Avventura. But that was then.
Rosenbaum, in his piece on L’eclisse for the Criterion Collection release of that film, states:
This was a time when intellectual activity about the zeitgeist could be debated, if not always welcomed, with Godard and Antonioni the two most commanding figureheads. L’eclisse (1962) appeared the year after Chronicle of a Summer, Last Year in Marienbad, and Paris Belongs to Us, the same year as The Exterminating Angel and Vivre sa vie, and the year before Contempt and Muriel—a period, in short, when large statements and narrative innovations often came together.
That is my understanding (of course not my experience) of the late Fifties and Sixties. The zeitgeist was critical. Mankind was in a giant philosophical flux, and big issues, existential issues were on the table and debated. Film was seen as important, and film departments were started at universities and colleges. Film festivals were important for political reasons and not merely for the glam. Bergman and Antonioni, among many others, were hotly debated, loved and despised, revered and condemned. And then it seemed like none of that really mattered so much. The mid-1970s arrived and the pursuit of these higher goals began to wane. The great leaders had been shot, Vietnam had “ended”, the counterculture became more and more of a drug culture, humans had already walked on the moon and that wasn’t so exciting anymore, the Beatles broke up, Nixon brought even more shame to government, and a self-absorbed “me” generation began to create a new zeitgeist of cynical pleasure. People didn’t go to the theater to find god anymore, they went to the theater to find a thrill. They didn’t go seeking truth, they went seeking a shark, or a spaceship, or the next escape from reality. I know I did.
I, of course, am over-simplifying and romanticizing a bit. People have always sought the thrill and the escape. Truth has always been debated. And some films still stir the soul-searching imagination and foster debate. Plus the 1970s were also an age that started many great things: personal computers, the environmental movement, the slow-food movement, to name just a few. But we are living in an age where the struggle after god and truth are essentially passé. The assumption is that there is no Truth (with a capital “T”), there are no true ethics, there is no God, there are only situations and opinions, and so, for the most part, nobody really cares anymore. The death of Bergman and Antonioni remind us of of a time when cinema was a medium for these pursuits to play themselves out, and people went to the theater to see them played out, and later, over coffee and cigarettes, or walking across campus after the student union showing of a Godard, or later still in bed with one’s lover, debated the meaning of those films and of ourselves.
No need to despair, though. The big questions of our existence are still with us, and if we are brave enough we can still talk about them. And film is still of of the great mediums with which to explore who we are.
As for Antonioni, much has been said by those more intelligent than I about his genius. But what is important to separate is the ennui of his characters and his own personal hope – I say this only from watching his films, not studying the man himself.
In fact, I think it is important to consider that Anotnioni was no true pessimist. He saw people as being trapped in the world that they have created. But he does not say there is nothing they can do, or that there is no other world. Consider this little scene from L’eclisse:
Vittoria (Monica Vitti) has left her lover. The relationship has been empty and she feels the ennui of living in the modern age. Although her feelings may not be entirely clear to herself. She walks back to her apartment.
Here she watches her ex-lover walk away as she stands at the entrance of her apartment building. She is visually framed by elements of that building which seems to dominate the scene. There is a kind of hopeless emptiness in her eyes and posture. She does not yet know that it was not that she was trapped in an empty relationship from which she is now free, rather she is still trapped in herself in the modern world. Antonioni uses modern architecture to symbolize the prison of modern society.
Then Vittoria goes through the glass doors. The camera tracks left to follow her movements.
In the foreground the corner pillar of the building comes into the frame.
Vittoria walks through the foyer as the camera continues to track left. But then the camera stops so that we see only a sliver of the stairwell.
Vittoria walks up the stairwell and disappears around the corner.
It is as though she has been swallowed by the building.
Then we see her at her apartment door. Again she is visually framed by the building’s architecture.
As she enters her apartment the camera is placed outside her windows in such a way as to emphasize that she is inside the building. And again, the architecture dominates, framing her “within” its space.
It should be noted as well that her apartment is chic and modern. She is a beautiful, rich woman living in a beautiful, richly furnished apartment which surrounds her with the bounty of wealth. She has it good, one could say.
She then walks through her apartment and goes to the window. Outside the wind is blowing the trees.
The only thing we hear is the wind in the trees. Here we have the modern world set against the timeless natural world. One world is visceral the other is sterile. One world is dead the other is alive.
The final shot of this sequence is critical, and one of the most important shots of the film. Antonioni is setting up a contrast, one that Vittoria sees but does not see. The truth is she is not lost, she is choosing her life.
Every pessimist is an optimist, and so was Anotnioni. When Vittoria looks out that window at the trees, she is trapped by her own choosing, but she can still choose. The walls of her chic apartment are a barrier to the life beyond those walls, but the apartment has a door. The question is whether she has the eyes to see that she has a choice.
And what is truly important anyway is that we can see, and we can choose. Ennui is a challenge to us, but it is also a door through which we discover ourselves and to understand that we must choose. Antonioni helps us see, and his films are but one doorway to that choice.
This film could also be titled The Tragedy of Bobby Fischer. Though I hate to say it, I feel much of the blame should fall on Bobby’s mother who abandoned him for her social causes and taught him, by her example, to make oneself the center of the world. Chess was Fischer’s escape, but chess is neither a loving parent nor a philosophy to sustain one through the dark hours. Still, and though he may have had a psychological disease, Fischer must bear at least most of the blame for his own choices and his spiritual darkness. And yet, and ironically, what a truly marvelous chess player and an example of dedication to excellence. As they say in the film, what he left us were his games.
And if you are curious: Fischer vs Spassky 1972 Game 6
French professor Geneviève Sellier (Université de Caen–senior member, Institut Universitaire de France) gave a lecture “The Politics of Gender in French Cinema” at New York University’s La Maison Française on April 14th, 2010. Sellier is the author of Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (Duke University Press, 2008; translated by NYU Professor Kristin Ross).
>We glorify the protests of the past. We have seen (or remember) the civil rights marches, the sit-ins and other actions. We remember the anti-war movement. We remember May 1968 and other important dates. But where are we today? Remember the huge global anti-war protests just prior to the invasion of Iraq. Or the mass protests at the Republican convention. Remember the police crackdown on the protesters? It was like clockwork, surgical, carefully crafted like extraordinary rendition. But it also got violent at times – the anti-riot police were the ones who typically led with the violence. And recently we saw the same thing at the G20 protests in Pittsburgh. But, like the protests of the romantic past, we once again wonder at the role of the police and the individual choices of each officer.
Check out this video and ask yourself what is really going on.
Now read this excerpt from a news report on National Public Radio regarding the G20 summit and, specifically, the protests outside the summit.
ROBERT SIEGEL (host): And have the protests been going on throughout the entire city?
SCOTT DETROW (on scene reporter): They have. After the tear gas, the march broke into many small groups. It stayed out of downtown, from what we can tell. Police are responding by breaking up these clumps of protesters. I saw one after the tear gas was fired. They were peacefully marching down the street and police officers swarmed the block from all directions. They got out of the car and they just pushed the protesters into side streets, and that’s what they’ve been doing. There have been arrests here and there, we’re hearing from other news outlets. But that seems to only be happening when marchers are directly confronting police officers. For the most part, police are just trying to show a presence and trying to get these marchers to break up on their own.
I find both the video clip and the NPR report fascinating, not because they are anything special, but because they say a lot about the structures of power that we have come to view as normal. But should they be normal? Consider the situation: A group of representatives from the richest and most powerful nations on earth come together to discuss the future for all of us. But the the G20 has been around for some time already and the world is in trouble with widening gaps between rich and poor, increasing corporate control over such basic things as water rights, food distribution, farmer’s crops, and of course the economy. In fact, it could be said the recent bailouts of large companies around the world represent a kind of coup d’état. It may just be that the current economic crisis (and the steps to remedy it with tax dollars) is evidence of the increasing loss of real power on the part of the government (a government of the people) over the economic/big business sector.
MICHAEL MOORE: We’re here to get the money back for the American People. Do you think it’s too harsh to call what has happened here a coup d’état? A financial coup d’état?
MARCY KAPTUR (Representative from Ohio): That’s, no. Because I think that’s what’s happened. Um, a financial coup d’état?
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah.
MARCY KAPTUR: I could agree with that. I could agree with that. Because the people here really aren’t in charge. Wall Street is in charge.
Given our democratic ideals the situation looks grim. One could easily see the recent election as a kind of sham (as are most elections but especially this one), a game those in power managed in order to help all of us feel like we participated in their power play. Maybe democracy as it’s been sold to us is a way to tie us up with mythological fairly tales so that the powerful few remain in power. So why would not people peacefully (or even angrily) march down the streets where the G20 is being held to protest? And why wouldn’t those marchers see the police as something like turncoats?
And this brings me to more questions: Why do police (working class men and women apparently there to uphold basic freedoms of speech, especially when it is most needed) seem to automatically view protesters and demonstrators as enemies and radical provocateurs? Are they trained to think that way? Or is it something closer to social influence and group think? Why, when anti-riot forces come out in overwhelming force, they end up being the group most prone to violence? Could it be something like the old adage, ‘to the man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail?’
Why does our society accept as normal such activities as the use of tear gas, batons, knocking people to the ground, tasers and rubber bullets, and now anti-riot siren devices, by police against weaponless, non-violent protesters? What is the psychology?
I won’t pretend to have the answers to these questions. However, when I see the way the police in this country deal with protesters I cannot help but be reminded of some very famous sociological studies, horrific events, and historic observations. My point here is not to equate actions so much as highlighting the way the human mind works in various situations.
Milgram experiment: Showing that people will do terrible things as long as someone (preferably someone “official”) tells them to.
Stanford prison experiment: Demonstrated the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with an apparently legitimizing ideology along with social and institutional support.
My Lai Massacre: Showing that individuals are capable of anything when part of a group, following orders blindly (as soldiers and police are trained to do), and operating in a tense situation outside of normal experience.
Banality of evil: Hannah Arendt’s observation that evil acts are most typically carried out by ordinary people viewing their actions as normal.
Social influence: How we are all greatly influenced by others around us, the situation we are in, and tendencies we have toward self preservation, being liked, and not being stigmatized.
I have come to believe the actions of police toward protesters reflects aspects of all these sociological and psychological characteristics found in the list above – though to a substantially lesser degree in some cases. But there is one other factor that possibly plays to largest role, that of hegemony.
Now hegemony is a good college level word for why people acquiesce, and even embrace, the power structures that control, and even sometimes enslave, them. If you did not study the word in college you may remember when Hugo Chavez touted the book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky when he spoke at the U.N.
Chavez aside, the concept of hegemony, first proposed by Antonio Gramsci as a way of trying to understand why the working classes did not rise up against their oppressors as the Marxists predicted, is a way to understand how the powerful persuade the less powerful to adopt the values of the ruling class. We live in a country that denies the existence of class structures in terms of power. We speak of middle class or working class merely as sympathetic terms used by politicians to manipulate votes. We do not accept the concept of a ruling class, but maybe we should.
In the videos on this page look at the faces of the police (the ones not wearing Darth Vader masks). There is a lot of anger in their eyes. I wonder if the anger comes from an internal struggle. I can only hope. I imagine the police feel a tension between the hierarchies of power they have come to believe must be protected (of which they are sworn to uphold) and their deeply internal sense of humanity and their belief in democracy (an understanding of which was probably formed in grade school like it was for most of us). They are caught in the clash of values, but they are a group operating with broad impunity and supported by the social dynamic of being able to hide within the apparent pawnship of their job. So they continue to manhandle, arrest, and attack the protesters. But their anger gives them away. They are alienated from the power they protect, and suppressing the very voices that are pointing out that alienation. That would make just about anyone angry.
Consider this video of another protest. If not for the police intervention it would almost be humorous.
I cannot imagine a less threatening protest. In fact I find it almost comical. Why then the overwhelming police force? Are they afraid of another Battle in Seattle? Clearly this is an example of those in power acting out of fear, but what do they fear? In fact, the whole thing has a kind of choreographed arc that not only speaks of a profound lack of imagination on both sides, but indicates the protest may be as much a product of hegemony as the police presence.
What do we do with all this? First, we should not romanticize the past. The efforts of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the past were often heroic, but they were also brutal and scary at times. People were seriously hurt and some died. Many went to prison. And we should know that external actions come from what is inside, but also know that one’s external actions affects one’s soul. The police who give in to the psychosis of power, abuse other humans, act out of anger, and stand in the way of freedoms that are not given by governments but only taken away, those police are damaging their own souls. And they are human just like me – frail, prone to delusion, living in a powerful culture, needed to be loved, and wanting to do what is right. We should not feel sorry for them, but we should empathize.
The fact is many of the above sociological/psychological concerns raised about police action can apply to the protesters. At times it appears some of the protesters are seeking to recreate a May ’68 kind of experience for their own pleasure. I wonder how many made the effort to reach out to the police in the days or weeks prior to their marches. I wonder how many pre-judged the police as irredeemable, in part because it is both the easier route and less romantic than manning the barricades. This is one reason that, while I support the protesters in general, I think the predictable protests outside every G20, G7, World Bank, etc., meeting may be as much a symbol of failure as righteous anger. We need more than theater, we need transformation.
Finally, we are all in this thing called life together, whether we want to admit that or not. It’s easy to march, easy to crack skulls, and very easy to write blog posts, and it’s difficult to love, forbear, and forgive.
>Why do I love this video below? I love how it is so odd (from an American perspective): A famous French philosopher gives a lecture into which a young “revolutionary” storms, creates a scene (and a mess), makes some kind of protest statement, and then the philosopher responds. All along the audience watches and occasionally applauds. It’s like a piece of performance art staged for the chic intellectual cohort.
The philosopher is Jacques Lacan. The year is 1972 (not really surprising).
Only in France is all I have to say. And yet, sometimes I wish I lived in a country that would take philosophy, and its philosophers, as seriously. On the other hand, for all his unintended humor, the young radical in this clip may be the more honest of the two.
>If there is a rock star in the world of contemporary philosophy it might be Slavoj Žižek. But I don’t even know what that means, except that, unlike most philosophers, he seems to engender a kind of rapture amongst his followers. Reviews of his books on Amazon are rarely uniform. They always included raves and pans. There is little neutrality. I think this should be the case with every philosopher.
Here is the documentary Žižek! (2005). Watch it an you will agree with me, there is no one like Žižek.
Okay, I am new to Žižek. I’ve seen his name for a while, but I don’t know his work as much as would like. From what little I do know about him I think he and I are in very different camps ideologically. The video above, though, is one of the more fascinating things I’ve seen lately. What a fascinating character he is.
I have no interest in addressing anything within the video per se, but I am fascinated that a philosopher shows up at a speaking engagement and even the standing room is overflowing. This is an extremely rare kind of happening in the U.S. – maybe with someone like Noam Chomsky, but even then not for his talks on linguistics as much as those on U.S. foreign policy. I also love that he has a sense of humor and love movies.
pilgrimakimbo 