New Cinema’s Heartless Beat

I’d sensed it before, but I wasn’t sure. I’d puzzled over it, wondered if I was imagining things, misreading the signs. But it was in the lobby of the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles a few weeks ago that I realized the change I’d thought I’d noticed was all too real.

One of the city’s larger venues for art house and alternative film programming, the Nuart is a theater I’ve always been fond of because it reminds me of the cinemas I went to in Manhattan when I was younger and getting increasingly interested in movies outside the Hollywood mainstream.

These were places like the New Yorker, the Thalia and the Bleecker Street, scruffy temples dedicated to the reigning cinematic gods whose screens featured the works of Francois Truffaut, Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray and others. But judging by the trio of one-sheets I saw in the Nuart’s lobby, that theater’s programming is going down a rather different path.

First came a poster for a new Thai movie called “Bangkok Dangerous,” dominated by a huge photo of a gun being held to an understandably unhappy man’s head. Next to that was “Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy,” apparently an in-depth look at the career of one of hard-core’s more durable male performers.

Finally, in a place of honor, was the poster for a current Japanese film called “Audition” that featured admiring quotes from not one or two, but three respected critics. “Not for the faint of heart,” said critic one. “A great sick rush,” added critic two, while critic three went everyone one better by calling it “the kinkiest, creepiest, most pungently sexual horror film in recent memory.” Anyone expecting “Jules and Jim” or “The Rules of the Game” was clearly in the wrong place.

That comparison may be extreme, and those films, none of which I have yet seen, may actually be worthwhile. But that doesn’t change the reality that, without a doubt, a new kind of art house movie has come to town, a distinctive type of picture with its own audience that exists alongside traditional (and still very much admired) fare like “The English Patient” and “You Can Count on Me,” but is as different from it as chalk proverbially is from cheese.

The viewers of this new fare (although there are, of course, numerous exceptions) are largely in their 20s and 30s, and the directors they fancy are young as well. Among these are Darren Aronofsky (“Pi,” “Requiem for a Dream”), David Fincher (“Seven,” “Fight Club”), Mary Harron (“American Psycho”), Paul Thomas Anderson (“Magnolia”), Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”), Richard Linklater (“Waking Life”) and Harmony Korine (“Gummo” and the screenplay for “Kids”).

Some of those films fit the new paradigm more precisely than others. Both “Rushmore” and “Magnolia,” for instance, have strong traditional elements. And some of those directors work for studios, and have not an art house, but a mass audience in mind. But taken in toto, they demonstrate an aesthetic that has little in common with the one that captivated the generation that came of cinematic age in the 1960s and 70s.

Although I’m not always enamored of these films, I look at the emergence of this new audience, this unexpected sea change in sensibility, not with anger or despair, but out of a sense of fascination about the inevitability of it all. Every generation wants and needs to have its own taste--that’s how it differentiates itself from the fools who came before. What’s especially intriguing this time around is to see how the new sensibility was formed in direct opposition to the values the 1960s and ‘70s partisans cherished the most.

Several qualities, at times together, at times standing alone, typify these new kinds of films. But it’s what they lack that defines them: Let’s call these features, for shorthand’s sake, heartless art films. It’s the new face of alternative cinema, so we’d better get used to it.

What these heartless art films often share is an enviable technical facility, but one of a particular sort. While the earlier generation of art films was entranced by the kind of smoothly moving cameras and long tracking shots epitomized by Max Ophuls’ ravishing “The Earrings of Madame de ... ,” the new boys like to slice and dice, cutting, cutting and cutting some more.

Recalling the blistering montages of Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov, these films often have a weakness for rapid, visceral editing, usually the quicker the better. In addition to being an end in itself, and a poke in the eye to the old kinds of leisurely mise-en-scene, this kind of exceptionally busy filmmaking sees the discomfiting of the audience as a primary aim. Anything that’s troublesome and excessive, that’s in your face all the time, is by definition the way things ought to be.

That way of thinking extends to heartless art’s subject matter and its aesthetic approach. Addicted to sensation, these new filmmakers and their supporters are interested almost exclusively in material that’s edgy, transgressive, difficult to sit through. The more aberrant the behavior, the further from the nominally normal, the more it fascinates. So we get the dehumanized, way-over-the-top junkies in Aronofsky’s version of Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Requiem” or the psychotic weirdo who’s the protagonist of “Chuck & Buck,” a Sundance competitor whose writer and star, Mike White, was admiringly described in the New York Times as someone who “established himself as the poet laureate of arrested development and mapped the limits of creepiness and dysfunction.”

Never mind that in a film like “Kids,” in the words of British critic Geoff Andrew, “the tone is relentlessly sordid, the view of these pubescent hedonists so hermetic, that the filmmakers’ ‘honesty’ seems exploitative and sensational.” In the heartless art world, it couldn’t matter less if you treat the material with any degree of success, sophistication or reality; just venturing out there and putting it on the screen are enough to win the laurels.

Of course filmmakers, and before them writers, have always been interested in breaking boundaries. “More than half of modern culture,” Oscar Wilde wrote more than 100 years ago, “depends on what one shouldn’t read.” What is different and peculiarly postmodern about the way heartless art films operate is that they are just that: proudly artificial and completely cold, deaf to any trace of empathy or human feeling.

Whereas the classic art films of the past prided themselves on how closely they could come to re-creating or understanding the subtleties of the human heart, these new films not only don’t care about that, they view even a touch of humanistic feeling as a regressive cheat, a quality whose existence is not officially recognized, something to be avoided if you want to be taken seriously.

Ask the people who’ve seen the admittedly visually brilliant “Moulin Rouge” numerous times if they’re not bothered by the clumsy and cliched nature of the hackneyed script and plot line, and they look at you as if you just don’t get it. Ask the partisans of the new French sensation “Amelie” or its predecessor, “The Girl on the Bridge,” if they don’t find them, well, heartless compared with classics of the genre such as “Children of Paradise” and “Casque d’Or,” and they truly don’t know what you’re talking about. Who cares about that kind of stuff? is the general attitude. That was then, dude, this is now.

As to why heartlessness is the trend of the moment, several answers suggest themselves, starting, as noted, with the notion that whatever’s anathema to one generation is catnip to the next. Also, it’s just possible that the security and physical comfort the newer audience has grown up with have given them a taste for the coldness, chaos and anomie they felt they weren’t getting enough of at home.

I am, of course, a bit saddened by the heartless art trend, because warmth and insight into the human condition are things I value. I’m going to miss films that share my predilections if they become a reviled, passe taste the way the sweepingly emotional silent films were for the generations that came of age just after the arrival of sound.

On the other hand, I’ve been mightily impressed by some of the films that nominally fit into this new category, from Alison Maclean’s “Jesus’ Son” (based on Denis Johnson’s short stories) to Mike Hodges’ “Croupier” and Christopher Nolan’s brilliant “Memento.” Plus, seeing these new kinds of films rise up and find a committed, passionate audience is testament to the ability of the medium to reinvent itself and make itself relevant to each succeeding generation. The existence of heartless art also reteaches the valuable lesson that one generation’s absolute cinematic values are viewed by another as retrograde personal taste.

And just as the wonders of silent film were rediscovered decades later, I am encouraged by the wheel of life and culture, by the fact that everything returns. I look forward to the day, inevitable even if I’m not around to witness it firsthand, when the children and grandchildren of “Fight Club’s” biggest fans discover the joys of “Children of Paradise.” Now that will be something to see.