Rechecking the Heartbeat of Art Films

Generational politics are a tricky business. From either side of the divide, it is so easy to be blinded by one’s own preconceptions, hang-ups and personal preferences that overstatement is barely a half-step away. Dennis Hopper, full of himself after the touchstone success of “Easy Rider,” once reportedly poked then-aging director George Cukor in the chest while youthfully boasting, “We’re going to bury you. You’re finished.”

After reading Kenneth Turan’s recent commentary “New Cinema’s Heartless Beat” (Dec. 2’s Sunday Calendar), I couldn’t help but nod my head and shake my fist, as his salient points got lost within a thesis that might best be summarized by the classic line from the cartoon “Scooby-Doo”: “You meddling kids!”

I’m not interested in poking Turan, a critic of tremendous wit and insight, in the metaphorical chest. But, as a fledgling critic and member of the age group in question, I couldn’t help but feel that he has painted those filmmakers in their 20s and 30s (and some on into their 40s) with too broad a brush. He has overlooked the skill, sensitivity, intelligence and nuance of these directors in the name of generational gamesmanship.

To start, his “heartless art film” argument seems structured on the shakiest of foundations. The three films (“Audition,” “Porn Star” and “Bangkok Dangerous”) with which he begins his essay are all receiving extremely small releases (and all have been kicking around the festival circuit for some time now), hardly making them the stuff of seismic shifts in movie-making. Then Turan neatly slides into discussing a tenuously connected group of filmmakers--including Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Mary Harron and Richard Linklater--whose films receive wide enough releases to move them well out of the art-house market.

Nit-picking, you might ask? No, I would argue, because if one were trying to define something about the “younger” generation of filmmakers, it would have to be the ways in which they have been forced to weather extreme changes in the environments of financing, production and distribution, brought about by conglomeration of the major studios and the increasing corporatization of the independent distributors. Perhaps trying to actually learn some lessons from the mistakes of those who came before them, many younger directors seem to be exhibiting an extreme savvy, or at least awareness, when it comes to negotiating the business side of show business.

The model of the romantic artist lost in his own head is perhaps now slightly outdated, replaced by someone still obstinately concerned with personal expression and artistic achievement, but also aware of the restrictive industrial framework within which they labor. Call it a sellout if you must, but no one wants to end up bankrupt as often as Francis Ford Coppola, or broken on the rocks of his or her own hubris and excess like countless others. As a video clerk said to me recently in reference to Peter Bogdanovich, “How do you go from ‘Targets’ to ‘At Long Last Love’? I never got that.”

Though he skirts saying it outright, I would guess that the films with heart so sorely missed by Turan are those of his own youth--what can now be thought of as the golden age of the European art film, which included Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave, and its American descendant, the New Hollywood films of the 1960s and ‘70s.

As monumental as these films remain, this somewhat narrow view of what film can be overlooks everything from the existential pulp of cheap thrillers like “Kansas City Confidential” to the ghoulish creepiness of “Deep Red” and the reckless high jinks of “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.” Which is to say that no single theory or strand can truly encompass and define the wildly strange and endlessly quixotic world of the movies.

If one must look for connections among the younger generation of filmmakers, perhaps none is as strong as the desire and ability to merge, to cover all the bases at once, unifying the jumble of film history in much the same way any local video store does.

The central claim that contemporary filmmakers are no longer interested in the human condition and have turned their backs on those who came before them seems to me misguided and shortsighted. One could easily argue that the purpose of the bare-bones story line in “Moulin Rouge,” for example, is so that the extravagant emotionalism and overwhelming passion of the film’s overall structure (it is, after all, a film actually about love) may in fact soar that much higher, unimpeded by unnecessary convolutions of plot. Much as Lars von Trier did in “Dancer in the Dark,” Baz Luhrmann seems to have intentionally returned to a simpler form of storytelling in an effort to provide himself a stronger spine from which to branch out and move forward. There may be no finer tribute to the cinema’s past than to put it back into action.

I found the timing of Turan’s article rather perplexing as well, in that I thought the filmmaking generations had reached a proper state of equilibrium. To the best of my knowledge, no younger directors are actively seeking to displace the Spielbergs and Scorseses of the filmmaking world. Neither is anyone disavowing the timeless majesty of Kurosawa, Renoir or Truffaut, to name just a few of the most common touchstones of the great “heartful” cinema of virtuous humanism Turan points to as a bar of achievement never to be crossed.

As far as I can tell, the young generation of filmmakers, to the extent that they even fall together in such a way as to warrant the label, are simply trying to keep at it--making movies, taking chances, pushing boundaries. Isn’t that ultimately what our cinematic forebears were always up to as well?

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Mark Olsen is West Coast editor of Film Comment magazine.