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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
If young film buffs choose Tarantino over Antonioni, are they culturally illiterate? Some of their elders, self-appointed guardians of the cinematic canon, think so.
Oct 31, 2002 | At Kim's video store on St. Marks Place in Manhattan's East Village, the "Employee Picks" section is on the third floor, right in front of the registers and next to the new releases. In the midst of a labyrinth that only Magellan could navigate, the location of this display is one of the few things in the shop that makes sense. Not only does it give Kim's a chance to market the store's institutional knowledge to customers waiting in line; it also offers employees the chance to lure the ignorant away from blockbuster schlock and toward more complex classics.
Forget "Changing Lanes," the film buffs argue from their pedestals behind a tall maroon counter. For a real dose of class struggle, grab Brando's "On the Waterfront." Ignore "Star Wars," they demand; instead watch its epic predecessor, "The Seven Samurai."
Snobby cultural up-selling is exactly what you'd expect from a place that has "cult," "classics" and "independent" sections that each occupy twice the space allotted to new releases. But still, the rack of Kim's employee picks is full of confusing choices. If the group of 44 films is meant be a microcosm of film geek opinion, a democratic canon of the best classics new and old, then much of what was once considered important appears to have been lost.
The films standing on the worn wooden shelves hail from various eras and countries. But the so-called gods of cinema are nowhere to be found. Not a single work by Italian film royalty -- Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini -- has penetrated the hearts and minds of today's self-declared film aficionados. There are no Ingmar Bergman films, nothing from classic Hollywood giants like Howard Hawks and John Ford. Jean-Luc Godard? Alain Resnais? They're not there either -- nor are they among the employee picks in the uptown branch of Kim's near Columbia University. Most of the students who rent films from the stores avoid anything made before 1970.
I ask the woman behind the counter in the East Village store -- Rachel Nelson, a 20-year-old Pace University education student with a nose ring -- why the once-essential anchors of historic cinema now seem so passé. Doesn't anyone care about Hollywood's pioneers or the complicated psychological work of French New Wave masters like Truffaut and Godard?
"I don't really like French movies," Nelson says. "A lot of them seem pretentious."
"It's easier to see something that my friends have seen," adds a 27-year-old college-educated customer standing nearby. Renting old movies, he says, "is too much of a shot in the dark."
To older film buffs and critics -- particularly baby boomers who came of age during the American film renaissance of the '60s and '70s -- such apparent lack of interest is appalling. It's nothing less than a brand of cultural illiteracy. How could anyone with a love of film remain indifferent to Godard? What kind of buffoon fails to acknowledge the genius of Ford? Clearly, pronounce the self-designated deans of film ed, the celebrity-obsessed media, MTV and college film departments -- awash in postmodern relativism that makes Spielberg as important as Bergman -- have lobotomized Generations X and Y.
"In the '60s and '70s, there was a spirit of 'challenge me, show me new limits.' People enjoyed the feeling of being lost, of not getting it," says Columbia professor Richard Peña, chairman of the New York Film Festival. "Now, 'I didn't get it' is what's said in frustrated desperation."
Is the 16-to-30-year-old crowd intellectually lazy? Not necessarily. Today's young film fans are very willing to watch the meandering montage of a film like Fellini's "8 1/2." They see the work of yesteryear's auteurs quite often, in fact, both in their film classes, which are more popular than ever at many universities, and on their own, via the Internet, cable, video or DVD. But some of these young viewers are unwilling to worship Fellini and his contemporaries with the passion of their elders. Their lack of effusive praise for the "classics," as designated by their predecessors, should not be misinterpreted as a failure to see, understand or appreciate films that were once breathlessly described as perfect. Even if they don't gush at the first frame of a black-and-white dream sequence, most young film geeks have likely learned to value Fellini, Godard, Bergman and the others who regularly appear on film critics' top 10 lists.
Today's young fanatics, like the ones who came before them, simply connect more intensely, and prefer to focus on, their own discoveries. They follow their favorite directors' influences; they find their own favorite styles and masters. Just as the employees at Kim's demonstrate impressive depth in their selection of obscure films from Germany, Russia and Japan, youthful film buffs are digging into the past -- distant and recent -- for classics of their own definition. Instead of eschewing the canon, they're expanding it. Film illiteracy is a concept subject to generational interpretation. Could it be that the old school, in clinging stubbornly to threadbare favorites, is losing its command of the cinematic language it claims to have invented?
