Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
All of these people in their teens and 20s -- along with a handful of older film scholars who argue that today's young people are at least as fascinated by classic films as their predecessors were -- say that their appreciation can be attributed to the availability of film and a process of acquired taste that comes from exposure to an eclectic bunch of movies. With cable, video, DVD and the rise of restored film prints like those put out by Rialto Pictures, "kids can self-educate," says Jeanine Basinger, head of the film program at Wesleyan University. "They didn't have film Ph.D.s when I was learning about film in the '50s," and film buffs had to explore on their own, Basinger says. "Today's kids are returning to that ideal."
Today's students of film are coming of age in a time when independent cinema has catapulted out of the art houses and into the mainstream. The movie industry's burgeoning faith in independent and edgy film has brought everything from "sex, lies, & videotape" to "Mulholland Drive" to local cineplexes, creating a willingness in young audiences to see films that, in an earlier era, might have been categorized as dull or incomprehensible.
"The more popular contemporary movies in my circle of friends are the movies that are more challenging; the ones that are doing something offbeat or different in a narrative or visual sense -- like anything by David Finch or Wes Anderson, or Richard Linklater's 'Waking Life,'" says Kate Brokaw, a freshman at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. "We're part of that trend that's looking for something different, and it makes us more willing to dig back into the past for older innovative work."
Most students and recent college graduates are lured back to traditional classics by their interest in current hits or cult films. They discover a contemporary director that they like, then trace his or her influences. Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," for example, led Wells back to the directors of the French New Wave -- Godard, Rivette, Chabrol, Varda. "The success of Tarantino's work raised up Asian cinema," says Bruce Jenkins, director of the Harvard Film Archive. "People weren't talking about John Woo before 'Reservoir Dogs.' And 'Run Lola Run' is a great film that knits together German legend with a very contemporary subject. If the director [Tom Tykwer] can do what he did with an old subject, people wonder, what was [F.W.] Murnau [the director of "Nosferatu," a 1922 vampire story that was also the subject of 2000's "Shadow of the Vampire"] doing in the '20s?"
But if German and Japanese films are hot -- which is the case not just at the Harvard Film Archive but also at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Calif., and at universities such as Wesleyan -- what kinds of films are they replacing? Have classics considered crucial by aging film buffs fallen from favor?
The students, professors and young film geeks I queried admitted that Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini and Godard had lost their status in the classics lineup. However, Ray Carney, a film professor at Boston University who maintains a comprehensive Web site on film and other arts, believes that simply citing names doesn't fully explain what's happening. It's a certain style of film that today's audiences seem unable to grasp, he says. The "spiritual" films have been shoved aside, explains Carney -- those that offer "a transformative experience," those that "expose us to new ways of being and feeling and knowing."
It isn't so much about the directors, says the film professor; it isn't just the old ones who get the boot. While Antonioni's and Bergman's work from 40 years ago fit Carney's description of unfavored films, he also cites the work of '70s indie heroes like John Cassavetes and relative newcomers like Abbas Kiarostami ("A Taste of Cherry," 1997), Mike Leigh ("Secrets and Lies," 1996) and Todd Haynes ("Velvet Goldmine," 1998).
The key issue with these films, Carney says, is that "you don't get easy gratification out of them. You're often left puzzled or frustrated. You may have to see them a second or third or fifth time." And precisely because they're difficult, says Carney, a caustic critic of academic multiculturalism and the press, they're eliminated from curricula and today's updated canon. Film culture's gatekeepers (except at Boston University, Carney says) favor films that fit easily into a political agenda -- Who's being oppressed? What would Marx think? -- or have an ironic, pop-cultural and literal sense of art. A film like Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence" -- the story of a woman's struggle with mental illness and her husband's unorthodox attempts to keep her sane -- can't be explained by these postmodern theories, Carney says, so it's dropped.
"I was at the Stanford film department, at Middlebury, at the University of Texas, and no one recognized [Cassavetes'] work," says Carney, who was a personal friend of the filmmaker. "It wasn't, 'Oh, we show it sometimes'; it was blank stares. They all thought he was just an actor in 'Rosemary's Baby.'"
To Carney, the contemporary filmmakers that many students cite as their favorites -- Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Todd Solondz -- lack depth. Just as kids in the '60s were attracted to "Bonnie and Clyde," "Easy Rider" and other anti-establishment pictures, today's kids are attracted to movies that show what Carney calls "the dirty underwear of American culture."
"It's not bad in itself," Carney says. "'Magnolia' is a better film than 'Titanic.' But it reveals an institutional bias to show films that pander to the youthful desire to drop out, or believe that the world is a load of crap."
Get Salon in your mailbox!
