Methuselah or Peter Pan?

UNESCO Courier, July-August, 1995 by Jean-Claude Carriere

It is very hard for us not to realize we are 100 years old, for everyone keeps on telling us so: the cinema is about to clock up the first century of its existence.

Is the cinema young or old? Has it, within a mere century, come full circle? Is it not beginning to repeat itself, to show signs of senility and approaching death? Could this first century also be its last?

It is certainly true that the language of film has evolved incredibly fast. The gulf that separates a monologue in Racine from a Surrealist poem, or a Giotto from a Kandinsky, was bridged by the cinema in less than fifty years. It is an art in a hurry and ever on the move, a form of expression that is constantly being manhandled and mauled. This sometimes leads film-makers to regard straightforward shifts of syntax, or state-of-the-art equipment, or satellite broadcasting, or so-called "new" images, as profound or even revolutionary changes. That great inventiveness, which has been a characteristic of the cinema since its very beginnings, tends to generate a state of exhilaration in practitioners of film, which encourages them to confuse, not for the first time, technique with thought, technique with emotion, technique with knowledge. Signs of change are mistakenly identified with the deeper substance of film. The wonderful proliferation of images that dog us wherever we go only aggravates this feeling of intoxication. Struck dumb by each new marvel of technology, we obstinately overlook the most fundamental thing of all: the true and singular meaning of what we see. Yet what we see is a repetition of the same familiar patterns in different technological disguises. We talk of eternal youth and renewal, and we applaud. This explains our sense of utter confusion, our feeling that everything we thought we knew is constantly being called into question. It explains our permanent state of feverish dissatisfaction, our almost unhealthy need to switch from one form to another - and to regard that process as real change.

It also explains our weariness, which arises from the repetition of an illusion. We know full well that at a time when we are swamped by images it is increasingly difficult to create an image - a truly dense and radiant image which our brain immediately locks into and never abandons.

So is the cinema old? In its 100 years of existence, it would seem to have gone through every conceivable phase: primitive, classical and baroque periods, followed by a renaissance (also known as the "New Wave"), a Surrealist, symbolic and even abstract period, all jumbled together and overlapping each other without any chronological rhyme or reason. The result today is that film-makers seem to have lost their productive ambition and are resigned to working in an often conventional narrative form or producing remakes of the same old stories.

Amazing maturity There was a time, thirty or forty years ago, when the cinema vowed it would swallow up all other forms of expression, from architecture and painting to music, drama and, of course, literature. It was hailed as the complete art, the art we had been waiting for since the beginning of History, the art of the twentieth century and the centuries after it.

Naturally, the dream fizzled out. Literature is not dead, nor is painting; and the theatre all over the world seems more thriving than ever. Film has had to resign itself to being nothing but film - which is already quite an achievement. And the technical exploits which brought it such loudly proclaimed glory are now a nuisance and even a hindrance.

Sooner or later we may enter the universe of virtual images and be able, in our drawing rooms, to act out scenes with utterly submissive creatures that are the spitting image of Marilyn Monroe or Napoleon. But that day is still several decades away, and in the meantime the cinema remains an image limited by a frame and projected onto a flat screen, either large or small. That projection has to obey a certain pace and send out a precise number of frames per second, otherwise the film being shown becomes an incomprehensible mishmash of images or else, on the contrary, slows down and stops.

Paradoxically, then, what was once the very strength of the cinema may today be its weakness. Film is a technical exploit, but an exploit limited by the technique itself. It is far from certain that we shall succeed in extricating ourselves from that contradiction.

The cinema has also aged in another, even more alarming way: it has lost its inventive, investigative streak, selling its soul to commercial forces and giving up the notion of original expression. As a result, a great debate continues regularly to pit American distributors against European film-makers. Let us examine that issue in a little more detail.

Two traditions

The American cinema, or rather the American sound image as conveyed by both cinema and television, seems to be spreading into every corner of the world, rapidly destroying all local production. This conquest is in fact a reconquest. At the beginning of the 1920s, Hollywood enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the manufacture of moving pictures - about 80 per cent of world production. That percentage fell during the decades that followed, as a result of the rise of national film industries and the advent of the Second World War, which cut off many countries from the American distribution network.