Trailer Lazy: Marxist Filmmaker Edition
Sep 19th, 2008 | By Rick | Category: Clips and Trailers, PeopleOk, so it’s not a trailer. But I’ve been thinking a lot about film ethics lately (and taking it out on some hard-working bloggers). It’s something I know little about, except the basic arguments surrounding realism and expressionism and the like. But it seems to me that it’s something that is in short supply in film-making these days, and mainstream film criticism as well.
This guy certainly knows something about the subject. He worries about it in every frame of every one of his films. He and his Cahiers du cinéma cronies, including François Truffaut and André Bazin, wrote about it passionately, then put it into practice beginning in 1959 with The 400 Blows and then, of course, Breathless.
Here’s Jean-Luc Godard talking in 1973 about his film Tout va bien. Forget the outmoded categories — intellectual versus worker, for instance — and listen to his passion.
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Rick, He’s right that filming what is happening, a vacation, is a political act for people without the right to record anything else. Not political in the same sense that recording the truths spoken by a factory worker at a union meeting might be, but rather as an exercise of freedom of speech, a choice about where to aim the camera, a human coming to terms with his or her own existence in a meaningful way to that person. It reminds me of my conversation with Errol Morris about why the guards at Abu Ghraib took photos of what they saw and did in the prison. In some sense, they were understanding their existence at that time and exercising a freedom they probably shouldn’t have been in the eyes of their superiors. The content was more purely political, but it had the same thought behind it as a vacation film at the Dells.
Where the interpretive filmmaker fits in all this is a little more slippery. Filmmaking mediates reality, therefore, by definition, isn’t reality. Is that an ethically wrong act or does it recognize the meaning of parable, the human urge to create stories to represent physical and psychological phenomena, to understand a reality they are not experiencing themselves (e.g., war, violence against women). There is a danger in this interpretation, of course, because it can influence the way these phenomena are experienced or viewed. This is where we bump up against the ethical dilemma of whether a film like I Spit on Your Grave does more harm than good if it cannot be looked at dispassionately as representing one director’s state of mind. Perhaps the more skillful the director, the more confusion of reality with simulated reality, the less ethical the film. But even documentaries can be edited.
So what are we praising when we say such and such a film is a masterpiece? A happy marriage between skill and truth? Whose truth? How do we measure that?
Keep thinking, Rick. This question’s too hard to answer.
Of course, answering the question of what is an ethically wrong act is context dependent, both in terms of the climate the film is made and shown in, but also in the context of toward whom it is marketed and “aimed.” A film that is ethically suspect when targeted for teenage male audiences — who are notoriously unable to see nuances in purpose and tone — might be fine for adults who have graduated beyond Piaget’s concrete operations stage. Of course as well, some adults never reach that stage …
I see little difference in Godard’s argument as it applies to documentary vs non-documentary filmmakers. The choice of where to point the camera still exists, and it is still a political act, as the arguments in recent years over folks like Michael Moore (and even Errol Morris, of whose reconstructions I’m not uniformly fond) show. All art mediates reality, but the danger of the recording arts is that the distance between sign and signifier is not as great as in the non-recording arts, and so it is easier to hide that fact with unscrupulous techniques, whether documentary or not.
I agree about documentary vs. nondocumentary, though the latter gives one a better chance of observing trust.
I have an interesting idea to pose with regard to your comments on my blog about Tarantino’s irresponsibility with Death Proof and the general lack of ethics “today.” This is a comment from a radical feminist blog, I Blame the Patriarchy, that I visit from time to time.
“I did watch a few minutes of an old movie on TCM last night, though, and was repelled enough by its Yay Patriarchyness to embark on a series of contemplations on how Western literature would scarcely exist if plots did not so consistently revolve around the purity of the female lead’s vagina, puritanical conceits concerning marriage and divorce, and whose-baby-is-it. Seriously, if you take away bastards, fallen women, and dominion-over-the-uterus as plot devices, nearly the whole canon instantly evaporates. I honestly don’t know how TCM broadcasts this crap with a straight face. ‘The story of a man who lived a man’s life, the story of a woman who believed in one man.’ It amounts, in large part, to hate speech.”
Now it can be said that given the historical context of these films, there is nothing wrong with showing them. Yet, cartoons that portray racial and ethnic stereotypes, such as those produced during World War II, have been banned. You won’t be able to watch them in a theatre or on TV (though YouTube might make them available). In addition, some of the sexist films are on a lot of Best of All Time lists, guaranteeing that people of all ages interested in movies will seek them out.
What do you think of her argument? If you agree with it, what should we do?
As we say down here in the sunny south, now you’re meddling. I love all those old TCM flicks, especially the noirs which with their femme fatales reinforce the whole “blame the woman” vibe of the patriarchy . . . and I have to agree with the author of “I Blame the Patriarchy”: they are steeped in the narrative of the dominant culture which was — and is — the patriarchy.
It is true, as you say, that these films have historical value, and are entertaining to boot. In addition, they have “film school value” — I enjoy them from a film geek standpoint. But the fact of the matter is they reinforce the dominant cultural narrative in their structure and function.
When you say “cartoons that portray racial and ethnic stereotypes . . . have been banned” I must quibble a little. I think it’s a matter of scale, or “blatancy” — it’s true, the most blatantly racist cartoons have been banned, the black-face “Song-of-the-South” cartoons, for instance, or the original “Little Black Sambo.” But the modern media — film, print and television — is still deeply, structurally racist. As I type this, for instance, I am watching an ostensibly “liberal” television program, “Boston Legal,” wherein the only regular black character is a transvestite. I don’t know who to feel more offended for — African Americans or the transgendered, who are both played for smarmy humor.
I think blatantly sexist stuff has become a lot less prevalent since the rise of feminism. The folks who control the media (still overwhelmingly male) have learned that if they just do cosmetic stuff — make men the idiots in sit-coms and commercials; rapists and wife-beaters get their comeuppance in grim revenge fantasies — they can sell product to women, win Oscars and Emmys, and be able to claim no-fault. Their product still, deeply and structurally, supports the cultural status quo.
I do not see modern films and television to be any less fundamentally racist and sexist than TCM’s fare, they’ve just become a little more adept at hiding it, like a chameleon adapting to changing environmental conditions.
You can’t ban everything, but you can educate. You can point out the connections between racism, sexism, homophobia and the narrative patterns found in both old and new media. I think those of us who write about that media — and who have benefited from white, male hegemony by sequestering wealth sufficient to blog, for instance — can help this along.
Personally, I think sexism is much more commonplace in media today than racism. When you look at all the appearance-obsessed shows out there aimed at women–Project Runway [which I watch, btw], America’s Next Top Model, formerly Sex in the City, Desperate Housewives, and worst of all The Swan–the way casting always seems to have only one woman in a cast of men (think Law & Order, The Closer) with the woman perhaps being thrown a bone of being in a position of authority (this is true for African Americans to some degree as well), well, have we come a long way, baby?
Banning never helps, in my opinion, but you’re right that we need to educate people. Personally, I’m all for diversity education in schools. That’s where the stereotyping and prejudice starts. I’d love to see classes taken to films that provide different views of other cultures. I took my niece and nephew to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to expose them to world cinema. I’d love to do something like that at the Chicago International Film Festival, and I’d love to see other film bloggers do it, too, and allow the kids to post their impressions on the blog.
You are right about that, the appearance-based shows go a ways in tilting the balance toward sexism. The Swan was vile, wasn’t it?
Now we’re getting down to brass tacks, aren’t we? Now that we’ve had this multi-blog discussion, what do we do about it? I like the idea of somehow creating a place where we can discuss ethical stuff on the web, or increase awareness of the way our popular culture is aided and abetted by it’s media expressions, but would anybody play?
Well then, let’s put one together. I love talking about ethics.
If we did, what would it look like? Would it be like, say, film of the month club, which seems to be going nowhere fast? Would we chose a film, debate it’s ethical merits?
I googled “Film Ethics”, and could find no blog titled as such … it’s possible we could name such a place that.
I favor categories of ethical dilemmas, which would open the blog up to a lot of different and fun things as well as the more serious ones. We could talk about colonialism in films, whether Anna should have turned in Harry Lime, the questions posed by M, as well as the more esoteric ideas about cultural attitudes communicated through contemporary film, whether historical films with ethically questionable ideas still have sway etc.
We could post alternately maybe once a week to start and lean on our friends heavily to participate.
How does that sound?
Sounds good by me … what kind of blog platform are you thinking? We could host it here at coosacreek.org or go to a freebee at either blogspot or wordpress.com. Myself, I prefer Wordpress because of it’s open source vibe.
I’ve never used wordpress. Is it very different from Blogger? I have used that. I’m on Movable Type now, and until I can upgrade, I wouldn’t recommend it.
I like wordpress personally, I think it may be marginally easier to use, but only marginally.
Blogger has the advantage of the community stuff … most of our online acquaintances are on blogger. It’s easy to set up a multi-author blog, although not any more so than Wordpress. Either would be fine with me … we can go with Blogger since we’ve both used it.
If you want, I’ll set up a site and then send you an email to invite you to be an admin/author.
Cool. Let’s do it!