The Sky Between the Leaves by David Walsh

Author:David Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-893638-38-9
Publisher: Mehring Books
Published: 2016-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

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104 V.G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works, “Literary Reveries” (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1948), 14–15.

World Cinema and the World’s Problems

2005 Toronto International Film Festival

World Socialist Web Site; September 23, 2005

In recent years, how could one have countered the argument that the state of international cinema refuted the materialist conception that the evolution of the world determines the evolution of art? After all, the products of the film industry grew increasingly trivial even as economic conditions worsened for masses of people and political life grew ever more ominous.

Of course, to argue that social life ultimately determines the course of art is not to suggest that the one is ever identical to the other, that art under any conditions reflects social truth in some automatic or seamless fashion. Events, traumas can and do intervene and divert art from its truth-telling course. The film industry as a profit-making industry in particular is susceptible to social pressures. At its best, Hollywood hardly offered a “close reading” of American or any other society.

In any event, the retrograde character of American studio works in particular has been itself an expression of social trends: the vast social gap opening up between the wealthy elite (including the Hollywood upper crust) and everyone else, a related intellectual and cultural decline and a growing evasiveness on the part of a prosperous middle-class layer in the face of troubling events.

The American circumstance was the most pronounced, but similar processes were at work elsewhere: increasingly privileged and socially indifferent layers came to prominence in France, Japan, Scandinavia and beyond (add profound political disorientation to the mix in those countries formerly run by Stalinist regimes).

In the mid-1990s, certain Asian filmmakers (in Iran and Taiwan, in particular) swam against the stream, upholding the principle of a democratic interest in the lives of ordinary people and the details of everyday life against the culture of celebrity and money. Unsurprisingly, they were not so impressed by the American example, Iran and Taiwan both having suffered under vicious US-backed dictatorships for decades.

However, the abstract humanism many of these filmmakers adhered to, which was largely unmixed with an understanding of the great events of the twentieth century, proved an unreliable guide to the complexities of the late 1990s and the early years of the new century. Taiwanese cinema has almost completely lost its way, and while the Iranians continue to produce serious, humanistic works, they do not reach the heights of those made a decade earlier. We have entered perilous and demanding times.

Objective reality provides a powerful impulse. The truth about things cannot be eternally swept under the rug. New tendencies are emerging. Notwithstanding the immense obstacles, cinema has begun to register the way things are for masses of people, albeit in a confused, preliminary and not always thoroughly artistic fashion. This latter weakness is perhaps inevitable. Significantly new artistic form is a response to stimuli originating outside art. For years, art and cinema have appeared dead to this kind of stimulation. Various formal twistings and

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