Diversity or Dumb Realism

SPECULATIONS ON CANADIAN FILM AND ON SEA IN THE BLOOD BY RICHARD FUNG Unquestionably, the challenge of contemporary civilization is the challenge of diversity. Every day, pollutants endemic to industrial development diminish the bio-diversity of the world. The corporate rush towards convergence diminishes local initiatives. In North America, the major automotive manufacturers or the major television companies devise products that all look very much the same. Innovation, market research insists, might trouble sales. Innovation might also trouble politics. Innovation suggests alternatives and alternatives remind citizens, now called consumers, that political options might also be possible. In the United States, however, because the Green Party couldn't command a sufficient percentage to acquire official party status, Ralph Nader couldn't debate with the Big Two in the recent presidential election. In Canada, although minority voices are more in evidence, both the major political parties, the Liberals and the Alliance, wish to retune the country to be more in harmony with the values of self-interest of the United States. In their own move towards convergence, they wish to diminish diversity. In the field of culture, more specifically within cinema, this movement towards convergence represses originality. Stylistic conformity is both cause and effect of other social changes within the circulation of film. The substitution of film festivals for the art house circuit works against a sustained knowledge of the potentiality of cinema. During the mammoth festivals at Montreal or Toronto, during ten days that shake the world, viewers have a choice of over 300 films. During the 346 days that follow, within the economically marginalized repertory cinemas, viewers have a choice of perhapsten films not from the main stream. These shifts in both production and circulation during the last thirty years recently led Susan Sontag to lament the death of cinephilia. Sontag recalled the days when cinema was a crucial part of everyday life: Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life. In those days, film style was informed by philosophy. A tracking shot possessed an ethical dimension. The content of movies transcended their subject-matter. As art critic John Berger has insisted, content is not the same as subject-matter: is what the artist discovers in his subject. Content is created through the process of discovery--a process that becomes the film's style. Style does not embellish a film's meaning: it enacts the meaning. In the early 1960s, there was an exciting diversity within film. The jump-cuts and zip-pans of Godard's A bout de souffle (1959) enacted the breathless pace of the film's protagonist; while in Quebec, in ways even more astringent than Godard's, Jean Pierre Lefebvre achieved a different style for every film he made, a different for every ethic, as he would explain. In L'amour blesse(1975), the extremely minimal style subtends the limitations of the woman's life; while in Avoir 16 ans(1979), the rigorous enclosures of its slow zooms and pans reinforce the boy's confinement within the school system. These were wonderful times, with the cinema informed by innovation. But current filmmakers either reject the formal achievements of the past or, increasingly, are ignorant of them. When in the early 1980s Peter Weir abandoned his Australian career to work in Hollywood, he confessed in Film Comment that an individual style is incompatible with an international reputation. Culture complicates commerce. Commerce constricts culture. Watching the Canadian films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, I was nudged into considering the state of cinema in this country. While there were some stylistic bravura achievements - Denis Arcand's Stardom, Robert Lepage's Possible Worlds, Denis Villeneuve's Maelstrom -- there were other films that really faltered owing to their inability to imagine a style adequate for their subject-matter, an aesthetic adequate for their ethic. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.