ART FILM IS DEAD

The always titillating Camille Paglia dedicated her monthly Salon column to what she considers to be an era with no art films.

Here’s an excerpt:

On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s. We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces — what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” or “Persona”? Perhaps only George Lucas’ multilayered, six-film “Star Wars” epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.

Tragically, very few young people today, teethed on dazzling special effects and a hyperactive visual style, seem to have patience for the long, slow take that deep-think European directors once specialized in. It’s a technique already painfully time-bound — that luxurious scrutiny of the tiniest facial expressions or the chilly sweep of a sterile room or bleak landscape. What my generation was passionately responding to in European films was their sexual candor and their low-budget protest against the peachy Technicolor artifice and forced jollity of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking in the Marilyn Monroe/Rock Hudson/Doris Day era, with its postwar myths of ever-imperiled virginity and ideal marriage.

I’m not sure who, if anyone, still views moviegoing as a quasi-mystical experience. As a college student in the mid-’60s, I saw the movie screen as a door into another world. When Roman Polanski’s hypnotic “Knife in the Water” was shown in my very first week at Harpur College (the State University of New York at Binghamton), life seemed to change overnight. Jean Cocteau’s “Orphée,” a surreal modernization of the Orpheus legend in existential Paris, sent me staggering out speechless under the twinkling upstate stars.

Other indelible memories: the grinding of the collapsing stone balustrade in the baroque gardens of Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad.” The night wind eerily stirring the spray-painted green trees in the London park of Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” The column of army tanks ominously rumbling through the city street in the unknown land of Bergman’s “The Silence.” The life-giving waters of the Fountain of Trevi suddenly stopping in Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” stranding Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg mid-kiss.

Here’s the link.