So this is what promising auteurs of the French cinema are now turning their hands to: Mindless entertainment with a sauce of pointless style, the whole served up on a bed of re-hashed American mass-market junk.
Not even after the Second World War was French cinema in such a dire state that a mess like this would be served up! Even its supporters do not seek to conceal its glaring flaws.
We should have realized that something was seriously wrong with contemporary French film culture when Bertolucci's 'The dreamers' actually turned the Nouvelle Vague into a nostalgic costume-drama: The very tendency which provoked the most important revolution in film theory and practice has become - ironically, but unfortunately without intending to express irony, - a retrograde parody of itself, dressed in papa's cast-offs.
Such disappointing and worthless films in fact represent, with supreme cynicism, a revival of the Cahiers-du-cinema-derided 'Cinema du papa' in the superficially plausible guise of mass appeal to the most shallow values of youth: Fat, elderly businessmen - or physically cultured feral ones in killer fashions - sit in the unsubtle glare of back rooms and fleece unadventurous, disillusioned and ill-educated youth of their money, in exchange for an empty fairground sensation.
Even the best new French films, like 'Laisser passer', seem largely nostalgic, when they are not pale imitations of Hollywood, or essays in disillusioned yet obsessional sexual morbidity incapable of achieving the vital freedom and balance of genuine, forward-looking creativity. Like its greater geo-political parent, the French revolution in film art has finally betrayed the fresh hopes of the new dawn, and led the intellectual romanticism of Truffaut into the squalor and decadence - albeit intellectualised - of films like 'The pornographer,' or the terror unleashed in 'Baise moi.'
You only have to look at the now ruined visage of Jean-Pierre Leaud to see the living death of Antoine Doinel.
Only in the almost hermetic reserve of Rivette, Godard, and Rohmer, who have practically retired into the silence of their private communion with personal values, do we see any possible source of inspiration. Unfortunately for us and for culture at large, the maturity of such contemplative dreamers intimidates any engagement with the world of instant gratification. Even Godard's aggressive politics seems to have despaired of the world. He keeps up merely the stance of a polemicist, for form's sake.
In the West we live, I regret to say, in a society profoundly inimical to personal values of this kind. The grace of the youthful revelation which the Nouvelle Vague gave us has long since faded into the common twilight of the prostituted urban day.
As with sex, the walk from the mystery of the outwardly darkened yet interiorly-illuminated auditorium into the anonymous and indifferent throng of the street is a saddening journey out of the rare illusion we treasure as the creative process, and into the commercial glare of mass-production. And we know that no return journey will now be possible, as the street is no longer the street of Paris in the 1960s.
For a while, we were all privileged to inhabit an idealised, intellectualized, Paris. That great city has been swallowed up in the ruthlessly global village. Olivier Assayas even makes his films from the anonymity of crowded Hong Kong. From that perspective, his 'Irma Vepp' recalled the streets of Paris in Feuillade's early, silent, thriller, which were haunted by the absence of all those people who had been drawn away by the vampire of international war-capitalism.
That remembered Paris is nothing but a ghost-town, except that it is not to the War that people today have gone, but to Disneyworld, and French cinema has become little more than an aspect of the industrialization of leisure. Where are artistry and integrity to come from in this culture of naked consumerism?
The rivers of inspiration have dried up, and only contribute to a stale and dusty pool of evaporating memories. One would wish to translate into French terms that great image of disillusion from 'Once upon a time in the West' where the quintessetial thrust of a European sensibility through the dream of an American West ends, exhausted, not on the crashing shores of the great Pacific Ocean, but on the filthy margins of a transient puddle in the middle of nowhere.
But a certain pretentiousness still clinging to these latter-day failures of the French film industry reveals only a profound lack of self-knowledge that does not even know how to expire decently. Their films are as full of animated corpses as that cemetery of light in Hollywood.
Perhaps the small and perfectly poised, but irrelevant, film essays of Godard represent the truest farewell to cinema's impossible dream, and its weird swan-song? His mysterious removal from our world of restricted reference at least preserves the concept of alternative possibilities - an absence, a zero: Place-holder in the binary union of night-and-day which maintains our persistence of vision. And one fine day, by another mysterious accomplishment of grace, we, also, may find ourselves once more translated by and into the light.
And so Truffaut steps aboard an illuminated cloud at the end of Spielberg's 'Close encounters of the third kind'. Perhaps in another forty years he will be returned to us?
Perhaps at least we shall be able to pick up his original message again on some Orphic, Cocteauesque medium of secretive cultural resistance, as an oracular modulation in the ether ...?
For at present it is the lead strip's expectant stream of silence which is the most engaging portion of any film. For onto this brief glimpse of possibilities we may project the whole of our own interior life. The films that follow now largely intrude upon this contemplation, which alone would enable us to grasp reality again.
Cinema was nothing less than an engine of thought; the movies are no more than a trick of the light. We have surrendered our critical role in the creative process to a synthetic dream of mindless satisfaction.
Welcome to the soul-destroying trip to be embarked upon in 'The matrix' or 'Demonlover.'
Welcome to a world of alien avatars, or technological succubi battening upon our sleeping reason, threatening our oblivious humanity.
Now there's a crime - there's a horror story - and there is real human interest: 'The invasion of the body-snatchers' for the post-Cold War generations, indeed. And it is the international conglomerates and their creatures, the corporate states, which draw sustenance from those living corpses which they animate by means of empty materialism.
Such creaking mechanisms as 'The purple rivers' serve only to divert talent and attention towards indulgence in transient and illusory pleasures, which provide no satisfaction at all. Such blatant commercialism only robs and beggars society. You will be the poorer for seeing this film.
Not even after the Second World War was French cinema in such a dire state that a mess like this would be served up! Even its supporters do not seek to conceal its glaring flaws.
We should have realized that something was seriously wrong with contemporary French film culture when Bertolucci's 'The dreamers' actually turned the Nouvelle Vague into a nostalgic costume-drama: The very tendency which provoked the most important revolution in film theory and practice has become - ironically, but unfortunately without intending to express irony, - a retrograde parody of itself, dressed in papa's cast-offs.
Such disappointing and worthless films in fact represent, with supreme cynicism, a revival of the Cahiers-du-cinema-derided 'Cinema du papa' in the superficially plausible guise of mass appeal to the most shallow values of youth: Fat, elderly businessmen - or physically cultured feral ones in killer fashions - sit in the unsubtle glare of back rooms and fleece unadventurous, disillusioned and ill-educated youth of their money, in exchange for an empty fairground sensation.
Even the best new French films, like 'Laisser passer', seem largely nostalgic, when they are not pale imitations of Hollywood, or essays in disillusioned yet obsessional sexual morbidity incapable of achieving the vital freedom and balance of genuine, forward-looking creativity. Like its greater geo-political parent, the French revolution in film art has finally betrayed the fresh hopes of the new dawn, and led the intellectual romanticism of Truffaut into the squalor and decadence - albeit intellectualised - of films like 'The pornographer,' or the terror unleashed in 'Baise moi.'
You only have to look at the now ruined visage of Jean-Pierre Leaud to see the living death of Antoine Doinel.
Only in the almost hermetic reserve of Rivette, Godard, and Rohmer, who have practically retired into the silence of their private communion with personal values, do we see any possible source of inspiration. Unfortunately for us and for culture at large, the maturity of such contemplative dreamers intimidates any engagement with the world of instant gratification. Even Godard's aggressive politics seems to have despaired of the world. He keeps up merely the stance of a polemicist, for form's sake.
In the West we live, I regret to say, in a society profoundly inimical to personal values of this kind. The grace of the youthful revelation which the Nouvelle Vague gave us has long since faded into the common twilight of the prostituted urban day.
As with sex, the walk from the mystery of the outwardly darkened yet interiorly-illuminated auditorium into the anonymous and indifferent throng of the street is a saddening journey out of the rare illusion we treasure as the creative process, and into the commercial glare of mass-production. And we know that no return journey will now be possible, as the street is no longer the street of Paris in the 1960s.
For a while, we were all privileged to inhabit an idealised, intellectualized, Paris. That great city has been swallowed up in the ruthlessly global village. Olivier Assayas even makes his films from the anonymity of crowded Hong Kong. From that perspective, his 'Irma Vepp' recalled the streets of Paris in Feuillade's early, silent, thriller, which were haunted by the absence of all those people who had been drawn away by the vampire of international war-capitalism.
That remembered Paris is nothing but a ghost-town, except that it is not to the War that people today have gone, but to Disneyworld, and French cinema has become little more than an aspect of the industrialization of leisure. Where are artistry and integrity to come from in this culture of naked consumerism?
The rivers of inspiration have dried up, and only contribute to a stale and dusty pool of evaporating memories. One would wish to translate into French terms that great image of disillusion from 'Once upon a time in the West' where the quintessetial thrust of a European sensibility through the dream of an American West ends, exhausted, not on the crashing shores of the great Pacific Ocean, but on the filthy margins of a transient puddle in the middle of nowhere.
But a certain pretentiousness still clinging to these latter-day failures of the French film industry reveals only a profound lack of self-knowledge that does not even know how to expire decently. Their films are as full of animated corpses as that cemetery of light in Hollywood.
Perhaps the small and perfectly poised, but irrelevant, film essays of Godard represent the truest farewell to cinema's impossible dream, and its weird swan-song? His mysterious removal from our world of restricted reference at least preserves the concept of alternative possibilities - an absence, a zero: Place-holder in the binary union of night-and-day which maintains our persistence of vision. And one fine day, by another mysterious accomplishment of grace, we, also, may find ourselves once more translated by and into the light.
And so Truffaut steps aboard an illuminated cloud at the end of Spielberg's 'Close encounters of the third kind'. Perhaps in another forty years he will be returned to us?
Perhaps at least we shall be able to pick up his original message again on some Orphic, Cocteauesque medium of secretive cultural resistance, as an oracular modulation in the ether ...?
For at present it is the lead strip's expectant stream of silence which is the most engaging portion of any film. For onto this brief glimpse of possibilities we may project the whole of our own interior life. The films that follow now largely intrude upon this contemplation, which alone would enable us to grasp reality again.
Cinema was nothing less than an engine of thought; the movies are no more than a trick of the light. We have surrendered our critical role in the creative process to a synthetic dream of mindless satisfaction.
Welcome to the soul-destroying trip to be embarked upon in 'The matrix' or 'Demonlover.'
Welcome to a world of alien avatars, or technological succubi battening upon our sleeping reason, threatening our oblivious humanity.
Now there's a crime - there's a horror story - and there is real human interest: 'The invasion of the body-snatchers' for the post-Cold War generations, indeed. And it is the international conglomerates and their creatures, the corporate states, which draw sustenance from those living corpses which they animate by means of empty materialism.
Such creaking mechanisms as 'The purple rivers' serve only to divert talent and attention towards indulgence in transient and illusory pleasures, which provide no satisfaction at all. Such blatant commercialism only robs and beggars society. You will be the poorer for seeing this film.