Prestige, Affect, and Forgotten Films: Another Manifesto for the Cinematic Experience

If you check out Salon.com's recent article "Oscar, Are You Listening?," you're bound to find some really interesting comments (my personal favorite is Farhad Manjoo's assertion, "The thing about [There Will Be Blood] is that every encounter ends up on the lonely side of loony; you're led to think these folks are merely eccentric, and then, across several pivotal scenes, it turns out, no, they're actually far, far further gone than you ever suspected.") But at the end of the article, IFC News host Matt Singer raises an interesting dilemma about our current cinematic taste culture by pointing out that Once and Music and Lyrics are "practically the same movie and they're both quite good," but that the latter "has already been forgotten, another Hollywood product destined for the discount bin of movie history."

It's a strange reversal of how we normally discuss value in the popular imagination: usually it's the big-budget Hollywood film that is destined to be remembered (at the very least through constant replaying on cable movie networks), while the small independent non-American film tends to get lost in the dustbin of history. But it also raises an interesting point about the ephemera of cinema that should always be obvious to us but is rarely discussed. We talk semi-frequently about "lost" films (it's a burgeoning field of scholarship, and I know someone in my department who does excellent work with them), but that category is suggestive of films that are absent but still somehow remembered, often fondly and with the vain hope of recovering it once again.

But Singer raises the specter of forgotten films, those films which we once experienced fondly but which are somehow lost affectively rather than materially. The film as an object still exists, but our culture as a whole has not generated the kind of affect for it (either loved or hated) that sustains its life in the public imagination. It's an incredibly common thing: hundreds of films are released every year, and, if I recall correctly, the average American movie-goer visits the cinematic temple around seven times a year. How many of the films that get made just drift away in this manner? Check out any random year in the IMDB to see how many of the hundreds of films released that year you actually saw. How many of them have you even heard of? How many of them could actually be raised in conversation and given even a spark of recognition?

Most interestingly, this article connects the ratio of forgotten-ness among films to the amount of prestige the picture was awarded (most critics would probably point to box office returns and DVD sales). Ted Pigeon also just raised a similar point about the manner in which great films are forgotten because Oscar discussion limits the field of inquiry. And they have a point: new film buffs (such as myself back in the day) frequently turn to past award winners/nominees and films appearing in any number of best-of lists as a guide of how to expand cinematic knowledge. Films with no award nominations and limited box office like Music and Lyrics don't make it on to these lists, and they are thus ignored ("written out" would be too active a phrase) when cinema history is recorded for the public. Realizations like this one remind us that canons are built upon a process of active exclusion, rather than inclusion: the attempt to bolster the best that has been thought in the world (to paraphrase Matthew Arnold) is really only the side effect of years of culturally whittling away our collective memories so that we only have a select few memories from which to choose. It is a process of effacing the multiplicity of media experience to bolster the singular aesthetic experiences of a singular few. [NOTE: In point of fact, I haven't seen Music and Lyrics either, and I hadn't intended to do so until reading this article. Now I'll have to add it to my Blockbuster queue right above Once, which was already on the list.]

It's a sad state of affairs, really. Time, effort, and money is dumped in to every feature made, and only the most disrespectful of film-goers would have the temerity to suggest otherwise. It's one reason why I try to find something--a character, a scene, a musical cue, a single image--that makes even the worst movies I see worthwhile. When confronted with the ephemera that is the cinematic experience, we have to realize that our personal affective responses are precisely what contributes to the manner in which prestige is accorded and thus to the manner in which films are remembered for posterity. The cinema needs some of that old time religion, in which people genuinely arrive in the theatre to experience a kind of communion with something outside themselves (a character, a scene, a musical cue, a single image, a critical understanding of the culture surrounding us, a self-awareness of why we would engage in the absurd activity of sitting in a darkened room with strangers only to watch lights flicker across a screen). These are the things that can restore our belief in the cinema, and allow us to question whether a belief in this kind of media is really even necessary. And it is this kind of communion with the cinematic experience that we must carry into our daily lives. This would be better for the films which are better off remembered for something and for the people who watch and care about them in some way.

10 Best Films of 2007: Overview

It's that time of year, when critics professional and amateur (or, as in this case, professional critics of a different stripe) chime in with passionate pleas for an "objective" look at the very best that cinema had to offer in the past year. Beyond a kind of preview of the awards season chaos to ensue shortly (if they aren't challenged by the writer's strike, that is), this is a strange effort to create a canon based on a quality that ultimately gets tallied and statistically weighed to give added weight to what are fundamentally subjective portraits of what represents a film of "quality." Just as many critics weigh in with half-hearted critiques of the ideology behind these lists each year as critics who weigh in with half-hearted attempts to justify that ideology on its own terms. Others, like Ted Pigeon, will comment on the social value that this kind of public forum on the nature of taste holds for us, and I tend to agree. Top ten lists aren't merely an effort at canonizing the "great films" of any given year: they are an effort to examine precisely those values that we label as canonical in any given year, and this is a politics of contemporary concerns that is too important to wave off in an ill-fated attempt to subvert the authority of the critical establishment.

Thus, in that spirit, I've cooked up a list in twelve volumes that will hopefully speak to those conerns that go into determining what we value and what we devalue this year. To start it off, I've provided a brief overview of those concerns below, an analysis of what critics at one time called the zeitgeist of our cinema before the term became passe for its univeralizing tendencies. I can only say that this analysis is far from comprehensive: these are just some trends that I've noticed in the movies I admired personally this year. The next eleven volumes will count down will count down what I felt were the most important and personally affecting movies this year, starting with a short list of great movies that don't fall within the traditional ten, and then moving up to the "best." In each individual review, I'll try to point out where I think the film fits (or doesn't fit) into the general political mood that cinema established this past year, hopefully giving the list the kind of complexity and attention to difference that tends to characterize some of the more interesting lists out there. So, without further ado:

The best (American, mostly--due more to my own viewing habits than to the films themselves) movies of 2007 were generally characterized by the kind of quiet, resigned melancholy that also characterized some of the best American cinema of the 1970s. Beyond a similarity in tone, the films from that decade have come back to us as some kind of cinematic return of the repressed: how else to explain why Andrew Dominik would mimic Once Upon a Time in the West, why Billy Ray and David Fincher would riff on All the President’s Men, Ben Affleck Chinatown, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo Dawn of the Dead, James Mangold The Wild Bunch, Paul Greengrass Three Days of the Condor, and even, in Judd Apatow’s aesthetic trade-off of drug-addled slackerism for yuppified neurosis, Annie Hall. That many of the actors in those classics have moved on to crap like Lions for Lambs, Scoop, and The Bucket List (while the rest are, sadly, dead) only shows how irrevocably lost that cinematic past is in today’s world even as we try to mine its paradoxically cynical hope once again.

The parallel with '70s cinema makes sense, though, when one considers how eerily familiar and yet completely alien are the socio-political climates in which the movies of today and those of yesteryear arose. Trapped in an unpopular war which has spawned protests at home and abroad and stuck with an unpopular president unwilling to lead us to some, any resolution, we’re once again struggling to find some form of comfort or answer to our problems, one that just doesn’t seem to be available to us through the standard political means. Filmmakers from the left have started to take notice, producing films like Rendition which at least appear so misguidedly reductive and self-satisfied that they only serve to remind everyone why the new New Left is failing to strike a popular chord in middle America today. In this context, with all of this public angst bubbling to a frustrated and disillusioned surface, it’s no surprise that some of the biggest popcorn entertainments of the year have either parodied the kinds of heroes we wish we could still appeal to in earnest (Ratatouille, Hot Fuzz, Stardust’s deliberate queering of heroism, Beowulf’s unintentional version of the same) or have posed some of the toughest ethical quandaries on film in recent memory (the latest Die Hard film, the latest Bourne movie, the latest Harry Potter, the latest zombie film, etc.). Perhaps this is also because they often resurrect characters or tropes born of different cinematic environments and place them in today’s screwed up world. And perhaps not coincidentally, it’s the task of the one non-English film on this list to literalize all of the thorny metaphors that articulate issues of power and control (that politics of the personal) to the dreamscape of the cinema, vividly imagining how the constant terrorist onslaught on our collective imaginary results in a very tangible hole at the center of our political life.

In this sense, astute observers may remember 2007’s cinema as a kind of hopeful postmortem of our murdered culture (notice how all of the top six films are actually about the failed investigations of some kind of crime). Filmmakers have echoed their own political situation and their own anxiety about the place of filmmaking in today’s world (with the ever-increasing rise of convergence technologies, the sudden awareness that the home market really determines the kinds of films that are made, and the ubiquity of the kind of pastiche-beyond-irony which characterizes the YouTube generation) both by going back to the well of great American cinema of the past and by turning their heroes into characters who are trapped by the past (not necessarily their own, either) and unable or unwilling to move into the kind of future that is forming before their eyes. The situation for these characters seems to be getting played out endlessly in our political discourse as well, in a coming election year whose only promise seems to be that we’re inevitably going to blow our chance for a fresh start once again. Our heroes this year (in politics as well as in characters like Ed Tom Bell in No Country, Patrick Kenzie in Gone Baby Gone, Robert Graysmith in Zodiac), in other words, are the latest version of what Nixon had termed “the silent majority,” mad as hell about the world but not mad enough not to take it anymore. Perhaps this is because, while the political scenarios abroad are so familiar, the wars taking place back home are no longer against poverty and institutionalized racism, but are, apparently, against abortion rights, gay marriage, and health care reform. The cultural landscape is vastly different, and, as a result, even some of our youngest heroes seem haggard and world-weary. At least we have Harry Potter (and, with any luck, at least a small percentage of his millions of young readers worldwide) growing into a genuine man of action.