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The Political and Cultural Function of the Movie
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15427 |
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EDITORIAL
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12 / 1989 |
1,351 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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The Special Section this month examines the impact of films on culture. As the articles in the special section make clear, film is playing an increasingly important role in the life and conversations of educated Americans. An increasing number of directors are credited with important cultural contributions, and film critics have become important personalities. Although I recognize the pragmatic importance of the film phenomenon, I will take a dissenting view in this editorial.
I must confess to having lost my fondness for cinema after seeing Last Year at Marienbad in 1961. Movies I find are most boring when they pretend to great sophistication and turn out to be most entertaining when least pretentions. Although film can be an art form, personally I find that only a small number of directors--Renoir, Ray, Flaherty, and perhaps two or three others--have possessed the required talent. And I am sick to death of hearing the political opinions of stars whose incoherent views are broadcast only because of their celebrity status.
Nonetheless, I retain fond memories of my former movie-going days. Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story transformed the way in which I saw space and light. In The Bridge over the River Kwai the tension in the Japanese colonel's neck when he severed his topknot encapsulated the remarkable way in which that film captured the incommensurability of Japanese and Western cultures. The magnificence of this achievement left me searching for a properly descriptive and appreciative term. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Kenton provided many pleasant moments, even though Chaplin's acclaimed Modern Times said more about the way he a would have functioned on the assembly line than about the individual worker of the 1930s, for whom the job reinforced his proud status as provider for his family.
Chaplin, of course, had a political message he was trying to communicate. He possessed a great satiric talent that overshadowed the sophomoric quality of the argument he was making in that film, a talent that was manifested magnificently in The Great Dictator. Sometimes, however, the genius of a director is informed by a talent so great that his conscious intentions are irrelevant to the illumination his films inspire.
Greand Illusion, the greatest film I have ever seen, like All Quiet on the Western Front, had the purpose of reinforcing antiwar sentiment in the Western world. No one should doubt that war is an evil, and the greater the war the greater the evil. But this 1937 film was designed to reinforce the very political currents that made World War II possible and necessary. Like many others in the movie colonies past and present, Jean Renoir was a political naïf. Unlike many films, for instance Z or Missing, the movie did not savagely distort history. However, its impact, although not intentional, was to reinforce tendencies that helped to produce monstrous evils.
How then can I claim that it was the greatest film I have even seen and perhaps the greatest film ever made? Renoir was a true artist, an intuitive genius. His purpose was to make an antiwar film by capturing on the screen the damage that war did to European civilization. What he captured was the tragedy of a changing social order.
Erich von Stroheim, the German commander of the prisoner of war camp, and the captured French lieutenant came from
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