Feature: Looking For Creators
A filmmaker isn’t supposed to say
things; his job is to show them.
- François Truffaut
Our mission as spectators is to see films. But, what about those films that are impossible, or almost impossible, to find and see? Do those movies fit the category of the “unseen film”? Films impossible to see… Isn’t visibility the condition of possibility of any given film? So, won’t its “unseen” quality be momentary or, at least, exceptional?
In some countries (mine, for example) movies tend to arrive a bit late or, sometimes, not arrive at all. So, beyond festivals, cineclubs and the Internet, it could be difficult to find certain films. In spite of that, I would not place those movies into the huge category of the “unseen”. They can’t be that: labeling them as such would mean accepting defeat and denying the remote chance of being able to watch them someday. And for us dreamers (cinephiles), that is inconceivable: the films we have not seen are only momentarily unseen.
So, what is the “unseen film”? I believe it is a category that only includes films that will stay forever unseen, and I believe the eternally unseen films are the ones that have already been seen: each and every one of the films on Earth has been seen at least once. Therefore, every single existing movie is an unseen film. And here it is that experience and interpretation (on this topic I suggest you read Conall Cash’s article in this dossier) join the game, for both (not confronted but together) determine what remains hidden from our gaze: all existing movies fit the category of the unseen film because we see them from the perspective of who we are and what we know, from what we’ve lived and where we come from. Yes, I know, that is as old as the world itself, and it is repeated and repetitive (also boring). Luckily, the present text is not about that obsolete “subjectivity vs. objectivity” discussion. This text is about experience, interpretation and their link to the concept of “the unseen film”.
In September of 1961 Cahiers du Cinéma published “Marienbad Year Zero”, an outstanding article by André S. Labarthe. In that piece, he meditated about Resnais’ film but also about neo-realism and about the audience’s role in cinema. Amongst those ideas, Labarthe wrote that “the spectator’s look is as much creator of the film as is the intention of its makers.”
And he went on to say:
This shows how far we are incapable of looking at (I won’t even say understanding) an incident without interpreting it and without our look adding to the event to form an amalgam, a mixture which by nature belongs as much to the documentary image as it does to the fiction with which we envelop it.
The use of two words strikes me in these passages: “look” and “creator”. Those two words are repeated through Labarthe’s entire article as if they belonged together. By linking them, this critic claims Resnais’ genius resides in making the audience’s look or gaze take part in the creation of the film. Of course Labarthe speaks of interpretation, but he also speaks of experience. It is, in fact, clear (it has been, for ages) that interpretation can lead to one thing being a million different things, but Labarthe also underlines experience as a potential creator: “we are incapable of looking at (I won’t even say understanding)…”. When we are watching a movie we are, at the same time, creating one. And we create it not only by our interpretation (understanding) but also by our experience of it (look). Regarding this creative aspect of the spectator, in a 1977 interview with Richard Thompson, the American critic Manny Farber said:
The person making the movie should be held responsible for everything that’s said and shown, and so should the people seeing it. It should be a massive kind of intelligence.
Although I strongly defend auteurs, I support Farber’s idea of each of us creating a new film in every single one he sees. And I also believe that new film we create lays in our minds and remains unseen to everyone but us… unless we speak it out.
Richard Thompson: Underlying your writing is the assumption that the reader has seen the film, even though the surface presentation often seems journalistic – you haven’t seen this yet. Most of what you say only pays off to those who have seen the film.
Manny Farber: Criticism should make that assumption and encourage it. The audience should be fantastically dialectical, involved in a continuing discussion of every movie. Rather than stressing superlative movies or guides to culture or antiwar tracts, feminism, whatever, this dialogue should attempt pursual and continual reassessment (…). The place of both criticism and movies should be finding out, getting intelligence.
In the same interview, Farber speaks about the strongest bond between movies and film criticism: “finding out”. So – following his line of thought – we could say the best way to access the unseen film should be film criticism, an art that nurtures from experiences and interpretations (the plural is completely intentional), an art that can transmit those experiences and show us how someone saw and felt a movie. There’s our trip to that hidden world: film criticism, an art that makes visible the invisible and gives cinephiles a portal that enables them to enter a whole world of unseen movies.
It is said that there are as many films as there are viewers, but I think there aren’t as many films as there are unseen films. To watch movies is to create them, to construct them with our gaze. “Man is a prisoner between three walls and it is on the invisible fourth that he tries to inscribe his loves, calculations and dreams”, wrote Jean Cocteau in Les Lettres Françaises. Consequently, every existing film is potentially an unseen film, or hundreds of them. And, as I said, I do believe in auteurism but I also believe the auteur’s work enable us to be creative. At the movie theatre, our gaze is the tool with which we build secret films, those films that remain unseen but can still be shown and experienced through film criticism.
Techy
31/08/11 - 10:14 PM
Muy bueno Jose!!!!!!!