Michel Ciment,
Film World: Interviews with Cinema’s Leading Directors.
New York: Berg, 2009
ISBN: 9 781845204 57 0
US$24.95 (pb)
384pp
(Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers
http://www.bergpublishers.com/Categories/flm/tabid/602/Default.aspx)
Reviewing a collection of interviews as a unified book is a strange business, all the more so when the collection in question features 25 different filmmakers, from 19 different countries, interviewed at various international film festivals over a period of 33 years. In groping for unity, the reviewer might look at the authorial influence of the book’s interviewer for points of consistency, but when the interviewer-critic is as professional and self-effacing as Michel Ciment that agenda becomes relatively pointless. Unlike, say, Francois Truffaut or Robert Hughes, Ciment is not a celebrity critic whose personality and idiosyncrasies play an important part in the critical text’s overall appeal. So, though the value of such a book is self-evident (just look at the list of big names here!), the question of how far the reviewer imposes a facile sense of theoretical or ideological unity on the assorted interviews remains problematic.
This problem of critically imposing unity on a disparate text seems particularly pertinent for the study of cinema. One of the many persistent hiccups in film studies is the prevalence of blinkered, theoretically driven film histories that over-simplify their subject (however broad it may be) for the sake of a demonstrable thesis, a “forced coherence” resulting from an eager scholar’s desire to fit everything or almost everything into his or her neat little model of how and why people make films. For the film academic, history tends to be regarded as something “out there”, or “back there”, certainly not something that pervades the walls of the academy. For the journalistic film critic, however, history assumes a different form, mostly because the critic experiences his or her own work as a part of history. The history that serious film journalism offers is thus a more “present” form of collated experience, less filtered for its logic, less timeless perhaps, but also more flexible to difference and potentially more honest. These are some of the reasons why high-quality journalistic film writing offers such a vital counterpart and foil to its more institutionalized academic twin. The handful of really excellent journalistic film critics writing today show us hermetic scholars that cinema is often not as complicated as we like to think it is, and even more often, not as simple.
In his aptly titled Film World (apt because of its non-descriptiveness) Michel Ciment does just this. He offers readers a pan-historical document of the period in international cinema that he has witnessed since his initial apprenticeship at the Paris film magazine Positif in the early 1960s. The interviews Ciment presents span almost the length of his journalistic career (the earliest with Andrei Tarkovsky is from 1969, the most recent with Im Kwon-taek is from 2002) a career that closely parallels the rapid rise and slow decline of what is too generally labeled “art cinema.” Film World (first published in French in 2003) is very much the document of a man who has spent a lifetime closely associated with the most prestigious and powerful of the European film festivals, first as a journalist and editor of Positif, then as a frequent member of festival juries, and most recently as President of FIPRESCI.
Glancing over the list of filmmakers interviewed in the book, the prestige of Ciment’s critical position in French cineaste society is clear. Only the big established names are here, only those that the French film aristocracy have designated artiste. Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Bernardo Bertolucci, Martin Scrosese, Mike Leigh and Werner Herzog make up the millionaires club. Abbas Kiarostami, Zhang Yimou, Im Kwon-taek and Hou Hsiou-Hsien represent the artistic cream of Asia. A “younger” generation of cine-brats gets a say in Lars von Trier, Wong Kar-wai and Aki Kaurismäki, as do a couple of Canadian filmmakers well-loved in France, Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. All that’s left is room for a couple of eyebrow raisers. Satyajit Ray (the man whose name used to denote Indian cinema) gets a welcome inclusion, as do Manoel de Oliveira, Peter Greenaway, John Cassavetes and Krzysztof Kieslowski. Oh, yes, and women and antipodeans get a flag in Jane Campion. So it’s not a controversial or sensational line-up, however “great” it might be. Note that all of these filmmakers have had a less than difficult relationship with Cannes and other elite European festivals.
In his short introduction to the book, Ciment states the goal of this collection is to provide an overview of the varying cinematic values and artistic personalities of postwar cinema. (He acknowledges the many omissions he has made in order to do this. Many prominent American names, for example, were excluded in favour of an international spread.) The book’s merit, he thinks, “lies in expressing a personal choice dictated by a love of invention, of singularity, of beauty and of aesthetic and moral courage” (p. 5). Unconcerned with a particular politics or theory, Ciment promotes intelligent freedom over intellectual systems. He gently suggests the detrimental influence that some theorists have had on film culture in their efforts to politicize or conceptualise the problems of cinema (he reserves a special mention for those who have been announcing cinema’s death for the past thirty years). ‘Critics should,’ Ciment argues, ‘reject the discourse of leaders and the logic of theories and doctrines.’ (p. 4) The big idea that Ciment has to offer, if it can be called an idea, is that postwar art cinema is in fact a wonderful and multifarious thing, and not something that should be judged negatively against the unrepeatable innovations of silent and early sound cinema.
It’s very much the differences between filmmakers’ approaches and personalities that Ciment’s book brings out. In his interviews, with the more senior filmmakers especially, Ciment’s questions function merely as catalysts for the director’s own interests and inclinations. Bresson, for example, runs the show in his interview, allowing Ciment to occasionally punctuate the discourse. Godard is a more interactive interviewee, but he too takes the discussion wherever he feels like going (and this means pretty much anywhere).
The value of these interviews is as much their reflection of a creative personality as their clarification of key ideas in the director’s work. Witness, for example, Godard’s enthusiastic penchant, at age 68, for making enormous generalizations, “We’ve come to an end of a certain era in cinema and even in art in general, an era that lasted for about ten centuries,” (p. 125) and his admission of his own intellectual superficiality: “I quote a lot of people I’ve read three sentences of.” (p. 125) Bresson, on the other hand, remains at the end of his filmmaking life (the interview is from 1983) almost perversely consistent with his earlier statements, situated in his own highly specialized artistic concerns, still almost entirely preoccupied with questions of cinematic specificity.
Younger filmmakers exhibit similar differences. In a revealing 1986 interview, a young Jane Campion elaborates with remarkable self-awareness on her anthropological interest in human feelings. She notes her talent for the observational poetry that has marked her best work ever since. Ciment’s interview with a 29 year-old Lars von Trier, on the other hand, exposes a precocious genius and cinephile still looking for his own voice, still trying to apply his personal vision to the aesthetics of his idols: Dreyer, Welles and Tarkovsky. There’s also a long 1974 interview with a 32-year old Scorsese, in Cannes for Mean Streets (USA 1973). Then as now, he barely draws a breath to cover all potential corners of Ciment’s questions.
Other moments in Ciment’s book point to surprising similarities in the approaches of filmmakers usually thought to belong to very different camps. In the interviews with Mike Leigh and Hou Hsiou-Hsien, for example, we can observe in each director a conscientious commitment to develop a film’s narrative in unison with its production process. Leigh states: “It’s important to remain open, not to commit yourself formally too prematurely.” (p. 256) Similarly, though far more surprisingly, Hou confesses a similar approach: “I never decide the structure in advance. So the rhythm can come when we edit.” (p. 180) Such differences and unexpected similarities shed light on the varied and ultimately free way that different film artists approach their work.
These are just a few examples from a disarmingly large collection that I cannot do justice to here. For a film studies culture more preoccupied with film studies than with films, serious journalistic books like Ciment’s offer a useful keyhole into the messy reality of how and why filmmakers actually make their films. Film World is all the more useful because of Ciment’s restrained excellence as a critic. The sober sensitivity he has to fine art is not accompanied by a fear of the present, brash though it can seem, and this allows him to discuss contemporary masterpieces without excessive effusiveness or cynicism. Ciment also knows the filmmakers he writes about and interviews (not always personally, but as professionals), and this saves him from talking about cinema in the abstract, as something other than people. For every ambitious academic reformulation of cinema and its history, we need a book like this.
Thomas Redwood,
South Australia.
Created on: Saturday, 19 December 2009