Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980

András Bálint Kovács,
Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978-0-226-45165-7
US$22.50 (pb)
428pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press)

As we approach the end of the 2000s, it is worth remembering that it has been fifty years since that annus mirabilis during which history and aesthetics took a quantum leap. In February 1959 Fidel Castro arrived in Havana. Spring saw Miles Davis recording the seminal jazz album Kind of Blue. In October a Soviet probe transmitted the first photos of the dark side of the moon. That year certain art films – BreathlessShadows, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning400 BlowsHiroshima, Mon Amour,L’AvventuraLa Dolce Vita – changed what cinema could be. It was an efflorescence of rare velocity. Screening Modernism re-evaluates the classics of that flowering, and situates these serendipitous releases amid the philosophical, political, and artistic contexts of the period.

In an era in which we are spoilt for choice as movies, television, DVD, satellite and cable vie for our viewing habits, any thoroughgoing attempt to account for the canonical audiovisual moment is welcome. Kovács begins by examining the notion of the ‘modern’ as it emerged in the 1920s avant-garde in France, Russia, Germany and elsewhere, tracing pre-war modernist impulses as they emerged out of movements in painting such as Expressionism, Impressionism and Surrealism. Kovács is good at summarizing paradigm shifts in a quotable sentence: “Early modernism was essentially a phenomenon of industrial mass culture; late modernism was the first cultural manifestation of the information- and entertainment-based leisure civilization.” (33) Such a propensity is a gift to the student essay.

The book’s scope is ambitious, defining the classical/modern distinction in its early chapters, then charting the institutionalization of art cinema amid the establishment of film festivals in Venice, Cannes, Berlin and Edinburgh. Whilst the 1920s avant-garde saw filmmakers and theorists attempt to account for cinema as a visual medium, the emphasis of post-war modernism was on the quest for mental representation, given a multitude of external cultures and influences impinging upon the image’s ability to chart psychological registers. Post-war modernism became the first truly international style or movement in cinema. And 1959 seemed seminal. Kovács writes:

It occurs not very often in the history of art that one single year brings so many radical novelties that determine considerably the evolution of a genre or a style. But that is exactly what happened in 1959 in European cinema. These films were not only emblematic of modern cinema, but represented all the important trends of modernism that would later spread throughout Europe and the world…almost the whole spectrum of modern cinema was opened up at once. (292)

As his book pivots around 1959 and Kovács thinks about the efficacy of singling out one year as a film-historical watershed, he prompts the interesting speculation of what a book commemorating 1959 might be like. Indeed, as rich and rigorous as this history of post-war aesthetics is, you find yourself wanting a little more of the history behind the history, so to speak. It may seem a great deal to ask of a book already so bold in its sweep, but given the tumultuous events going on around the middle decades of the 20th century, it would be a welcome service to scholarship to link up say, the preoccupation with ‘nothingness’ in Sartre with Europe’s experience of occupation and resistance during the Second World War, or to investigate the Cold War mood as it seeped into 1950s and 1960s Resnais, Antonioni and Godard.

This aside, Screening Modernism proposes a taxonomy of trends from the late-1950s to the mid-1970s, mapping variations of modernist form characterizing different regions, cultures, countries and individual directors positioned within an overview of the historical evolution of trends and currents. Kovács essays modernism’s favoured genres – mental journey, investigation, picaresque, essay, melodrama, etc. – tracing subtleties of camerawork in Antonioni, Janscó, close-ups in Bergman, the impact of May ’68 on the political turn modernism took from 1966, as well as providing a (useful) definition of nothingness as a primary philosophical idea in post-war art cinema.

But Kovács’ sentences often mirror the attempt to hold too much together in short form. For anyone seeking a working introduction to Deleuze, or a potted history of auteurism from Alexandre Astruc’s caméra stylo to self-reflexivity in Godard, this book is very handy, but the sheer wealth of detail and insight deserves better editing. Whilst deserving space on the serious cinephile’s bookshelf, Screening Modernism should go back to the publisher for a final going-over. It is easy to be picky, but here there is so much to choose from: Chantal Akerman’s name is perennially spelt “Ackerman”. Motifs, surely a key term for a taxonomy, is spelt “motives”. There is no date for Tomás Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). And syntactically cumbersome, the sentences go on and on and on. As for the factual errors, these are not so frequent that they detract from the exacting intellectual ambition of the book, but they do glare. Bergman had “virtually no followers” we read. What about Woody Allen, an arch-legatee of Bergman, surely? The book also confuses the British Free Cinema movement with its more famous successor the British New Wave. The Free Cinema movement did not emerge out of the theatrical tradition. It was the result of a British Film Institute funding initiative to re-invigorate British cinema cinematically, owing more to the poetic tradition in British documentary than to the British theatre, the hidebound traditions of which it opposed. Kovács draws plentifully on a treasury of post-war Hungarian filmmaking, but is Janscó’s continuity style really “the most original and most influential innovation since the beginning of modern cinema”? There is also an irritating habit of shortening film titles.

Such glitches make this book turgid reading, but at other moments it is not merely serviceable – helpful on Fassbinder’s theatricality and postmodern sensibility, but pithily eloquent: “All that is at stake in modern melodrama is understanding helplessness” (89), and enticing in its analysis of such as Antonioni’s Neo-realist noir Cronaca di un amore (1951). Screening Modernism is a path-breaking exploration which suffers from the lack of care shown by its publisher.

Richard Armstrong,
Cambridge University, U.K.

Created on: Sunday, 23 November 2008

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