A New Year and A New Start for the Visual Arts

While 2007 at first seemed as if it was going to be a really terrible year for serious cinema and television, by year's end film and television producers redeemed themselves. Films such as No Country for Old Men, I'm Not There, Michael Clayton, Asassination of Jesse James, In the Valley of Elah and Lions for Lambs proved that the political awareness once displayed in the Hollywood films of the 1970s may be creeping back into American films. Unfortunately, all these really amazing and challenging films have gone unnoticed by most Americans. Instead of seeing films that might have something to say in this the age of "dis-information" audiences flocked to tentpole movies like Spiderman 3, Pirates 3, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and American Gangster. I am not opposed to popular culture nor popular films, but what I am opposed to is the constant theme of American's to lose themselves in fantasy as our troops continue to die and get injured. Or worse yet, the constant presence of global capitalism dictating people's emotions, their politics, and their active engagement with indifference.
One film that encapsulates these thoughts was the monster hit 300 which made well over 200 million dollars in 2007. Here is a movie that is designed to showcase the advances of digital filmmaking technology but in its need to show off its cool abilities, the movies loses its cinematic property: that is it becomes flat and uninteresting as a piece of entertainment. However, what does make the film interesting as Slavoj Zizek notes, is the way in which the film sells the ideas of militarism and hypermasculinity as natural and ideal for the survival of nations. As the Spartans fight in the film it becomes apparent that this is a movie which wears the philosophies and values of American neo-conservatives. What is most ironic about the film is that as it depicts fascism as "chic" it is also a film that embodies the pleasure of male-male desire: what with all the naked male chests, long hair, and intense scenes of male-male relationships. Leonidas may claim to be an overly virile example of the heterosexual Spartan man but the ways that he is shown onscreen complicate this notion.
In addition to thinking about these few films I have managed to read quite a few really interesting and enlightening books on film. Stephen Teo has published a monograph on the Hong Kong director Johnnie To (Breaking News, PTU, Election Parts I&II, Exiled) who is easily one of the best and most accomplished filmmakers working today. Teo's book is the first of its kind, a sustained study of auterism and its connection to generic expectations. He examines how To utilizes the generic patterns of Hong Kong action films to critique and deconstruct the identity of a global citizenry.
Equally interesting is Peter DeCherney's book Hollywood and the Cultural Elite. In this historical/ theoretical study Decherney illustrates how the business interests of Hollywood were an active participant in the formulation of Hollywood and especially American films as works of art and objects worthy of study. Like Dana Polan, Janet Staiger and other film scholars, DeCherney is problemitizing the discipline in order to show that like it or not the study of film is connected to economics and the needs of the studio system. Another book which explores the effects of the studio system and its relationship to cinema is a book by Joe McElhaney: The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli. In this book he looks at how the art cinema movement of the 1950s and 1960s influenced and eventually altered the ways in which these 3 directors approached their craft. These changes brought to mainstream American filmmaking, McElhaney argues effected the careers of New Hollywood Directors such as De Palma, Scorsese, and Coppola. Many of these narrative and cinematic tropes he identifies are still present with us today. Perhaps this is why 2007 turned out to be a better year for American films than I first believed.