documents

Preface to
Movie Mutations
Edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin

To the memory of
Serge Daney (1944–1992)
and Raymond Durgnat (1932–2002)

Adrian Martin: The Movie Mutations project made its first public appearance in a 1997 issue of the French magazine Trafic – in a series of letters that appears here as Chapter 1. Why did you initiate that exchange, Jonathan?

Jonathan Rosenbaum: The project literally began with a taped dialogue between you and me in a Melbourne suburb in 1996. I was trying to solve a riddle that had grown out of some of my previous travels and international contacts – such as that first letter and that package containing your first two books that you’d sent me out of the blue in 1995. What piqued my curiosity was having met four extremely knowledgeable and highly energetic professional cinephiles based in different parts of the world who were all born around 1960 and had very similar film tastes, tastes which weren’t my own. The fact that none of you knew one another – except for Kent Jones in New York and Alex Horwath in Vienna – was what especially intrigued me, because all four of you, including also Nicole Brenez in Paris, gravitated towards the same set of film-makers. What were the generational conditions of this unconscious bond between strangers that traversed so many national and linguistic borders? That's what I wanted to explore in our dialogue, and, for practical reasons, this ultimately grew into a series of letters that I asked the editors of the French magazine Trafic to consider publishing. The fact that Trafic – founded by the late Serge Daney, who invited me to become an early contributor – was already highly international, grounded in cinephilia, and favourable towards highly personal expressions such as journals and letters made it an obvious choice.

Then the fact that these letters sparked off discussions in still other countries, such as Holland and Italy, involving cinephiles who were younger than the four of you, suggested a somewhat different development growing out of the initial project: an exploration of what cinephiles (and, in some cases, film-makers) around the planet have in common and what they can generate, activate and explore by linking up together in various ways. Though I started out wanting to explore the phenomenon of a certain unconscious 'global' simultaneity – which I found not only in the tastes of certain far-flung cinephiles, but also in the styles and themes of certain far-flung directors (which became my starting point in Chapter 5, comparing Yasuzo Masumura with several American directors) – the international exchanges and collaborations that ensued are cases of willed and deliberate simultaneity. In other words, a recognition of common interests, which include making certain films and critical positions more accessible and better known. A way of broadening the options.

The remainder of this book more or less traces that development, step by step. Some of the early chapters, such as the dialogues with Abbas Kiarostami in Chicago in 1998 and with Shigehiko Hasumi in Tokyo in 1999, followed by various email exchanges between others over the next three years, were generated specifically for the book, while some others – such as Kent's essay on Tsai Ming-liang, pieces of mine about the Rotterdam Film Festival and The Circle, and your own reflections about international musicals – were initiated independently of the book, but then became integral parts of it by suggesting new yet related avenues to follow.

Adrian Martin: Of course, some of these chapters developed concurrently, but their order, which is mainly chronological, reflects the overall process through which this book was defining itself – a kind of ongoing narrative leading us at times into unforeseeable directions, and inflected by contemporary events ranging from the attack on the World Trade Center to the death of Raymond Durgnat. All of which culminated in a second round of letters, five years after the first, sparked by the invitation of Quintín, a film critic and festival director based in Buenos Aires. So there's a certain widening geographical spread as well as a chronological development reflected in the book’s structure.

So, what began as your inquiry into an intriguing generational phenomenon became something else – a larger, collective meditation on many sorts of 'mutation' affecting film, and film culture, today. Let's start with the technological mutation that comes up in Chapter 1: this mysterious thing popularly called 'digital cinema', which brings with it a new definition of the filmic image.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: Daney was the first to raise this issue in the early 90s. For him, the cinema we once knew was based on the photographic registration of the world – a notion dear to his mentor at one remove, André Bazin. But with the digital image we can fake the world, paint the image. So what does this mean for our almost religious belief and faith in the cinema?

On the other hand, you have something resembling a reinvention of Italian neo-realism in the Iranian New Wave and in some of the notions of Dogme, so it's not as if Bazin's notions of reality are completely outmoded. There's still some carry-over of Bazin's idea as a kind of humanism. I mean, what was the cinema for, according to Bazin? It was a way for the world to keep in touch with itself – and that's clearly an issue today, even an urgent one when faced with the consequences of, say, American isolationism.

Adrian Martin: Isolationism is the opposite of another kind of mutation which this book pursues: the changing map of world cinema, and how our perceptions of it and accounting for it must keep pace with that mutation. The cinemas of Asia and the Middle East have, over the past decade, assumed a prominence in world film culture unimaginable twenty years ago. Many of us are still a long way from knowing either the breadth or depth of production and film thought in most countries of the world. But the old prejudices and assumptions are giving way. This book looks into a number of the 'masters' of this new map of world cinema, like Kiarostami, Hou and Tsai – which is maybe an old-fashioned, auteurist way to proceed, but absolutely necessary when you flip open the latest edition of David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and still read the ill-informed lament that 'there are so few masters left now'. (1)

Jonathan Rosenbaum: Yes – it's alarming how certain critics are valued precisely because of their capacity to keep certain doors closed, making it so much easier for their lazier colleagues to function – which leads inevitably to mutations in film criticism itself, in modes of writing, of publishing, and in that state of mind or way of being we're calling cinephilia. During the period in which we've worked on this book, various magazines have appeared that have a specific relevance to our undertaking – the online, Melbourne-based Senses of Cinema, with which you were closely involved during its first two and half years; Mark Peranson's Toronto-based Cinema Scope, which started shortly afterwards; and now Rouge, another international online journal, which you're helping to found and edit, launching in 2003. And there are at least half a dozen new journals in France now, such as Balthazar and Exploding, which explore new methods of analysis (such as 'figural' criticism) and draw interesting connections between, say, 'trashy' horror films and the most radical experiments of the avant-garde. All these new publications have created a context that is unabashedly intellectual – rather than pandering to the anti-intellectual defences of so much 'fan' culture today – and we've tried to bear witness to this commitment in the book.

Adrian Martin: I'm very struck with how these magazines – we can also cite El Amante and Otrocampo from Argentina, Schnitt from Germany and De Filmkrant from Holland – all have some sort of website, even if they're not all primarily web magazines. And they're all created by people who have a real curiosity about things happening in other countries. So, for the first time in my experience, we're getting a true sense of internationalism in such humble acts of film culture as little magazines, which are no longer bound by the film cultures they're in, involved in an effort to share knowledge across countries. Otrocampo and Senses of Cinema, for instance, adopt a policy of publishing articles in their original languages whenever possible alongside the English translations.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: What's interesting is that each magazine seems to have one foot in its own national culture and the other foot in a new kind of shared, international space – the kind of new space where, for instance, thanks to multiregional DVDs and players, you can easily order films from the other side of the world rather than wait for them to turn up in local cinemas. It's that growing community that really interests me, in part because it reminds me of the film community I saw being formed between, say, New York, LA, London, Paris and Rome during the early 60s; and I'm enough of an old fogey now to feel nostalgic for those links. The friendships between certain nouvelle vague directors provided a model for that sense of mutual empowerment. And in New York, where I was living at the time, the community was new enough to be truly pluralistic, so that you could find Stan Brakhage, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, Andrew Sarris, Jack Smith and Parker Tyler all writing in the same issues of Film Culture. And a little later there was a short-lived effort to bring out an edition of Cahiers du cinéma in English – something that's been done more recently in Japan.

Adrian Martin: And with community comes dialogue, conversation. That's why so much of this book takes the form of dialogues, letters or email exchanges. All these types of collaborative writing can create a different way of speaking and thinking about cinematic objects. Modes and tones get mixed, digression has a place, the personal voice is valued. But our goal is not merely personal, is it?

Jonathan Rosenbaum: I've often said that one of the key functions of film criticism is or should be information, and one handicap the West has in accessing certain kinds of information regarding film is the radical splintering of film culture that has come about through the growth of academic film study. For me, what caused an enormous detour in this study was the way the so-called social sciences took over – making art itself a suspect notion, as Gilberto Perez has pointed out, at least in the Anglo-American branches of academia. (2) And because of its institutional basis, this orientation began to avoid certain kinds of politics as well, despite some appearances to the contrary. Yet it's equally reprehensible when the critical mainstream simply ignores academia, an attitude which is no less parochial.

Traversing both academia and the mainstream is something of great concern to me, the question of availability: when films become available, or whether they remain unavailable, wherever you happen to be. This is an issue that always exists and is particularly acute in America. I think that, generally, where there is a group of cinephiles that know one another across the different sectors of a film community, the problem exists to a lesser extent. But I would say for example in a place like New York or even Los Angeles, where you have totally autonomous groups composed of academic film study people and industry people and journalists, it's a big problem. There's a lot of waste involved because people are duplicating the same work, the same research, discussing the same issues, when there could be a coming together of all of this. In effect there's absolutely nothing that could be called a single film community.

Adrian Martin: Movie Mutations, then, is our way of showing how such a community might be conjured, through the book's own actions of information-sharing and mutual reflection. There's a trap here, however, which is the classic imperialist takeover: taking an Asian film (say), extracting it from its specific, national and cultural context, having a fantasia about it, bringing it back to the West and writing it up. Our hope is that, through the collaborations we set in motion, we can get past that sort of myopia, into a cross-cultural understanding. But we are also trying to stay open to the exciting possibilities that can emerge from not always remaining bound to the 'culture-specific': we're looking to find certain insights into our own situations whenever we can, in the process that Bérénice Reynaud has called using the defamiliarising mirror of another culture.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: My initial understanding of Taiwanese cinema was as the articulation of a certain existential crisis of Taiwan in relation to history – which was instructive for its similarities to and differences from certain questions about American identity. But that should be only the first step. As I pointed out in my exchange with Hasumi, there's a very disagreeable American trait that finds other cultures interesting only if they echo or duplicate American culture, and I suspect that alternate versions of that trait can be found in (say) France, England and China. On the other hand, a big stage in my education about Iran was learning from Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa how Bresson could speak directly to the experience of post-revolutionary Iran – not only in A Man Escaped (1956), which deals directly with the French Occupation and Resistance, but more generally through the notion of souls in hiding.

My point is that national identities are generally helpful and relevant at the outset of such discussions; eventually they become hindrances because they're becoming outdated. I mean, we're obviously where we're from when we're on the Internet because of the cultural baggage we're carrying, but in other respects we're getting a taste of potential statelessness, the sense in which we're all citizens of the world (which George W. seems so intent on denying). There's a new international culture growing out of this shared perception and some of the kinds of empowerment it can bring. That's part of what makes Naomi Klein's No Logo (3), which has been translated into quite a few languages by now, so exciting, and I think it's significant that it was written by a Canadian; the biggest countries are usually the last ones to know what's going on – and to realise that the more the big multi-corporations go on doing the same things across the planet, the more that people across the planet have something in common, and a reason for joining forces with one another. I like to think that the chain reaction of Tiananmen Square in 1989 among Chinese-speaking people around the world was a burst of energy made possible as well as evident by the fax machine, and that the World Trade Organization uprising in Seattle a decade later was largely organised via the Internet. The possibilities are in fact limitless, and at this point they've barely been scratched.

Adrian Martin: As Ray Durgnat might have written, the 'usual disclaimers' apply: this book offers its own map to a changing film culture, but it does not pretend to be definitive or comprehensive. It's more an extended example, a 'rhizome', of the kinds of explorations and connections that can be made today.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: Some of the sections of this book that were planned at one point or another but which never materialised include discussions with the film-maker Richard Linklater about his long-term involvement with the Austin Film Society; Edward Yang about how recent films from the West are read by Asian spectators and conversely how recent Asian films are read by Western spectators; and a dialogue between French film historian Bernard Eisenschitz and Russian film historian Naum Kleiman about suppressed Soviet films. It's important to emphasise that much of the material in this book is conceived of as work in progress. It can and should be extended beyond the parameters of a single project or publication.

Between Melbourne and Chicago, December 2002
Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin

Notes
1. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 22.
2. Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
3. Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001).

Copyright © British Film Institute, 2003
Copyright preface © Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, 2003

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