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Slow Expansion. Neomodernism As a Postnational Tendency in Contemporary Cinema

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Slow Expansion. Neomodernism As a Postnational Tendency in Contemporary Cinema TRANSMISSIONS: THE JOURNAL OF FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES 2016, VOL.1, NO. 2, PP. 100-117. Miłosz Stelmach Jagiellonian University Slow Expansion. Neomodernism as a Postnational Tendency in Contemporary Cinema Abstract The article presents a theoretical overview of a distinctive strand of contemporary cinema identified in the text as neomodernism (as defined by Rafał Syska). It focuses on works of filmmakers such as Béla Tarr, Aleksander Sokurov or Tsai Ming-liang and their followers and tries to present them as a part of informal postnational artistic movement developing in cinema from mid-90s onward. The aim of the article is to examine critically the journalistic and reductive category of slow cinema usually applied to auteurs mentioned above and propose term more burdened with cultural connotations and thus open for nuanced historical and theoretical studies. The particular attention is given to the international character of neomodernism that negates the traditional boundaries of national schools as well as the division of centre-periphery in world cinema shaped by the first wave of postwar modernist cinema. Neomodernism rather moves the notion of centre to the institutional level with the growing importance of festivals, film agents and public fund that take the place of production companies as the main actors in the transnational net of art-house cinema circulation. Key words: contemporary cinema, modernism, slow cinema, postnational cinema, neomodernism Introduction Over the course of the last two decades, the debate over cinema and modernism has taken the form of a dialectical struggle since two distinctive theoretical standpoints emerged, of which the more traditional and still dominant is rooted in art history and literary studies of the post-war years. It is focused on tracing the signs of high modernism in cinema, locating it mostly in the field of international art film practice of 100 SLOW EXPANSION. NEOMODERNISM AS A POSTNATIONAL TENDENCY IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA both the pre-war (avant-garde and national film schools of 1920s) and post-war (New Wave and New Cinemas of the 1960s and 1970s) eras.1 We can call this understanding of cinematic modernism “exclusive” as it refers to the language of formal innovation, auteurism, and a break with classical cinema. Lately, this perspective has been recapitulated and thoroughly explicated by András Bálint Kovács in his book-length study.2 Kovács identifies subjectivity, reflexivity, and abstraction as basic characteristics of all modernist art3 and finds them in the post-war films of directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, or auteurs associated with French New Wave, among others. The oppositional, “inclusive” theory of modernism in cinema was conceived as a radical departure from this discourse. Since the 1990s, many scholars (often associated with the term New Modernist Studies) have contradicted the conservative Greenbergian account of modernism as a drive toward formalism, artistic sophistication, and medium specificity. Instead, they perceived it as a cinematic expression and representation of modernity in its various forms that is not restricted to the field of high artistic practice, but rather comprises mass cultural production. Miriam Bratu Hansen's 1999 essay, which is probably the most emblematic and influential work in this vein, calls Hollywood cinema “vernacular modernism”,4 and this term caught on.5 In her understanding, “modernism encompasses a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity, including a paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed”.6 In this sense, early comic strips and Russian socialist realist musicals are just as (or even more) modernist as Ulysses or movies by Ingmar Bergman because of the way they transform and exploit new possibilities of perception born from the spirit of modernity. In its most radical form, this “modernity thesis” tries to prove that cinema as a whole is a modern art: the product and consequence of modernity defined by its technological and industrial character.7 Although the two described standpoints might appear to be distinct, competing approaches to the same problem, namely cinematic modernism, I would suggest that the situation is in fact the opposite: they examine two different phenomena claiming the same designation. The disparity between them is demonstrable not simply in the choice 1 See John Orr, Cinema and Modernity, (London: Polity Press, 1993). 2 András Bálint Kovács, Screening modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 3 Kovács, Screening modernism, p. 52. 4 Miriam Hansen, 'The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism', Modernism/modernity, vol. 6, no. 3 (1999), pp. 59-77. 5 It has been used to describe, among others, Soviet socialist realist cinema (Peter Kupfer, 'Volga- Volga: “The Story of a Song,” Vernacular Modernism, and the Realization of Soviet Music', The Journal of Musicology Vol. 30, No. 4 (Fall 2013), pp. 530-576.) and silent Chinese films (Qijun Han, 'Melodrama as Vernacular Modernism in China: The Case of D. W. Griffith', Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, no. 26 (2013), pp. 18.). 6 Hansen, 'The Mass Production of the Senses', p. 60. 7 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 102-103. 101 MIŁOSZ STELMACH of cultural texts they seem to be primarily interested in (“high” vs. “popular” art), but even more importantly in the way they try to position those texts. The proponents of cinema as vernacular modernism focus mostly on the social, industrial, and cultural context in which movies exist. These specific conditions make classical cinema a vital part of late 19th and early to mid-20th century modernity as it was experienced by moviegoers all over the world, since cinema according to Hansen became the world's first “global vernacular”.8 As a consequence, their aim is to describe a certain historical point of “paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed”. By contrast, the idea of modern cinema, as derived from Clement Greenberg's writings and represented today by András Bálint Kovács, concentrates more on the interrelations within cinema history itself rather than its social context. It is more interested in aesthetic autonomy and internal development of specific art forms and their inherent features. Cultural, political, and social contexts obviously play an important role in this argument; however, they are mostly used as possible hypotheses explaining certain formal and stylistic devices. This line of argumentation was employed also by many authors who did not use the term “Modernism” but were highly influential and contributed greatly to the debate on the term. Key examples might be David Bordwell, who identified “art cinema” as one of the four main historical modes of film practice,9 or Gilles Deleuze, for whom post-war international cinema of “Time-Image” was the fullest possible realization of medium specificity.10 Narrated in this manner, the story of modernism appears to be an evolutionary process of progressing sophistication of a given art in the search for its expressive potential. The crucial consequence of equating modernism with a set of formal qualities (instead of considering its relation to the broader cultural and social field) is the possibility of conceptualizing it as a trans-historical phenomenon. Although Kovács defined modernism as a completed historical period, his recounting of it allows for some trans-historical interpretation when he remarks, “narrative techniques, after they become accepted, remain in fact available for anyone, anywhere, anytime. Historical ‘modes of narration’, however, are conglomerates of certain techniques that are more fashionable in certain periods and in certain parts of the world than in others”.11 This makes it possible to understand modernism as a set of artistic choices that became less frequently used in the course of 1970s and 1980s, but are still available and one day may come back into favour. This idea of recurring modernist tropes, reappearing in different periods and cultural contexts, is nothing new to modernism studies but has never been convincingly employed in film studies, where it is generally believed that high modernist cinema 8 Hansen, 'The Mass Production of the Senses', p. 68. 9 See David Bordwll, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, vol. 4, no 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 56-64. The expanded version of this text formed a basis for one of the chapters in Bordwell’s famous book-length study on narration. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 10 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2007). 11 Kovács, Screening modernism, p. 59. 102 SLOW EXPANSION. NEOMODERNISM AS A POSTNATIONAL TENDENCY IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA ended sometime in the mid-70s. While it might be true for some particular forms of modernist film, specific to the international art cinema of '60s, I would like to argue that its spirit survived and began reappearing in a new form around mid-90s, gaining full momentum about decade later. The whole wave of directors, led by figures like
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