Correspondencias (Mexico)
Interview (2018)

We [Correspondencias editors Eduardo Cruz and Rafael Guilhem] would like to begin by asking you about your definition of film culture. You have mentioned before the importance of understanding cinema as an ensemble, which includes more than just movies. Can you tell us a little more about this concept and its importance?

I have recently realised that this term ‘film culture’ is very prominent in some countries (like Australia or Britain), and not so familiar in others (such as North America). I believe there has to be some anxiety present, in the nation and in the general culture, about the place and state of cinema – especially the local, national cinema – for this term to exist. Something has to be in danger, and so concerned people feel a need to protect it – to establish, build and maintain structures to protect it.

So, I originally come from a place (Australia) where cinema (and particularly innovative cinema of all kinds) is a rare, endangered species, not a fraction as respected as, for instance, sport! In this situation, people like me start thinking about education on all levels – in schools, in the media, in public events. This is what leads to the often fragile ideal of film culture. Cinema is not just what is made and projected on screens. It is how films are distributed and exhibited; how films are spoken about, and where; what kids learn in schools and universities; which books and magazines are published; what’s said on the radio and television. And today, it is also the Internet, with all its possibilities and black holes! So, film culture is a constant struggle, a cultural war, a never-ending battle – and very often, a losing battle. But we hang in there with it, as committed cinephiles! We love the cinema, but getting others to appreciate and love cinema the way we do is the challenge.

In your book Last Day Every Day (2012) you offer some ideas about the figural method, following Auerbach, Kracauer, Agamben and others. What value do you find in this notion, and what is its relevance as a method of approaching to the movies?

Let me say, first of all, that if you want to know what my form of film criticism is, and what it means to me, the best source is my 2014 book Mise en scène and Film Style, as well as my subsequent Mysteries of Cinema in 2018, a collection of my best and most detailed general essays spanning 35 years. These two books genuinely represent the evolution of my work from my teenage years in the 1970s to now. Very summarily, I can say that what I have always been most interested in is film style – its expressive capacities and possibilities, and its changing history of modes within culture. I possessed a particular sensibility about cinema and film style from an earlier point in my teenage life – when I was watching Daffy Duck cartoons, Ingmar Bergman movies dubbed into English, and Preston Sturges comedies, all on a black-and-white television in my parent’s home in suburban Melbourne! That’s where my cinephilia started, and it’s where my tastes (which are, mercifully, wide) were formed.

Why do I tell you all this? 25 years after becoming a cinephile, around 1992, I encountered the ideas of figural theory and analysis. This body of work simply confirmed something deep inside me about my own approach, my own way of seeing things in cinema. I did not discover cinema with figuralism, but it helped me, for a few moments, to sharpen some of my methodological and analytical tools. My Mise en scène book, completed much later, marks the real consolidation of my individual path, which mixes many methodologies, intuitions and tools (figural criticism is only one part of that book, and even a quite small part).

But, to put it briefly here, the figural approach stresses that everything in a film is abstract and therefore malleable: people, personalities, objects, bodies, worlds – all of them are just shapes, outlines, propositions. Nothing is truly realistic on film. Everything can be changed, metamorphosed. That’s a liberating philosophy! And figural analysis (at its best) makes no distinction between the supposed low culture of cartoons and comedies and the too-often institutionalised high culture of avant-garde experimentation – that promiscuous inclusivity is something I have always embraced, it’s part of my temperament. At present, figural work in the universities has become a little too fixed on an extreme political position, tied to an exclusive focus on the avant-garde. I like to keep things open, and I take them my own way.

In Last Day Every Day (Spanish-language edition published 2013) you also talk about some forms of the encounter: classic, sublime, ideal, ghostly, forced, and so on. In general, you have an interest in relationships, which is explicit in your introduction to ¿Qué es el cine moderno? (2008) where you mention that, in modern cinema, there is a question about what unites and separates people, what forms communities. What interest do you have in these dynamics, on which you have elaborated different logics, classifications and observations?

You are very astute to link these two moments in my work, the essay on encounters in cinema with the ideas of unity and separation expressed in my writing on Chantal Akerman, Tsai Ming-liang and others in ¿Qué es el cine moderno? (a book which, by the way, only exists in Spanish, thanks to my friends in Chile!). I guess the connection is that, in my life and personal view of things, I am obsessed with intimacy, with the mysteries of love, relationships, friendship, and so on. And cinema exists, in part, to capture and explore these mysteries of intimacy, in whatever expressive way it can. Once again, this is a fleeting, shifting, sometimes treacherous terrain, full of projection, fantasy, misunderstanding, desire, duplicity, intense energy, politics, and so on!

So, intimacy has become (without me being totally, consciously aware of this) my personal master-metaphor for how film style works: the perpetual drama of encounter is a choreography of attraction and repulsion, affections expressed in movement and music, colour and line ... And from there, the rational side of my mind does go to work in terms of seeking “different logics, classifications and observations”, as you suggest. But I try to build open systems of classification, not rigid or closed ones. As Gilles Deleuze said in 1967, you always need three terms, not two, because with three you can shift and perpetually displace and redefine your schemas! That’s what I always try to do. Life is change; so is cinema.

About the characteristics that you have attributed to some stages of cinema, such as classicism or modern cinema, how do you see cinema today? What are its main characteristics or primary elements that attract your attention?

To tell you the truth, I am not entirely certain where we are today. Any historian, of any type, will remark on this: where the past always seems to belong to a specific category (such as modernity/modernism), the present always seems open, mixed, confused, with too many things happening at once. Things become crystal-clear only in retrospect. We are living now in this state of mixed confusion in culture. It is no longer postmodernism, because a lot of classicism (in storytelling, in styles) has returned in a strong way. And yet we are still experiencing – we cannot help but experience – an ongoing modernity, things shifting and mutating at a rapid rate.

Look at just a few of the signs: on the one hand, Hollywood blockbusters (superhero movies, and so forth) are in a total state of regression, going backward in every way; they are awful, they are not even worth the label of classical – they are pre-art and post-thought! On the other hand, TV and cinema are combining and producing genuinely new things, such as Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Digital technology, at all its levels, sometimes just reinforces the oldest and most conventional forms; and yet it also, literally every day, opens up new possibilities. This is where we are now. You make programmatic sense of it, I can’t!

Finally, in the face of the changes brought about by new technologies, the ways of production, distribution and consumption of movies today, how do you think film criticism should change? What are its challenges, its new possibilities or weaknesses?

The challenge for film criticism is, in my opinion, always the same, no matter what decade or technological state we are in. Try to be intelligent; try not to trade in clichés and promotional nonsense; try to say or express something about a film (or group of films) that is not immediately evident in the film itself. Try to really analyse something, and try to stay interesting in your critical work – stay lively, stay hungry, keep some energy in what you do, have productive (not just negative) ideas, get a good montage going (like in a good film!). And I say this irrespective of whether we are writing in old-fashioned words for a university journal, working for a regular newspaper or magazine, or sitting at home (as I do, with my beloved Cristina Álvarez López) collaborating on audiovisual essays through the computer. It is all film criticism, and it should set its aim high, not low.

People fall, all too often, into pre-established habits and formulae: when they do an Internet podcast for themselves or their friends, they sound like they are on public radio or commercial TV, making bad jokes and simplifying everything for their imagined ‘mass audience’ of listeners. This is a dangerous, time-wasting illusion. I have always believed that each of us should express our insights and feelings at their highest level, not at the lowest common denominator – that way is madness and stupidity. Sure, address an audience – but try to bring them up to your level, don’t talk down to what you (usually falsely) presume is their (low) level.

That’s always been my personal creed, in audio commentaries, writing, teaching, everything. True film criticism needs to have something visionary about it. I am smiling right now as I reflect back on the key words featured or suggested in the titles of my books: phantasm, mystery, style, madness, thought, obsession … I am always chasing that kind of variegated vision!

Note: Correspondencias ran online from Winter 2017 until March 2022. Several of my essays were translated into Spanish for its thematic dossiers. Consult the archive at: http://correspondenciascine.com/dossiers/

© Adrian Martin 7 February 2018