We have to understand that neither ‘film criticism’ nor ‘film theory’ ever had a pure place in the division of knowledges taught by most (or all) universities. In tertiary education, they were born – almost accidentally, but kicking

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Dr. Adrian Martin (b.1959) is an Australian film and arts critic from Melbourne. He is a Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies, Monash University (Australia). His work has appeared in many magazines, journals and newspapers around the world, and has been translated into over twenty languages. He has regular columns in the Dutch De Filmkrant and in Cahiers du cinema España.

Martin was one of The Age newspaper’s film reviewers for 11 years until early 2006 and has worked as a film reviewer for ABC TV and Radio National. He is currently co-editor of the online international scholarly film journal Rouge. He completed a PhD on film style, titled Towards a synthetic analysis of film style, through Monash University’s Art and Design faculty in 2006, which won the Mollie Holman award for best Arts PhD thesis.

He plans to launch his own website, containing around 3000 pieces of writing from 1979 to the present, in early 2010.

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1. I.     “Why would movie goers need a film criticism that is more than a synopsis run down and summary judgements? To whom does serious film criticism matter ? How could film criticism reach out to the average movie goers?

Film criticism should matter to everyone who has a serious, passionate love for movies. Of course, you cannot force it on anyone! People must come to it themselves, through their own interest and desire. And there have to be the good critics, teachers, writers and speakers on hand to capture and cultivate that desire in people. That ‘culture’ has to be there for those who want to find it and explore it. But the desire has to involve the compulsion to put together films with ideas, with thinking. Not everyone wants to do this, and I understand and respect that; we all have an ‘economy’ to our lives, different things that we invest in different ways at different levels. I personally do not want to deeply analyse every pop song I hear, or every TV show I watch! But somebody else will. So, I try to live my own life in terms of my own desire to explore, enjoy and contemplate cinema; and I make that work public for anyone who might be intrigued by something in it to begin their own lifetime of cinephilia. All serious film fans look for teachers, different sorts of teachers: some in books, some in schools, some on the radio or in newspapers and magazines. No student completely agrees with his or her ‘master’, and that is healthy: each of must define and defend our own special sensibility. I believe in individual taste and exploration on that level: we all invent the cinema for ourselves, within our own personal, social and cultural histories and biographies.

1. II.        How film critics and their tribune will survive the economic crisis of newspapers? Is it possible to imagine film criticism without film pages in newspapers? Do print media still matter to the 21st century generation of movie goers? How will online film criticism evolve to in the future?

I take a hard line on this: newspapers are yesterday’s news! Literally, the news in newspapers now is always two or three days old when you get it. And very few newspapers investigate or generate anything, anyhow: they are just recirculating and repackaging what they grab off the Internet, on a delay. I ask you: who cares? Newspapers will soon die around the whole world, and I am not sad about this; their day in the media sphere is over. It has been a long time since serious film criticism has had a good berth in newspapers anywhere. And this is for one reason: publicity. Big film companies buy big advertisements, and editorial decisions follow the dictates of that advertising dollar. So, newspaper coverage (and also much media coverage in general) becomes just an adjunct to advertising campaigns: obsessed with promoting the ‘latest releases’, the stars, streaming box-office figures, and so on. None of it has anything to do with true film criticism. I think there may still be some good, genuine film magazines, like Sight and Sound or Film Comment, up against all the consumer-guide garbage that now fills all newsagencies, as the 21^st Century proceeds, but they will need quite a bit of institutional backing (and money) to survive – and a mighty international distribution system, which is becoming more and more scarce. Can you buy Cinema Scope, Cineaste, Film International, Positif, Cahiers du cinéma España in your local newsagency or bookshop? If you can, you’re very lucky, because I can’t! So, in terms of any sensible ‘economy of scale’ in financial matters – and in international distribution – the Internet is the only way to go. Maybe I could produce 500 ‘hard copies’ of Rouge and you could do the same with Indian Auteur: but how could we be sure that we would ever be able to receive, access, read or buy each other’s cultural production? Whereas with the Internet we can reach many thousands of interested people immediately: and in the small world of serious film culture, that is truly a revolution. Magazines that have only a partial, nervous relation to the Internet (like Cinema Scope, Sight and Sound or Cineaste) are fighting a rearguard action. Something’s got to give, and it will do so soon.

1. III.       What is the role of film critics in film culture? Do they only give hindsight downstream, or can they also influence upstream how movies will look like next? Is film criticism an integral part of cinema or is it just in the position of a distant observer in the sidelines?

I have always been fascinated by the interaction between criticism and practical filmmaking. It should start in film schools, and it does so already in the best ones. Some countries have (it seems to me) a healthier, more fluid interrelation of these functions: Italy, for example, where filmmakers like Fellini, Argento, Bertolucci, Antonioni or Leone would hire the critics who wrote perceptively about them to help script their next films! I have worked in various roles on the margins of the film development process (sometimes for government film agencies, sometimes for commercial companies): script editor, ‘script doctor’, project assessor. In these experiences, I always say to filmmakers: it’s better that I give you my criticisms now, before you make the film, rather than afterwards, when I write a negative review! But the course of the critic-filmmaker relationship doesn’t always run smoothly: there can be mutual suspicion, mistrust, paranoia. Critics and filmmakers don’t always approach the ‘object’ – a film – in the same way, with the same means or the same ends in sight. They never will be the same thing; they are autonomous endeavours on two sometimes overlapping paths. But critics can always learn more about the practical matters of filmmaking (some know almost nothing!), and filmmakers can sometimes get a sense of some aspect of film art, film history or film culture from critics. Both critics and filmmakers can use each other to get (as I like to say) ‘an edge’, a special bit of insight and knowledge you won’t get if you stay isolated within your own field; the really smart ones (in my opinion) seek this edge out. I certainly do!

1. IV.            What does the Auteur theory mean in film culture today? Is it still relevant to popular film critics and cultural studies scholars? Is the job of film director still at the heart of film creation in big productions? Do contemporary filmmakers even consider themselves as auteurs? What are the new paradigms offered by recent academic studies to move beyond the concept of Auteur?”

The status of the auteur and auteurism wavers all the time. Sometimes I think that it’s old-hat, a battle won long ago, an irrelevant and in fact burdensome legacy; at other times, I think it’s one of the few solid principles you can hold onto: the individual poetic voice that speaks, sometimes miraculously, above all the ‘noise’ of industry, money, publicity, culture in the bad sense. The difficulty is that, today (and for quite a while now, at least 20 years), the auteur has become a marketing category, a ‘name brand’: when that happened, everybody (including especially those who didn’t deserve it) became an instant ‘auteur’! It’s the ‘a film by …’ syndrome, set in stone within film industry law: the director is the boss, the star, the celebrity, the person with ‘vision’ and style and personality and (hopefully) good looks … and they know (sometimes painfully) that this is the part they must play within the ‘system’. So, in this sense, the auteur is no longer someone whom critics discover or ‘decipher’ (as Peter Wollen once put it); he or she is already way out there in the public eye, sometimes even before their first feature exists! (Look at the career of Jane Campion for a striking example.) So, the auteur is something different today: he or she exists in a different ‘game space’ of the public cultural industry, and when scholars talk (rather windily and posily) about post-auteurism or neo-auteurism, that’s what they are gesturing towards: it’s not just a matter of the film text in isolation anymore (if it indeed ever was! – the best auteurism always drew a wide circle around a film) but a whole, complex set of social relations. In terms of auteurism – meaning the kinds of study and analysis we critics, scholars and teachers do – there needs to be constant vigilance about moving away from the reductive trap (even worse in art criticism than in film criticism) of just funneling films first and last and foremost through their directors: there are many contexts, many circuits or networks, many aspects and cross-referencings of films that we need to explore, all the time. Auteurism as a critical approach, alas, is sometimes the easy, lazy way out!

FILM EDUCATION

1. i.        As a film teacher, do you believe that film education, either in high school or in film university, can make a difference in opening up the taste of the population? How film education, or lack thereof, could change the bad habits of the mainstream audience? Who are the players in film culture responsible for the taste conservatism of the public, the media, the institutions, the executives and the filmmakers?

Well, taste conservatism – let’s call it cultural mediocrity, the ‘common denominator’ or the ‘bottom line’ – is everywhere dominant. We have to start from that ugly reality. Middle-class standards of taste are everywhere triumphant; lazy habits of thinking, speaking and writing proliferate at a terrifying rate every day. Not just in film but in every area of public life, politics, education, journalism, everything! We will always be fighting the ‘uphill battle’, and we will always be flying in the face of what many people regard as ‘common sense’: that films are made just for laughs or thrills, that they are just disposable stories about glamorous people, that they are a weak, vulgar, commercial art, etc, etc. To pitch a tent of serious film education and criticism in the middle of that mortal storm is a divine, reckless folly indeed! But I think the deepest role of film criticism is to be against common sense – and it took me 50 years to figure that out, in all its dramatic simplicity!

1. ii.                   What range of knowledge is taught in film schools? (In Melbourne or any other universities you might be familiar with) and what film students educated in these schools are capable to accomplish once they are through? What jobs do they go to (teaching, research, journalism, and publishing)? How does this film culture acquired by students then spread around to help educate the public opinion, the mainstream taste, to improve the reception of cinema in society?

We have to understand that neither ‘film criticism’ nor ‘film theory’ ever had a pure place in the division of knowledges taught by most (or all) universities. In tertiary education, they were born – almost accidentally, but kicking and screaming – out of English literature departments (in the 1950s and ‘60s); they co-existed for a long time alongside Media Studies (‘70s); and then, just as they seemed to be achieving a fully visible ‘disciplinary identity’, Cultural Studies (‘80s) came and swooped them up. Ever since then, film has remained a football passed around between these various areas that are themselves being constantly today redefined, absorbed, expanded: Cultural Studies is going down, but both Media Studies (or Communications) and Gender Studies are back on the way up. It is very rare – too rare – to find a ‘pure’ Film Studies department in a university; maybe, thanks to young people like you, India can blaze a new trail in this regard! But it’s hard work, wherever we are, to ‘fix’ this field of study; in my experience, there is no entirely agreed-on curriculum across institutions that offer it (I sometimes wish there was!). Therefore, it is never easy – but also always thrilling – to know where the diverse students of film ‘come from’, what they are bringing into it, or where they will go to afterwards with what they have (hopefully) learnt. In my experience, film graduates go into many areas – the least of which is teaching Film Studies in their own or other universities! Some go into writing (in its many forms, including publishing), some into the ‘public sector’ of arts bureaucracy (courses are now taught in ‘arts management’ and even ‘cinema culture management’!), and others of course into one of many levels of the filmmaking and television industries. A few go into programming or curating; or film distribution and exhibition. For me, this ‘promiscuity’ is all good. The seeds of cinephilia should be scattered wide in this way; it is the only way to create anything like a healthy film culture with open, future possibilities.

1. iii.                 Regarding your recent book ¿Qué es el cine moderno? ["What is Modern cinema?"] published in Chile, what is the short answer to your question: What is Modern cinema?

Hah, a great question! So, in short: modern cinema begins for me after World War II. It is defined, in relation to previous classical cinemas, by a radically different approach (or set of approaches) to narrative, to characterisation, and to film style. Modern cinema is a rupture, a break within regimes of cinematic representation. It did not end in the ‘60s; the adventure still goes on today. What is called postmodernism is, for me, only an episode within this adventure. When I see films by Apichatpong, Ruiz, Guerín or Gomes, I exclaim to myself (and frequently to others): wow, that’s so modern! You can ‘taste that difference’, as they say in advertising!

1. iv.                 What happened to the modernity of cinema in the 21st century, with digital images, mixed-media, CGI “acting”, a revival of 3D projections, online streaming and interactive appropriation of mash-ups?”

The modernity of cinema doesn’t go away – just as cinema itself as a medium does not go away. Yes, it disperses, extends, gets redefined in all sorts of new technologies grand and humble. But cinema as audiovisual event – which ultimately lodges and is replayed in your head, not on any objective screen surface, a fact I always insist on – exists whether we are in a grand picture palace, watching a 16mm print in a classroom, sampling YouTube or (and this last one I haven’t myself had the nerve to try yet) downloading into a tiny mobile phone! All those problems and challenges of modern cinema – telling the story, conjuring a body, affixing an image to a sound – are the same no matter what ‘format’ we are inside (and all formats, to say it again, exist to project this audiovisual event into you, ultimately). We are indeed witnessing a cultural revolution at the level of general access to editing and filming technologies via computers. But access alone changes nothing; we can still be reproducing sheer garbage, bad ideology, on our laptops 24 hours a day! All the challenges – and all the traps – remain. This is as true (I might add) of teaching as it is of cinema: with all the new technology around, every teacher still has to stand on his/her two feet and ‘put an idea across’ into the head of a student! That does not change, either.

1. v.        What, within Leone’s films, appealed to you in order to prompt you to write on his films?

Well, for me, Sergio Leone is one of the primal cinema experiences – alongside Godard, Boris Barnet, Michael Powell, Lubitsch, Akerman, Lang, Kiarostami, a few others. That’s part of my personal autobiography – the way his films affected me when I was 11 years old, watching them on a huge cinema screen with my Dad – but also part of my (and not just my!) idea of cinema, of what it is and what it can do. Leone is one of those artists who opens you up to everything that is theatrical, artificial, operatic, performative and cartoonish in cinema (which for me, adds up to one key stream of modernity in cinema) – with a grandeur that Tarantino (for example) cannot even approach. Leone is not an intellectual, but his work is profound: on that level, he is one kind of apotheosis of popular cinema. I find his work so rich, and so enjoyable, that I know it will accompany me all my life, just like the work of those other directors I just listed.

1. vi.          Where do you see cinephilia heading towards in the 21st Century?

It’s heading everywhere, down every nook and cranny! Cinephilia is itself changing, shifting and expanding these days – it’s not so much an elitist cult, and nor is it defined anymore primarily by the figure of the authoritative expert-critic (of which cinema history has had many shining examples). Many forms of cinephilia are emerging into prominence: collecting-cinephilia, programming-cinephilia, collage-cinephilia, DVD-producing-cinephilia, as well as the kind of grass roots, pedagogical cinephilia you are involved in with Indian Auteur’s public activities. What used to be extremely private cinephilias – people who obsessively drew up lists, or translated their favourite critics, to give two examples – now come out into the open, via the ambiguous (public as well as hidden, secretive, playful) avenue of the website or blog. I try to use my monthly column for Filmkrant magazine in Holland, “World Wide Angle”, to reflect on all these mutations. For example, something that people once dreamed of in the ‘70s but only occasionally practiced – writing criticism purely in short fragments, aphorisms or haikus – has become a new genre of expression, and not just in Twitter! These ongoing experiments (even if they are sometimes only passing fads) open experimental possibilities for all of us.

3 – INDIAN CINEMA

1. I.           Which is your favourite Indian film and why?

For me, this is an easy one, and the answer will not surprise you: The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) by Ritwik Ghatak, whom I am writing on in greater length and depth at the moment for a forthcoming French book. An inexhaustibly rich and extraordinary film; a great melodrama; and a manifesto of cinematic modernism. Ghatak is a complex, mysterious character: to understand him both in himself and as part of social history would be a life’s work, like Sartre’s highly creative ‘projection’ into the mind, life and times of Flaubert! And maybe Ghatak was, like Sartre’s Flaubert, another ‘idiot in the family’ in the context of his national cinema, an irritant, a nuisance, a neurotic enigma. As well as a genius! Like Abel Ferrara, perhaps. But Ghatak also belongs to the wide world, and his films, so specific to the Indian experience at many levels, also speak to everyone. That is especially true of Cloud-Capped Star. But I have to confess that, so far, my knowledge and experience of Indian cinema (in all its varieties) is still quite superficial. I have sampled both the art cinemas popular cinemas of India; I have some familiarity with this national cinema’s issues and debates, and I follow the work of some great scholars such as Ashish Rajadhyaksha, or Australia-based Vijay Mishra. I have also written half a dozen pieces recently that were solicited by Indian editors and publishers (one of them is on Marguerite Duras’ India Song!). But my journey into Indian cinema is just beginning. It is a good feeling to know that vast words of cinema still await you! And I would like to acknowledge here an odd debt that goes back thirty years: when I saw on TV (our once-magnificent multicultural channel SBS) the wonderful, breakneck Bollywood compilation film Cinema Cinema (1979) by Krishna Shah, which introduced me, with lightning-bolt force, to the miracle named Guru Dutt. I can also recommend the spirited, low-budget ‘trash comedy’ American Drive-In made six years later by Shah: I once thought the future of cinema belonged in this guy’s capable hands! Where is he today, I wonder? Time to check IMDb!

1. II.                 How could you explain a single recipe, the Bollywood musical, generates so many copycats without boring an ever growing audience? Why is the Bollywood production underevaluated on the international scene, especially in prestigious festivals, and why did this form of cinema seems to appeal to Indians only and some East/Middle-East countries? Why hasn’t it exported this model successfully to the West?

This is a question which has surely been pondered, for many years now, by people both inside and outside of India. I myself wrote some words about it when I worked for a newspaper between 1995 and 2006 – because, in that context, I became aware of a vast ‘parallel circuit’ of Bollywood musical cinema that is enthusiastically supported by the Indian-Australian population (in big cinemas as well as on VHS and DVD), but is completely invisible, almost literally never mentioned, in the daily Anglo film press. It’s a totally bizarre situation! (And the same thing happened with Hong Kong cinema.) And every time I would review a Bollywood musical epic – always favourably, I might add, because I have rarely seen one I didn’t enjoy! – I would get a great response from the Indians in the local community, because they felt their particular cinephilic passion had at last been acknowledged, even if only for a passing newspaper moment. However, the sad truth remains that Anglo culture, in very many of its forms and sensibilities, remains totally resistant to virtually every aspect of the Bollywood template – even more so than to musicals in general. Again, it has to do with the inferior place accorded to artifice, and the dull triumph, in middle-class cultures everywhere, of naturalistic drama (and its attendant model of character psychology – very un-modern cinema!). Undoubtedly, there is also a middle-class rejection of Bollywood within Indian culture itself, and others can tell if, or to what extent, that is tied up with the postcolonial remnants of backward British imperial taste in all things high-cultural. The best Bollywood films rock me like Leone’s do: the fusion of image and sound, movement and music, is sublime. Something especially exciting to me – and a challenge to every ‘totalised’,  America-centric theorisation of the musical, such as we get in Rick Altman’s work – is the way that Bollywood very naturally fuses a grand mise en scène style (dancers in superb choreographic formation) with very fast (even MTV-style) kinetic cutting: supposedly the great ‘no-no’ or stylistic contradiction which has destroyed the screen musical! And I like the pictures of everyday life (however stylised) we get in Bollywood romances, too (Shaad Ali’s Saathiya [2002] is among my favourites in this regard). But there will never be either an ‘international popular cinema embrace’ of Bollywood – Baz Luhrmann’s token 30-second gesture in Moulin Rouge notwithstanding – nor a Film Festival, art-cinema embrace. Those cultures would really have to change radically in order to open themselves up to what is good in Indian popular cinema. And it is only after, or on the basis of, that appreciation of popular Indian aesthetics that we could move to a deeper cultural understanding of the social role and functions of Bollywood cinema, which I don’t pretend to understand at all at that level.

1. III.               Is there room in India for regional films and indie filmmakers under the current circumstances? And how could this status quo might change?

I certainly hope there is room for regional films and independent filmmakers! I am not familiar enough with the current Indian cultural situation to know why this is not flourishing as quickly as we all would like. Of course, I am sensitive to that post-Ghatak generation of directors: Kumar Shahani (whom I have met, through the Sri Lankan-Australian scholar Laleen Jayamanne, because his films have been preserved by Queensland Art Gallery), Mani Kaul, Adoor Gopalkrishnan (a marvellous retrospective of his early work was screened at the Brisbane Film Festival), Mrinal Sen, and others. I have had to search out these films: on the Australian arthouse circuit, I could only see, over about a ten-year span, that crazy Tamil film The Terrorist (1999), directed by Santosh Sivan and ‘presented’ to Anglo audiences by John Malkovich! (Later, in 2001, I saw his more conventional and epic Asoka, which I liked very much.) I fitfully follow the commentary on regional/independent Indian work by Paul Willemen and other critic-theorists-teachers. Actually, Australia (as I realise, writing this) is a reasonably good place to keep in contact both with Indian art cinema and Indian popular cinema! On the general international Film Festival circuit, my sense is that the idea of regional/art cinema from India is somewhat hampered by a reductive view of the Satyajit Ray legacy – a great director, no doubt, but the idea that was imposed around him and since, all over the world, of ‘Indian neorealism’ is hard to break away from: it renders many non-Indian viewers at a total loss when they encounter, for example, Sahani’s highly formal and allegorical work. And the fact that, for so long, Ghatak was far from the centre of global perception of Indian cinema history, has had devastating effects. Actually, the neo-realism tag – which blankets the cinema from most countries that have ever had any relation to economic underdevelopment – makes it pretty impossible to even appreciate what Ray was doing, for example, with his richly expressive and lyrical relations between music and image, sound and narrative. Everybody needs their eyes and ears opened anew – at all times.

ON HOLLYWOOD

What keeps the Hollywood hegemony intact decades after decades? Is it a financial/marketing leverage/lobbying? Is it because of its uncontested superiority in the mainstream entertainment territory? or is it purely due to its cultural universality that transcends all language and cultural barriers in every country on Earth? Does the prosperity of Hollywood imperialism somehow sustains the health of cinema industries in the world, even for indie markets through collateral benefits? Or does this omnipresence act as a deterrent glass ceiling blocking the growth of domestic films?

I have spent much of my life looking at the question of Hollywood, and turning it over from different angles. It does not take so much of my time now, simply because I have made the personal decision that I want more to look at world cinema, experimental cinema, and other more overlooked forms. But it is certainly safe to say that I have been through every available position and emotion that a critic can take and experience in relation to the ‘passion for Hollywood’: defending it, rejecting it, rationalising it, exploring it, becoming disenchanted with it, becoming re-enchanted with it. Now, I feel I am ‘out of the cycle’ of this difficult passion. Like many critics, my interest in the resistant streams in world cinema has steered me more towards the true American independents: not the Sundance or Miramax camps, but people like James Benning, Yvonne Rainer, Travis Wilkerson, Jon Jost, and many others. In the semi-commercial cinema, the only Americans I really defend today are those precisely ignored (for the most part) by and in America, and discovered elsewhere: Ferrara, James Gray, Larry Clark, Monte Hellman, Elaine May. Rouge magazine, which I co-edit, supports these directors in its choice of published pieces. But I am drifting away from your question, which is about this strange thing we call ‘Hollywood’ cinema: is it universal? What is its power? It is clear we can never overlook the imperial, invasive, economic power of American cinema: cinephiles traditionally have a hard time facing this reality, and when they do, they often then dramatically ‘disavow’ what they formerly loved (it is a common drama of disillusionment, which lays the ground for ‘falling in love again’ later). On the other hand, and equally, we cannot deny the ‘genius of the system’ in Hollywood, roughly between 1920 and 1960. So many great films and filmmakers in that grove! And, for a time, a truly multicultural pool: Hollywood cinema is considerably less without its many illustrious émigrés (Lubitsch, Lang, Ulmer, etc). Which, extraordinarily, created a cinema absolutely connected to a mass, popular audience: the kind of thing Bollywood can boast of today. Also, I continue to be fascinated by this remarkable period of transition, precisely into modern cinema, carried by Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Vincente Minnelli, Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis and others. All this can be studied, and has been studied, endlessly. The politics of it can be tough, and sometimes they wipe out the aesthetic or popular-cultural considerations. But this is bound to be the case whenever we have small, oppressed nations toiling and fuming in the shadow of the USA Goliath – I feel this intensely in the Australian context. And this is another, simple but profound thing I have come around to realising, after having passed beyond the ‘for or against Hollywood’ debate: who you are, in terms of where you were born and raised, is something you never escape or transcend (however much you might try to, or imagine so), and for a film critic that means, at some point, coming back around to look at your own national cinema (in all its diverse forms), and especially your own cultural context. You have to start from where your two feet are most firmly planted – like many great films, today or yesterday, do.

© Adrian Martin and Indian Auteur October 2009

The interview was made possible with the help and contribution of Harrytuttle.

Tags: Adrian Martin, Cinephila, Film Criticism, Film Education, Issue no-7, November Issue no-7 2009

Posted By IndianAuteurTm | Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 | Filed under Film Education, Interviews, News