Beyond the multiplex: The films of 1994<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): Audiences for Hollywood films did not peak last
\nyear with Spielberg's Jurassic Park. They began to decline long
\nbefore, towards the end of the big studio era in the 1940s. Then
\ntelevision took off in the 1950s and VCRs in the 1980s. Actually,
\nHollywood doesn't have it all sewn up, so don't believe what you
\nthink you see around you.<\/p>\n
What? You say, as you recall the film posters above Jakarta's
\nmain venues, and are probably about to take issue. But it's true.<\/p>\n
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood was \"vertically integrated\",
\nfrom top to toe, which meant that one company, one of the Hollywood
\nstudios like MGM or Universal, produced, distributed and exhibited
\nits own movies. Films which weren't assembled like Ford cars, mass
\nproduced and sold like sausages, weren't made. These days, it is
\npossible for an independent production to get off the ground, find
\nfinance, get made and find an audience.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, Hollywood is still trying for market shares in some
\nplaces, in countries like India, which have bustling film industries
\nof their own, and where the local audiences prefer to watch local
\nfilms, for better or for worse. And it seems the argument that
\nlanguage presents a natural barrier to English-language films
\ndoesn't always hold.<\/p>\n
But all this talk is cold comfort if you want more than the wall-
\nto-wall Hollywood which you see around you. Hollywood -- whatever
\nthat now means -- still looks dominant. Movies on offer in the city
\nat the moment are Time Cop, Airheads, Yankee Zulu, When a Man Loves
\na Woman and Tryst. You scan the posters, consider the sales pitch
\nand try to recall the reviews. Nah, nothing promising, it would have
\nbeen a good week for a film festival with a few alternatives.<\/p>\n
Perhaps there's something on at the Teater Tertutup, Taman Ismail
\nMarzuki. Could also check out the programs at the British Council.
\nFor instance, this year they had Ken Loach's social comedy Raining
\nStones, and the other Robin Hood (was it better or more
\nauthentic?), the one without Kevin, the Prince, Costner.<\/p>\n
At the Japan Cultural Center, the French Cultural Center, and the
\nGoethe Institute in 1994 there were both regular and special event
\nscreenings. The French Cultural Center offers a new season of films
\neach month and this year its program included films by top directors
\nsuch as the inimitable Jean-Luc Godard, Une Femme est Une Femme,
\nEric Rohmer, Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune, Jacques Demy and Jean-
\nPierre Melville.<\/p>\n
The Goethe Institute held a season of early 1930s German films
\nwhich included, as it ought, the timeless The Blue Angel. This is a
\nMarlene Dietrich vehicle by Josef von Sternberg, director and thigh-
\nhigh boot and cigar fetishist. With naughty Marlene in her famous
\nLola-Lola role, he had her flaunting her femininity and also
\nflouting it. When dressed in men's attire for a cabaret act she
\nsteals a kiss from a woman in the audience.<\/p>\n
Outside the ongoing cultural programs, there were festivals of
\nGerman, Japanese, American, Australian, French, and Taiwanese films.
\nThese events beckon to the cineast, but for the uninitiated they may
\npresent a pretty discomforting experience, sure to bring on the
\nfidget factor . How can you account for Wim Wenders' angels and
\nother fugues of fancy in a movie culture dominated by fast cutting
\nand special effects? Where, amongst the action heroes, psychopaths
\nand sociopaths who live up there on the big screen is there space
\nfor ideas on the human condition? How can you seriously contemplate
\nthe state of relations between men and women, when women's breasts
\nare burgeoning from every other movie poster that leers down from
\nthe billboards? Audiences in Jakarta deserve better.<\/p>\n
Alternatives<\/p>\n
At this year's festivals, there was a lot which was better. For
\ninstance, European directors of the French New Wave and the New
\nGerman Cinema, as each film movement is known.<\/p>\n
Internationally renowned work from Wim Wenders and Francois
\nTruffaut came to town this year, aboard retrospectives held at Taman
\nIsmail Marzuki by the Kine Klub with the Goethe Institute and the
\nFrench Cultural Center, respectively.<\/p>\n
Wim Wenders, in particular, would have been puzzling to audiences
\nnot already familiar with the context of his work or with European
\nradical cinema in general. He is also puzzling to some of those who
\nare (familiar). For a start he likes to make really long movies, way
\nover the obligatory 90 to 100 minutes. The longest he made was Until
\nthe End of the World, about eight hours long, before the people who
\nhad to make business out of it demanded that the director reduce
\nthis unwieldiness to a more manageable three hours plus.<\/p>\n
This lengthiness might look like self-indulgence, to some, one
\nsupposes it definitely is self-indulgence. But the long movies are a
\nreflection of Wenders' respect for his material which also
\ntranslates into a preference for long takes, with minimal cutting,
\nhence lengthy scenes and sequences, an overall lack of montage. For
\naudiences used to the staccato editing rhythms of the Hollywood
\naction feature, this can no doubt be hard to take. But if you feel
\ninclined to sit down for the long-term, and when you vary your
\nviewing expectations to the longueurs of the best of Wenders' work
\nand enjoy the integrity of his representations, you discover a kind
\nof brilliance and a poetic cinema at its best.<\/p>\n
What a pity that less of the best of Wenders was on show at the
\nretrospective in August. For me, missing were films such as Kings of
\nthe Road, a road-movie meditation on the state of contemporary
\nGerman culture and the relationships between young men of the post
\nWorld War II generation and their fathers; Wings of Desire, a piece
\nabout love that seems impossible, love between mankind and the
\nangels. Wenders has been bold enough to revisit this scenario of
\nsupernatural beings in his most recent film Faraway, So Close, which
\nwas a 1993 Cannes jury prize winner. Even the difficult, mixed
\npleasures of Until the End of the World itself, in the shortened
\nversion, could have been screened. Instead we had the ponderous
\nNotebook on Clothes and Cities and the equally muddy vision in
\nTokyo-Ga. You would have had to have been a blinkered Wenders
\ndevotee to enjoy either. But Paris, Texas, was on, a good choice,
\nwith Wenders going well over halfway to meet the mainstream
\naudience. And there was The State of Things and Nick's Film -
\nLightning Over Water.<\/p>\n
Wenders' Paris, Texas is the outcome of an implausible set of
\ncollaborations: Wim Wenders collaborating with Sam Sheppard
\n(director\/scenarists both), Robby Muller and Ry Cooder
\n(cinematographer and composer), Natassia Kinski and Harry Dean
\nStanton (actors). A joint effort between European art-house film
\nfilmmakers and down-south American filmmakers which works in this
\nremarkable, long film that clings long after the lights come up.
\nWith the wail of Cooder's guitar, Robby Muller's framings of the
\nland and sky, the little family at the center of the text -- Paris,
\nTexas has a simplicity both deceptive and powerful.<\/p>\n
Nick's Film - Lightning Over Water had none of the production
\nvalues of Paris, Texas. No big budget or big stars, just an aged man
\nin front of the camera -- film director Nicholas Ray. There was no
\nscreenplay penned by Sam Sheppard, no soundtrack scored by Ry
\nCooder, no handsome wide-angle location shots to signal \"the big
\nstatement\". Instead, the camera is trained on a frail old man, with
\na documentary intensity that can sometimes make you want to look
\naway. Nick Ray was once a Hollywood director of considerable stature
\n-- he made Rebel Without a Cause (starring James Dean as the
\nquintessential angry young man), also Party Girl, and 55 Days at
\nPeking -- and this film is Wenders' homage to his career.<\/p>\n
Truffaut<\/p>\n
A retrospective of the career of Francois Truffaut had a season
\nat Taman Ismail Tertutup with some of his most important films --
\nTirez sur le Pianiste, Jules et Jim, Baisers Voles and Le Dernier
\nMetro. Truffaut was the most successful of the French New Wave
\nfilmmakers in commercial terms so you would expect his films to be
\nthe most accessible. He had a healthy respect for the narrative form
\n(unlike Wenders) but if you only saw Tirez sur le Pianiste among the
\nfilms as the festival, you could be forgiven for not realizing this.<\/p>\n
Tirez sur le Pianiste, made in 1960, was a key film of the French
\nNew Wave. It was Truffaut's ground-breaking film, and like colleague
\nJean-Luc Godard's Breathless of the same year, an elliptical,
\ndisjointed text. The story of a honky-tonk piano player, once a
\ngreat musician, who becomes involves with gangsters, it is marked by
\nbizarre changes of mood -- comic, melodramatic, tragic - all
\nconfounded by jockey allusions to other films and a self-reflexivity
\nunheard of at the time of its release. If you saw this film and this
\nfilm alone, you would have done well for an introduction to the
\ncinema of the French New Wave.<\/p>\n
It was good to see Le Dernier Metro on the program, with lusty,
\nhunky Gerard Depardieu and the lofty Catherine Deneuve together. But
\nit would also have been good to see some of Truffaut's other best
\nremembered commercial features, such as l'Histoire d'Adele H (1975)
\nwith Isabelle Adjani and La Nuit Americaine, also known as Day for
\nNight (1973).<\/p>\n
--Jane Scott<\/p>", "url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/beyond-the-multiplex-the-films-of-1994-1447893297", "image": "" }, "sponsor": "Okusi Associates", "sponsor_url": "https:\/\/okusiassociates.com" }