Beyond the multiplex: The films of 1994

JAKARTA (JP): Audiences for Hollywood films did not peak last year with Spielberg's Jurassic Park. They began to decline long before, towards the end of the big studio era in the 1940s. Then television took off in the 1950s and VCRs in the 1980s. Actually, Hollywood doesn't have it all sewn up, so don't believe what you think you see around you.

What? You say, as you recall the film posters above Jakarta's main venues, and are probably about to take issue. But it's true.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood was "vertically integrated", from top to toe, which meant that one company, one of the Hollywood studios like MGM or Universal, produced, distributed and exhibited its own movies. Films which weren't assembled like Ford cars, mass produced and sold like sausages, weren't made. These days, it is possible for an independent production to get off the ground, find finance, get made and find an audience.

Nowadays, Hollywood is still trying for market shares in some places, in countries like India, which have bustling film industries of their own, and where the local audiences prefer to watch local films, for better or for worse. And it seems the argument that language presents a natural barrier to English-language films doesn't always hold.

But all this talk is cold comfort if you want more than the wall- to-wall Hollywood which you see around you. Hollywood -- whatever that now means -- still looks dominant. Movies on offer in the city at the moment are Time Cop, Airheads, Yankee Zulu, When a Man Loves a Woman and Tryst. You scan the posters, consider the sales pitch and try to recall the reviews. Nah, nothing promising, it would have been a good week for a film festival with a few alternatives.

Perhaps there's something on at the Teater Tertutup, Taman Ismail Marzuki. Could also check out the programs at the British Council. For instance, this year they had Ken Loach's social comedy Raining Stones, and the other Robin Hood (was it better or more authentic?), the one without Kevin, the Prince, Costner.

At the Japan Cultural Center, the French Cultural Center, and the Goethe Institute in 1994 there were both regular and special event screenings. The French Cultural Center offers a new season of films each month and this year its program included films by top directors such as the inimitable Jean-Luc Godard, Une Femme est Une Femme, Eric Rohmer, Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune, Jacques Demy and Jean- Pierre Melville.

The Goethe Institute held a season of early 1930s German films which included, as it ought, the timeless The Blue Angel. This is a Marlene Dietrich vehicle by Josef von Sternberg, director and thigh- high boot and cigar fetishist. With naughty Marlene in her famous Lola-Lola role, he had her flaunting her femininity and also flouting it. When dressed in men's attire for a cabaret act she steals a kiss from a woman in the audience.

Outside the ongoing cultural programs, there were festivals of German, Japanese, American, Australian, French, and Taiwanese films. These events beckon to the cineast, but for the uninitiated they may present a pretty discomforting experience, sure to bring on the fidget factor . How can you account for Wim Wenders' angels and other fugues of fancy in a movie culture dominated by fast cutting and special effects? Where, amongst the action heroes, psychopaths and sociopaths who live up there on the big screen is there space for ideas on the human condition? How can you seriously contemplate the state of relations between men and women, when women's breasts are burgeoning from every other movie poster that leers down from the billboards? Audiences in Jakarta deserve better.

Alternatives

At this year's festivals, there was a lot which was better. For instance, European directors of the French New Wave and the New German Cinema, as each film movement is known.

Internationally renowned work from Wim Wenders and Francois Truffaut came to town this year, aboard retrospectives held at Taman Ismail Marzuki by the Kine Klub with the Goethe Institute and the French Cultural Center, respectively.

Wim Wenders, in particular, would have been puzzling to audiences not already familiar with the context of his work or with European radical cinema in general. He is also puzzling to some of those who are (familiar). For a start he likes to make really long movies, way over the obligatory 90 to 100 minutes. The longest he made was Until the End of the World, about eight hours long, before the people who had to make business out of it demanded that the director reduce this unwieldiness to a more manageable three hours plus.

This lengthiness might look like self-indulgence, to some, one supposes it definitely is self-indulgence. But the long movies are a reflection of Wenders' respect for his material which also translates into a preference for long takes, with minimal cutting, hence lengthy scenes and sequences, an overall lack of montage. For audiences used to the staccato editing rhythms of the Hollywood action feature, this can no doubt be hard to take. But if you feel inclined to sit down for the long-term, and when you vary your viewing expectations to the longueurs of the best of Wenders' work and enjoy the integrity of his representations, you discover a kind of brilliance and a poetic cinema at its best.

What a pity that less of the best of Wenders was on show at the retrospective in August. For me, missing were films such as Kings of the Road, a road-movie meditation on the state of contemporary German culture and the relationships between young men of the post World War II generation and their fathers; Wings of Desire, a piece about love that seems impossible, love between mankind and the angels. Wenders has been bold enough to revisit this scenario of supernatural beings in his most recent film Faraway, So Close, which was a 1993 Cannes jury prize winner. Even the difficult, mixed pleasures of Until the End of the World itself, in the shortened version, could have been screened. Instead we had the ponderous Notebook on Clothes and Cities and the equally muddy vision in Tokyo-Ga. You would have had to have been a blinkered Wenders devotee to enjoy either. But Paris, Texas, was on, a good choice, with Wenders going well over halfway to meet the mainstream audience. And there was The State of Things and Nick's Film - Lightning Over Water.

Wenders' Paris, Texas is the outcome of an implausible set of collaborations: Wim Wenders collaborating with Sam Sheppard (director/scenarists both), Robby Muller and Ry Cooder (cinematographer and composer), Natassia Kinski and Harry Dean Stanton (actors). A joint effort between European art-house film filmmakers and down-south American filmmakers which works in this remarkable, long film that clings long after the lights come up. With the wail of Cooder's guitar, Robby Muller's framings of the land and sky, the little family at the center of the text -- Paris, Texas has a simplicity both deceptive and powerful.

Nick's Film - Lightning Over Water had none of the production values of Paris, Texas. No big budget or big stars, just an aged man in front of the camera -- film director Nicholas Ray. There was no screenplay penned by Sam Sheppard, no soundtrack scored by Ry Cooder, no handsome wide-angle location shots to signal "the big statement". Instead, the camera is trained on a frail old man, with a documentary intensity that can sometimes make you want to look away. Nick Ray was once a Hollywood director of considerable stature -- he made Rebel Without a Cause (starring James Dean as the quintessential angry young man), also Party Girl, and 55 Days at Peking -- and this film is Wenders' homage to his career.

Truffaut

A retrospective of the career of Francois Truffaut had a season at Taman Ismail Tertutup with some of his most important films -- Tirez sur le Pianiste, Jules et Jim, Baisers Voles and Le Dernier Metro. Truffaut was the most successful of the French New Wave filmmakers in commercial terms so you would expect his films to be the most accessible. He had a healthy respect for the narrative form (unlike Wenders) but if you only saw Tirez sur le Pianiste among the films as the festival, you could be forgiven for not realizing this.

Tirez sur le Pianiste, made in 1960, was a key film of the French New Wave. It was Truffaut's ground-breaking film, and like colleague Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless of the same year, an elliptical, disjointed text. The story of a honky-tonk piano player, once a great musician, who becomes involves with gangsters, it is marked by bizarre changes of mood -- comic, melodramatic, tragic - all confounded by jockey allusions to other films and a self-reflexivity unheard of at the time of its release. If you saw this film and this film alone, you would have done well for an introduction to the cinema of the French New Wave.

It was good to see Le Dernier Metro on the program, with lusty, hunky Gerard Depardieu and the lofty Catherine Deneuve together. But it would also have been good to see some of Truffaut's other best remembered commercial features, such as l'Histoire d'Adele H (1975) with Isabelle Adjani and La Nuit Americaine, also known as Day for Night (1973).

--Jane Scott