Beyond the multiplex: The films of 1994

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