In the couple of months around publication of this article, the following film events will have taken place. Francis Coppola's presentation at Cannes of a longer version of Apocalypse Now. The paperback publication of Michael Powell's autobiography. The re-release of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. A South Bank Show profile of Ken Russell.
A common note sounds through all these retrospective celebrations which is rather embarrassing for cinema. Paul Schrader got it right a few years ago. "Looking back at my movies is a lose-lose situation," he said. "If they seem bad, you think 'my God, I had no talent'; if they seem good, you think 'my God, where has my talent gone?'"
What Coppola, Powell, Roeg and Russell have in common is that their talents went long before their time was up. In a flash of accelerated ageing, they became old pygmies remembering themselves as virile titans. Now, when Coppola makes a film like Jack, it is as anodyne as Apocalypse Now was grand. Powell's Age of Consent was as execrable as his wartime collaborations with Emeric Pressburger had been glorious. Roeg's decline started with the aptly titled Insignificance, which came after a string of masterpieces such as Don't Look Now and Bad Timing. Ken Russell's late work must surely have been directed by a talentless acolyte of the man who once made Women in Love.
In all these directors there is a drastic falling-off. It is replicated throughout the history of cinema. You can see it in the careers of-to take a random sample-Hitchcock, Antonioni, Welles, Fritz Lang, Wenders, Cukor, Minnelli, Peckinpah and Polanski. It is impossible to think of an important director in world cinema whose late work is his or her best. Eric Rohmer and Bergman come close, but Luis Bu?uel and Sergio Leone are the only true exceptions. Why don't film-makers conform to the principles of creative evolution?
Artists should mature, develop and intensify their own personal style. It happens with writers and painters. Poussin's late mythological landscapes are a striking advance; late Caravaggio dares to be more austere; the elderly Monet created his water lily screens. James Joyce's experimental energy went into top gear at the end. Dostoyevsky's three greatest novels came in his last 15 years. Of course there are exceptions, like Picasso, but in the arts the ideal is that late work comes as a culmination born of greater knowledge and self-knowledge. Beethoven composed the late string quartets when he was aged and deaf. Great architects usually produce their best work after the age of 50. The same should apply to film directors.
So why doesn't it? To start with, movie making is physically demanding. A day on set or on location when you're 70 is more of a grind than a day at the typewriter or easel. Then there's the argument that the language of cinema moves on and leaves the old behind. Cinema has undergone at least four technological revolutions (sound, colour, stereo sound, computer imaging) in a little over 100 years; and while Ridley Scott at 63 wasn't put off using computers to recreate Rome for Gladiator, what if he'd been ten years older?
Yet neither of these points explain the problem. Look again at the quartet of Coppola, Powell, Roeg and Russell. All four treated the camera as a pen, as one French critic put it and created a signature style. None, as he got older, was daunted by the technology of cinema. They were not "left behind" aesthetically, nor was it a matter of external factors shifting while they remained constant. Instead an internal sense of what constituted their voices calmed or died and they began to resemble the conservatives whom they once despised.
Roeg, Russell and Powell/Pressburger were great iconoclasts and explorers of the erotic imagination. In late middle age, they and others seem to fall into cliches about gender (Roeg, Powell), horror (Russell), and power (Coppola). The commercial imperative of the movie industry requires even older film-makers to make films about young people-people the age of moviegoers. A gap in empathy and understanding opens up. They no longer see themselves in their characters. Their themes become those of resentment, of the best times being in the past. In other words, they become reactionaries.
So the industry tends to arrest the creative development of its film-makers by refusing to let them move on to middle-aged themes and characters. Something happens socially, too. Successful movie people, more than other artists, rocket up the class ladder. They often become very rich, begin to see the world through tinted limousine glass, travel the globe for filming or publicity and isolate themselves in swanky houses. Martin Scorsese is the best example. His films were about the wise guys on the streets of lower east side Manhattan, but he can't continue to draw on his receding childhood forever. Success has removed his material problems, while perhaps creating existential ones. Watching him search for new themes and settings is fascinating.
Artists have always found that search difficult. But Paul Schrader's pain on looking back on his work is a pain which film-makers know particularly well. It'll be a sad evening in Cannes when Coppola takes the stage.
