There seems to be a general consensus that films aren't as good as they used to be. What films? The films that we used to call "art house films." Such films were different from ordinary Hollywood entertainment. For a start, they were in a foreign language, usually French or Italian, but also of more exotic provenance: Russian or Japanese or Brazilian. They were slow, they were "talky," they dealt with psychological nuances-that was their whole subject matter-and while they were serious they were also, often enough, sexy. Conversations in an early Rohmer film such as Ma nuit chez Maud (1969) had an erotic charge directly related to the beauty and intelligence of the actresses-actresses who seemed to be much more sophisticated and alluring than their transatlantic counterparts.
What has happened to such films-and the cinemas which used to show them? The Academy in Oxford Street-temple to the art film in London-closed long ago. One by one, the places where I spent many happy hours of my youth-the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, the Electric in Portobello Road, the Scala at King's Cross-have shut. True, the Curzon in Mayfair is still going; and with numerous changes (not all for the best) so is the National Film Theatre. But the demise of the beautiful Lumière in St Martin's Lane-the most modern of custom-built art house London cinemas, now for the past three years, cold and empty-suggests that the crisis is a real one. When prime-site cinemas like this are closing, there must surely be something amiss.
Is it that art house films are no longer being produced any more? The production pages of Screen International list every week, country by country, a breakdown of movies either in production or about to start. And in fact, there are literally thousands of such projects. France is producing as many films as it did 35 years ago in the heyday of the "new wave"-perhaps slightly more (about 150 a year). A similar level of production seems to be true of Germany, Spain and Scandinavia. Meanwhile, Hungary, Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic have all, somehow, against the odds, kept their film industries going-often by recourse to co-productions. Britain and America represent a special case: they are not traditionally art house-producing countries, at least by my definition. Yet production figures are well up in both countries, and in the case of America, the last 15 years have seen the rise of a small-scale independent cinema (the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh, David Mamet-even Woody Allen) which in many ways reproduces the best qualities of European art house movies. On the surface, then, it is as it always has been: more art films are produced annually than any sane person could possibly want to see.
Maybe the problem is that the kind of films that I loved are being made-but not talked about or publicised much. Rohmer is an example. More than 30 years after Ma nuit chez Maud he continues to produce movies as fresh and as beautiful as all but the best of his earliest work. (If you have seen his recent series of films based on the four seasons you will know what I mean.) Jean-Luc Godard, too, is still alive and still interesting. Ditto (in a different way) Claude Chabrol. And if a number of the old new wave directors have, inevitably, fallen by the wayside, they have been replaced by a new generation-Andr??in?Olivier Assayas, Jacques Doillon, Eric Zonca-every bit as intelligent, and as productive, as their predecessors.
So, the assumption of decline that surrounds art cinema may seem unduly pessimistic. None the less, I can see that there are some things which are worrying-the problem of availability for one. Films arrive in cinemas via distribution companies which have paid the producers a licence to exploit their wares in various ways: a cinema release followed by video distribution; and finally, a year or more down the line, a screening on television.
For most of the small-scale distributors which specialise in importing art films, the final deal with the television companies made the business viable. The problem is that, these days, broadcasters don't seem to be buying-especially if the film is in a foreign language. This is something of a mystery. With the explosion of television channels there should be more, not fewer, opportunities to screen such movies. But this is to ignore the levelling-down of cultural aspiration which has been a feature of recent changes on the airwaves; in particular, the way that public service channels like the BBC and Channel 4, which used to broadcast seasons of such films (at reasonable times), feel obliged now to join the ratings game. Whatever the reasons for the broadcasters holding back, the effects have been damaging. A prize-winning festival film which, ten years ago, might have been sold to Channel 4 for ?170,000, will now be lucky to receive ?15,000. Deprived of this final outlet on which their profits depended, distributors tend to import fewer foreign language movies into Britain. At the same time, the drying-up of foreign language films on television, scheduled at times when we can reasonably be expected to watch them, means the demand itself to see such movies decreases. The whole experience becomes culturally marginalised.
What about video? To the extent that you can own, or rent cheaply, cassettes of foreign classics, it might be argued that there would be a positive knock-on effect at the box office. But the opposite, it seems to me, is equally plausible: the option to watch tapes in the comfort of your home makes it increasingly easy to forgo the pleasures of the big screen-or at the very least, to ration your visits to the cinema to those occasions (usually, the opening of big Hollywood imports) where it's felt that the size of the screen is an intrinsic part of the viewing experience.
The size of the screen-the purist will reply-is always part of the viewing experience. It is one of the key aesthetic elements which separate cinema from television and make it a different art form. Yet even purists make compromises; and, purist or not, most of us now watch films at home. Still the problem remains: that in order for films to be available in cassette or DVD form, they need first to be profiled by a cinema release: this is how they get talked about and reviewed. You can see the outlines of an economic vicious circle. The extra revenues generated by a video release don't seem to be sufficient to offset the losses incurred by television's failure to buy up those vital broadcasting rights; and the whole delicate ecology of the operation (always a matter of tiny profit margins) is in danger of unravelling.
Let's not exaggerate. The films are still arriving (see the table opposite), in comparable numbers to the films available 20 years ago. Nor is the number of people paying money to see such films in cinemas declining. About 5.5m tickets are sold for art house admissions in Britain a year, the same as 20 years ago, (although, over the same period, total admissions have increased by about 40 per cent). Yet outside a few overwhelming successes such as last year's La vita è bella, these films are less visible. A subtle cultural downgrading of the art form seems to have taken place: a shift in the zeitgeist, hard to analyse, but connected to the general crisis in high culture which is a recognisable feature of postmodernism. Put simply: the divide between high and low art is no longer as clear as it used to be. In humanities departments and media courses one can discern a positive bias towards the popular: at any event, a mixing of high and low which, not so long ago, would have been unthinkable. Hollywood is increasingly seen as the model which cinema should aspire to-the only cinema, so to speak, worthy to be called such. And this shift in the cultural paradigm has coincided with a successful push on Hollywood's part to mop up remaining world markets.
Meanwhile, the hegemony of the English language increases; and so, by necessity, the standing of once rival languages declines. A recent summer treat for me was reading the collected letters of Henry James. What is so striking about the youthful writer and his circle of friends is their unembarrassed cosmopolitanism; their eagerness to travel to Europe, to live there and study its languages. Difficult (though not impossible) to imagine a similar young American of today writing to his friends, as James did to his friends, in French or German or Italian. This reminds me how much, in my own case, the pleasure of cinema was always a pleasure in listening to foreign languages: Swedish for Bergman, French for Rohmer and the new wave, Russian for Tarkovsky, and so on. Whether we knew these languages didn't matter, for their meaning became transparent to us through the miraculous medium of subtitling.
That particularity of art cinema-international, but embedded in the culture of individual languages-appears to be in danger. More and more directors are making films in English rather than their mother tongue, on the assumption that only if the film will sell in the north American market will it stand any chance of making a decent profit. Following a trend traceable back to Bertolucci in the mid-1980s, most of my erstwhile heroes seem to have gone down the same road: Chen Kaige from China, Lars von Trier and Bille August from Denmark, Volker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders from Germany, and so on. Even the French have joined the game, and this is important, because in so many ways it was France which defined art cinema, and gave the world the most beautiful examples of its practice. Some of the films that have emerged from this trend are undoubtedly worthy of their director's best efforts. But it seems likely that the greater accessibility to world markets will be paid for-is already being paid for-by a loss in artistic integrity; above all in the dialogue-which lies at the heart of intelligent psychological drama.
Yet European funding agencies, script development projects, even teaching departments in the great film schools, all seem to accept the same gospel. The message is: get popular. The classical art film, these new European culture-bureaucrats argue, is obscure and elitist, its practitioners ignorant of the rules of plot construction and of storytelling which are believed to be at the core of good film-making. By adopting the Hollywood model, European cinema (the argument continues) has the chance to do itself a big commercial favour. It can even compete with Hollywood on its own territory. And indeed, some European films-mainly British-have risen to this challenge. I don't begrudge films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Full Monty and more recently East is East their success in the marketplace. The danger lies in the implication that these are the only kind of films-with their life enhancing themes, usually describing triumph over adversity-that anyone would want to watch, or to make.
The difference between Hollywood and European cinema is not only a difference of scale but of kind: they are scarcely even the same art form. My point is not to insist that one is better than the other; merely that they are different; they cater to different constituencies. The danger with the current orthodoxy, even on its own commercial terms, is that Hollywood, will continue to do what it always does better than anyone else. Meanwhile, what Europe used to do superlatively languishes or is lost irrecoverably.
There are complicated interests here, and I don't want to make the matter seem simpler than it is. Starting from the moment someone decides to make a new movie, there are four elements have to be got right if the film is to prosper. First it needs to be "developed" properly-a matter of making sure that the script is convincing, the story holds together and that financing is in place. Then the thing has to be made. Next it has to be sold to distributors and prepared for the public. Finally a cinema must be found to show it in. In a big industrial system like the American one, the laws of supply and demand operate to harmonise all these elements. The whole process, in the jargon, is "vertically integrated."
But in Europe, where national cinema industries exist within the context of state or regional subsidies (without which, in most cases, the films wouldn't exist) it has never been as straightforward. The existence of subsidies to get a film made has allowed producers (who are paid a fee rather than a percentage of the profits) to be less vigilant than they should be about how the film finally comes to market. This has led to misalignments between production and consumption. In this sense, the European industry can only benefit from coming more into line with the American one. "Don't make films unless there are cinemas to screen them in; and only makes films which 'the public will want to go and see.'" Such is the mantra which motivates the huge EU funding agency known as Media II (five year budget: euro 310m). The difficulty is in making such seemingly sensible reforms coincide with continuing production of "our kind of cinema": films, that is, with a clear artistic quality or stamp to them.
The issue, as I see it, hinges on the notion of seriousness, and taking seriousness seriously. A measure of bleakness is part of the human condition and it used to be possible to reflect this in art. Many of the old-style art house films were indeed gloomy, but often the lucidity of their form acted to convert that pessimism into something close to aesthetic exaltation. Our new orthodoxy would do away with anything dark or difficult in cinema in favour of works which produce, or are said to produce, a recognisable feelgood factor (the "Miramax effect"). A sublime "feelgood factor" certainly exists in some art worthy of the name; just as it is true that seriousness in art can sometimes be an alibi for coldness and sterility. But the fact that culture needs seriousness close to its living centre is surely an unexceptionable dictum, valid across all the arts, cinema included.
Seriousness means, among other things, being open to the idea that art finds its subject matter not merely in romance and in comedy (although of course, there too) but in the events of contemporary history. Take the example of Yugoslavia. Out of that appalling conflict brilliant and fascinating films have emerged. But how many of these have we seen, or heard discussed? Emir Kusturica has an energy and inventiveness which put him in the league of earlier masters like Fellini. Yet his comic-grotesque diptych about the war, Underground (1995) and Black Cat, White Cat (1998)-primed, both of them, with major Cannes awards, and by any fair use of the word masterpieces-found few takers at the box office in Britain. At least, however, these films were distributed. Filmgoers, on the other hand, would have to have been very astute indeed to catch other great films about this war: Goran Paskaljevic's The Powder Keg, Srdjan Dragojevic's Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, Stole Popov's Gypsy Magic and most memorably, Ademir Kenovic's melancholy masterpiece The Perfect Circle-each of them in their different ways compelling works of art, and imbued with a poetry that belongs to the language they were conceived in.
One hesitates to invoke a trahison des clercs, but the press has not been helpful in all this. One is told pityingly that an epoch is "over": Fellini, Bresson, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, Bergman-they are all dead, aren't they? (Bergman is in fact alive.) The idea that art has its own value, on a different scale from the purely economic calculus, is heard less and less. There has been a marked decline in the quality of film criticism over the past ten to 15 years-all but killed off by changes in the set-up of the newspapers' arts pages which have promoted gossip and PR hype over disinterested presentation and commentary. Not all critics have colluded in this downmarket spiral, but you get the impression, nevertheless, that even the prominent ones have been pretty powerless to protest.
The critics have given up too easily. Fellini, Kurosawa, Bresson, Bergman and others like them have left the stage. But contemporaries such as Rohmer and Alain Resnais are alive and producing-along with directors such as Maurice Pialat, Chris Marker, Bertrand Tavernier, Raúl Ruiz, Emir Kusturica, István Szabó and Kira Muratova. Wonderful, intricate, fascinating films continue to be produced every year-in more or less the same quantities as they used to be. France remains, as always, the bedrock of the auteur tradition. But other nations and cultures are contributing too. At Cannes this year, for example (and it was not unusual), we had an opportunity to see three splendid films from Iran. Venturing further east, there were notable films from South Korea, from China, from Hong Kong and from Japan. Latin America (especially Brazil) seems to be going through a renewal. New cineastes, particularly women, are constantly emerging. Altogether, as I have said, there are too many, rather than too few films for any single consumer to keep up with. The problem is not their existence but their diminishing presence in our culture-on our cinema and television screens and in the reviews of the critics. Wouldn't it be wonderful to get these films back into the cinemas on a consistent, round-the-year basis? Then we could test out whether the famous "decline" was true or not. We might even discover that we were living in a golden age. n
