The cinema, Jean-Luc Godard (and a generation of filmmakers and cinephiles) declared, is inherently political. Image and meaning cannot be separated. Image is meaning; and meaning, image. The ontology of the (unmanipulated) celluloid image may indeed be time embalmed, but that of the digital, fragmented, meta-layered, digital composite is something more: truth itself.
Modern (and post-modern and post-post-modern) theory has developed endless tools with which to analyze the moving image: semiotics, Marxism, structuralism, humanism, social and culture theory, psychoanalysis, gender and sexual studies. Yes, these are worthy pursuits. Yes, consider and record the aggregate. But also consider the apparatus, the filmmaking and film-watching process, itself an aggregate of a million hopes and fears – of a certain and undeniable truth.
Auteur theory, we know, is simply an inadequate indication of meaning. Each frame, each layer of meaning within, is the work of a hundred (a thousand, a hundred thousand) voices: a writer of a script; an author of a source novel; an editor of that novel; a cinematographer; a lighting technician; a composer; that very composer’s favorite existential philosopher; a film editor; a film editor’s most valued university professor; a director, possessed as he is by countless political and economic fears; a producer; hundreds of crew; several actors playing out their own very personal and political world views; and, in the case of studio product, a thousand test-screen and focus group participants, whose cut notes directly impact a final release print. If the dim, violent resolution of The Dark Knight represents the collective sensibility of a thousand creative artists, its astounding box office receipts reflect those of a million cinema patrons. What then of Slumdog Millionaire, released in the wake of devastating atrocities in Mumbai, or Milk, in the aftermath of the bigoted Proposition 8, or No Country for Old Men, as dire a reflection as any of the pitiful inadequacy of traditional, monotheistic religion, with its all-knowing, all-just god, to account for our Post-911 reality, or, indeed, for evil and the unmistakable inclination of the faithful to destroy all others and themselves?
Films communicate, perhaps in coded terms, what politicians and news media refuse to utter aloud. Indeed the ontology of the fractured, composited, mashed-up, sampled, and youtubed image is a dialogue – between artists, between viewers, between the images themselves. Yet films do not change minds, certain intellectuals concluded after Fahrenheit 9-11 broke box office records only for Bush to be reelected. A similar conclusion greeted De Gaul’s reelection following the student revolts of May 1968. But maybe the cinematic image works in subtler ways. Perhaps we evoke social change through telling impactful stories (our stories) in the narrative form. Or perhaps the impact of a social documentary like Fahrenheit 911 cannot be measured in a six-month window. Or perhaps, all or none of these things are true. Perhaps, more subtly still, the evolution of our social progress plays out in accumulation of an endless and perpetual stream of filmed and disseminated and regurgitated images. As Andre Bazin (as great a man as ever considered and wrote on these matters) once said: “if we define film culture…also as the recognition of our collective dreams, illusions, and worst thoughts, then every film, good or bad, realistic or fabricated, is an irreplaceable social documentary.” Take some comfort in this wisdom. Viewed broadly, our current film culture suggests a profound questioning of the present state of our American experiment. We will continue this evaluation, through meaning imaged, and, eventually, we will prevail.
Next time: a season of vampires.
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Matthew Mishory is a filmmaker and writer based in Los Angeles. His current project, PORTLAND, is being produced through his Iconoclastic Features shingle, and stars Jonathan Caouette, Erin Daniels, and David Carradine.
