hamish ford the return of the 1960s modernist cinema

7/29/2019 Hamish Ford the Return of the 1960s Modernist Cinema

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SAC 5 (2) pp. 155170 Intellect Limited 2011

Studies in Australasian Cinema

Volume 5 Number 2

2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sac.5.2.155_1

KEYWORDSpost-war modernism1960sreturnpasttemporalityaesthetic form

HAMISH FORD

University of Newcastle

The return of 1960s

modernist cinema

ABSTRACTThis article concerns the complex nature of post-war European film modernismshistoricity. According to Andrs Blint Kovcs, this cinema rose in an arc starting

from the mid-1950s, peaking in the 1960s, and slowly petering out by 1980. At itsbest such historicizing produces precise contextual detailing, rather than romantic-hermetic affirmation or subsequent backlash dismissal, in the process creatingroom for new accounts of films and filmmakers beyond their role in the heated

politics of then-contemporary critical taste and the competitive linear regime ofvanguard innovation. But we also need to look closely at the peculiarities of this

particular modernist cinemas apparent past-ness as revealing crucial elements ofmodernisms perennial (if variously contested or disavowed) power, challenge and

attraction. This article explores the uncanny, untimely return of such cinemas1960s apogee, embedded in a very real past while also emerging from virtual

futures, as it complicates anew our unstable present.

INTRODUCTION

We ignore the constantly self-transforming nature of the modern, itsinherent and ruthless dynamisms. Instead we fantasize its overthrow,see it as something already in the past.

(Orr 1993: 1)


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[F]rom the ambiguity of consciousness and situations spring forthactions, events, results, without warning.

(Lefebvre [1947] 1991: 18)

This article examines the multifaceted return over recent years of post-war European modernist cinema, in particular the feature films of its1960s apogee. Powered by an already uncanny temporality built into thefilms textual make-up that only becomes amplified upon digital rebirth,this modernist cinemas troubling questions and strange, science fiction-like aesthetic surfaces are today devoured as freshly minted works by newgenerations of critics, viewers and scholars. This return both gives substanceto and challenges different historical and theoretical accounts of post-warfilm modernism itself and more broadly the moving images fundamental yetcontradictory and ambivalent, exemplary and subversive, contextually boundand trans-historical relationship with, and enunciation of, the modern.

WHAT, AND WHEN, IS THIS MODERNISM?Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly, wrote Oscar Wilde (quoted in Livingston1982: 16). During the 1960s peak of European modernist cinemas post-warperiod, with a linear model of progress aesthetically still in play even if thefilms themselves very often apply a critical lens to the ideologies germaneto industrial and economic modernization we see played out in the widersocial and political world as portrayed on-screen it appeared easy for afilm-maker to be left behind by the stylistic and conceptual innovations ofother directors. If the rise of fascist and communist totalitarianism, the domi-nance of Hollywood and finally World War II killed off modernisms first,

inter-war wave in the estimation of scholars like John Orr (1993), historianssuch as Andrs Blint Kovcs (2007) argue that in its less-agreed-upon post-

war incarnation film modernism itself eventually became superseded andran its course. Irrespective of the precise timelines and explanations, critical

writing over the last three decades often paints modernism per se as nowdefinitively of the past. Kovcs dates the gradual decline as finally completeby 1980, while both Orr and Paisley Livingston (1982) earlier declared themodern in film to be over by general agreement, before lamenting and thenchallenging this eschatological picture. The epigraph quote by Orr at thestart of this article exemplifies the fervour of such a polemically contrarian,historically enmeshed position.

Strongly reconfiguring claims for such a cinemas importance by telling itsstory as thoroughly as possible via an almost encyclopedic context-rich histori-cal timeline and argument, Kovcs recent book Screening Modernism: European

Art Cinema, 19501980 enables a fresh gaze upon European film modernismspost-war or late period. Yet at the same time, something remains not quiteright with this modernisms past-ness. Kovcs himself touches on whatOrr and most notably Deleuze (1989) emphasize in mounting arguments forsuch films uncanny temporality and the philosophically subversive effectsthereof. Since the digitalization of film historys reproduction and consump-tion, and the roughly concurrent peak of critical and scholarly interest in thequestion of cinema and modernism, the issue has become both more central

to film studies discourses and beyond while at the same time even morechallenging to frame and account for.


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1. Important work byMiriam Hansen (1995,1999, 2009), HeideSchlpmann (1987,2010), Gertrud Koch(2000, 2005) and ThomasElsaesser (1996, 2000)has been central to our

evolving understandingof modernismsfirst era in both itsadvanced avant-garde and vernacularunderstandings.

If the contemporary digital and scholarly era has seen significant rethink-ing of historical accounts of cinema per se, modernist temporality has alwaysbeen particularly difficult to reconcile thanks to its common disregard fornarrative-based linear, teleological and non-reflexive forms. This problem onlyescalates when modernism is commonly deemed to have passed, its presump-tive internal progress and cultural currency curtailed by diverse forces includ-ing the increasing politicization of film theory, Hollywoods 1970s resurgence,growing scholarly emphasis on genre and popular cinema, the advent of post-classical mainstream forms, and gradually increasing focus on the diverseglories of recent world cinema. Orr starts Cinema and Modernity, his defiantlypro-modernism book written at the height of much film scholarships post-modern embrace of Hollywood and popular forms, thus: In the cinema themodern is already history. But it has never been replaced. This is the paradox

which confronts us in looking at film over the last fifty years. He then goeson in this articles epigraph to protest that while we fantasize modernismssuperceding we suppress and wish away such films unpredictable power,their ruthless dynamisms. (1993: 1). In the time since Orrs self-consciously

lonely work, we have seen a gradual and disparate re-emergence of post-warmodernism into the film-historical spotlight, following or sometimes alongside(if arguably not matching in quantity and attention when it comes to promi-nent film studies debates) the influential scholarship devoted to modernismsearlier inter-war period.1 In addition to the definitional problem of situatingpost-war modernist cinemas relationship to its inter-war forebear, scholarsof the former not only face the twin challenges of defining such a cinemasrelation to the avant-garde on the one hand and more formally conventionalmainstream art films on the other, but also what is increasingly seen as acomplex and often intertwined rather than obviously or always agonistic relationship with the classical narrative tradition.

INHERENT CONTRADICTIONS

In an instructive short piece called The Godard paradox, Serge Daney marksthe connection and important divergence between cinemas periods of exper-imentation. It was only after the war, he states, with the New Wave kami-kaze patch up job, that the idea of another cinema, one that would open intosomething else, was possible again. Possible, but no longer with the conquer-ing optimism of the early years (Daney 2004: 70). The second era is bothinspired by and yet very different from the earlier, more hopeful one. Daneyscomments emerge in the context of positioning Jean-Luc Godard the film-

maker often seen as the quintessential post-war vanguard innovator ina perhaps surprising way. There is nothing revolutionary about Godard,rather he is more interested in radical reformism, Daney writes, in offeringthe possibility of doing things differently even while continuing as before(2004: 71). In addition to a striking evocation of Godards gloriously paradox-ical modernism, Daney provides an apposite description of the substantivelyambivalent and Janus-faced nature of post-war modernist cinema itself in allits diversity, reminding us that no matter how enrapturing the given filmsaesthetic and conceptual riches we should attend to its inherent, enablingcontradictions. Daney contends that like many formal inventors, [Godard]advances back-to-front, apprehensively facing what he is leaving behind

(2004: 70). The film-maker Daney calls cinemas reformer rather than itsagonistic rebel is the very same figure whose 1960s work causes him to be


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2. See Hamish Ford(2011) for a detailedexplication of thisprocess in the contextof an argument for themutually productiveencounter between thispost-war modernist

cinema and Adornosphilosophy. For a moreintroductory accountof Adorno and theFrankfurt Schoolsusefulness for Filmstudies, see Ford (2008).

described recently by British critic and film historian Geoffrey Nowell-Smithas the most influential and revolutionary filmmaker of the last fifty years(2008: 189).

The diverse work of key European directors whose peak modernism orimportant early films emerged in the 1960s such as Michelangelo Antonioni,Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, JacquesRivette, Agnes Varda, Jancs Mikls, Vera Chytilov, Andrei Tarkovsky,Duan Makavejev and Rainer Werner Fassbinder all offers a deeply ambiv-alent gaze upon the immediate modernity. These films are palimpsest-likeaccounts of the contemporary world in which the past is never escaped yetoffers no morally helpful guide to a present that is increasingly characterizedby seemingly futuristic technologies and concepts, no matter our opinion ofthem. Such inherent conflict and contradiction is presented, via layered reflex-ivity, in the formal make-up of the films themselves.

P. Adams Sitney highlights modernisms unstable operational space some-where between classicism and the radical avant-garde. In his book ModernistMontage, examining the nexus between literary and cinematic modernist

forms, Sitney argues that the central conflict within modernism has beenthe opposition of a visionary quest for revolutionary newness and a continu-ity with a classical tradition (1992: 13). But rather than blunted compromise,such apparent conflict both further subverts conventional modes of meaning-delivery and forges destabilizing temporal impact. Sitney evocatively describesmodernisms trans-media tendency of reaching back into earlier modes ofrepresentation, forcing a quivering movementwithin whichyet another oblitera-tion of meaningbecomes a link to the tradition (1992: 16, emphasis added).This is only one reason why, despite myriad forms of aesthetic density andpleasure, post-war modernist works at their most complex and substantivecan never be called romantic or idealist, affirming neither the way things are

nor outsider refusal and radical alterity. Rather, any such elements are offeredonly in shards, the after-effects of illusions and beliefs being shattered. Ideals,investments and ideologies of both past and present appear and survive insuch films only as broken glass by the roadside, to borrow Theodor Adornospowerful phrase describing the way Gustav Mahlers deeply paradoxicalmodernism pulls fragments of western harmony and tonality together, hold-ing them up to the sun so that all the colours are reflected ([1960] 1992:36). We glimpse the ghosts of wholeness and belief, but only as meaningthat arises in fragments (Adorno [1960] 1992: 101). This is why, contra morepurist understandings of modernism as synonymous with the avant-garde,here narrative and a loose linearity often remain in play, plus the attendant

traditions of character and fictional scenario but as broken, unpersuasiveor ghosted. Traditional form is still present but made newly dysfunctional,with the result that, again to use Adornos words, its voice cracks ([1960]1992: 20).2

Seeking to productively define its complexities, Kovcs stresses that post-war modernist cinema

is essentially narrative, but its narrative forms are based on interactionsunknown or rarely apparent in both classical Hollywood and art cinemabecause they are based not in physical contact but in different forms ofmental responses. These unusual human interactions determine [such

films] specific narrative patterns (2007: 57)


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3. Relevant here isAdornos cautionfromAesthetic Theorywhen he writes, directprotest is reactionary.Even critical art hasto surrender itself tothat which it opposes.

[] The modernity ofart lies in its mimeticrelation to a petrifiedand alienated reality.This, and not the denialof that mute reality, iswhat makes art speak([1970] 1983: 31).

As opposed to so-called postmodern modes of narration that around 1980became the new paradigm in the story told by Kovcs such as what DavidBordwell (2002) calls the forking path narratives of films like Przypadek/BlindChance (Kieslowski [1981] 1987) and Lola rennt/Run Lola Run (Tykwer 1999) [t]he universe of modernist narratives is the single possible world of classi-cal narratives, but it is essentially uncertain, unpredictable, and incalculable(Kovcs 2007: 77). As I have argued elsewhere (Ford 2011), this means that

while such modernism is critical and often radical, it seldom if ever unambig-uously attacks the reality portrayed on-screen. Rather than a critically bluntedcompromise, however, these films soberly face the fundamental facts facedby modern art from within its economic and political real, as opposed tomounting a confident critique from an assumed alternative position.3

The most radical 1960s modernist feature films even Godards areusually quite oblique in their political address, or enclosed in quotations.Rather, what we find instead are those markers of uncertainty, unpre-dictability and incalculability emphasized by Kovcs. It is precisely thesequalities that make an aesthetically and philosophically radical film and

quintessential example of post-war modernist cinema like Persona (Bergman1966) still so challenging. That Ingmar Bergman was commonly attackedin Sweden and elsewhere in the late 1960s for his purportedly apoliticaland bourgeois cinema is now largely informative for the fact that his critics

were asking the famous art house director to provide ethico-politicalcertainty and belief completely at odds with his burgeoning modernism andphilosophical position. In utilizing familiar forms, no matter how fragmen-tary and self-consciously presented, such exemplary 1960s modernist filmsas Persona, Leclisse/Eclipse (Antonioni 1962), Lanne dernire Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad (Resnais 1962), Szegnylegnyek/The Round-Up (Jancs1966), 2 ou 3 choses que je sais delle/Two or Three Things I Know About Her

(Godard 1966) or Sedmikrsky/Daisies (Chytilov 1966) are unable to navigateescape from the ideological and moral residue of the culture they render,come from and enter into. This reconstituted, vastly tampered-with use offamiliar aesthetic forms results in properly immanent and reflexive accountsof the given modernity from and into which the films emerge.

Twin questions are asked by this film modernism: What is the modernitywe see on-screen, and is it indeed modern? In the first volume ofCritique ofEveryday Life, written at the dawn of the post-war era in 1947, Henri Lefebvrenotes, Even in its apparent and pretentious modernity (and what in fact,does this modernity consist of?) our culture drags in its wake a great,disparate patchwork which has nothing modern about it ([1947] 1991: 192).

Earlier, in his famous 1927 essay The mass ornament, Siegfried Kracaueranalysed how both pre-modern and modern regimes coalesce within thenew consumer culture, in often regressive ways, with reason present onlyin an emaciated form denuded of its Enlightenment promise so to becomecapitalisms ideologically prescribed ratio ([1927] 1995: 7486). This modern-

yet-not-yet in-between-ness that seems to characterize modernity itself isgiven a multi-layered critical rendering through the reflexive lens of the post-

war modernist cinema.Compared to the more comparably utopian tone of silent-era modernism,

however, following World War II and the death camps, then the creepinghorrors and very real violence of the Cold War, faith in modernity per se

and its purported progress is irrevocably undermined. This is one of thereasons Orr describes the post-war film-makers whose most radical work


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emerges in the 1960s as the neo-moderns. The neo affix indicates thiscinemas often very self-conscious taking up of the modernist challengeand idealism first staged in cinemas earlier decades, but also the crucialbridging role of Italian neo-realism (Orr 1993: 5) immediately following and often centrally concerning the foundation-destroying horrors offascism and war. Orrs descriptive moniker thereby highlights the post-

war modernist image as a reflexive prompter to look again, presenting analmost debilitatingly self-conscious vision of the modern world as seenthrough, and by, newly weary and saddened eyes in the wake of suchapocalyptic violence that seriously calls into question every tenet of westerncivilization. This is why he can argue that in rendering the modern worldit inherits through such a founding critically paradoxical gaze, the post-

war era is where we reach the true moment of the modern in the Westerncinema (Orr 1993: 2).

UBIQUITOUS AMBIVALENCE: MODERNITY, IMAGE,

SUBJECT, THEORYThere is no sense of spirituality here, no redeeming transcendence, accord-ing to Peter Brunettes (1998: 105) description ofIl deserto rosso/Red Desert(Antonioni 1964). Antonionis film is exemplary of much post-war filmmodernism in this and other regards. Such work is a far cry from romanticor utopian modernism, neither celebrating present-day technologized life norethically decrying it in favour of a very different vision. This is a distinctly criti-cal but non-purist, non-partisan modernism that casts doubt not only uponthe building blocks of classical and traditional modes of both life and cinemaalike, but equally in fact more so, because increasingly urgent and real contemporary, upon allegedly modern ones.

Such films demonstrate their immediate modernitys inherent oppositionsand unreconciled problems, irrespective of endless conjecture about autho-rial intentionality, the extent to which the given film-maker with Antonionibeing exemplary is on the whole drawn to the modern world, exhibiting nodesire to return to any past. Red Desert famously illustrates such a world asrather uninhabitable environmentally but also conceptually for the kindof humans who build and inhabit it. In charting this disconnect no directblame is apportioned, no clearly political analysis offered. And the aestheticincarnation of reality as viewed on the screen, no matter how ambivalent atbest we might feel about its worldly fact, is the source of real fascination andcreativity. That we (and the film-maker) can be so enthralled by the render-

ing of a world that is otherwise so troubling beyond the cinema (such as thepolluted industrial zone of Ravenna that dominates Red Desert) is a large partof this modernisms apparently contradictory fascination.

Consistently offering such ambivalent, often unnerving and multi-layered meditations by means of frequently remarkable aesthetic form,the very technological tools so effectively and often brilliantly utilized byhigh-profile 1960s film-makers such as Antonioni, Godard, Bergman orResnais are themselves both demonstrated at their artistic peak and yet equallydistrusted epistemologically disempowered and ontologically demystified.In doing so, post-war modernist cinema at the same time exhibits creativemastery of and yet also undermines the central tenets that twentieth-century

culture, cinema and modernism per se appear at first to inescapably privilege:vision and the image. Describing this generative contradiction, Sitney finds


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4. Such observations aredrawn from thirteenyears of teachingsuch films across fourdifferent Australianuniversities, and manymore viewing themwith peers.

5. In a plenary address atthe Cinema, modernityand modernism Filmand History Associationof Australia and NewZealand conference on1 December 2010, JulianMurphet spoke foraround 90 minutes onthe topic of modernistcinema, presumingagreement that sucha moniker denotedonly the inter-warincarnation. When hebriefly gestured tolater outcomes anddevelopments nearthe end of the address,we were told this waspostmodern cinema,a category into whichGodard was placed.Murphets accountof modernism wasalso entirely definedby the pursuit of along-take aesthetic adefinition that seemslimiting enough when

addressing silent-eramodernism but wouldbe entirely untenableif analysing theaesthetically diverseaesthetic forms of1960s modernism.The focus on thelong take is, however,consistent with theutopian, romantic andsometimes mysticalelements suggestedby some importantelements of early

modernism but whichagain would need tobe radically rethoughtwhen accounting forthe later work I addresshere.

that modernist literary and cinematic works stress vision as a privileged modeof perception, even of revelation, while at the same time cultivating opacityand questioning the primacy of the visible world (1992: 2). He sees this asmodernisms central antinomy, which it repeats and turns into its own elabo-rate metaphors (Sitney 1992: 2). Later in his book, Sitney provides a quotefrom Maurice Blanchot that illustrates well the kind of aesthetic-conceptual

world that results: present in its absence, graspable because ungraspable,appearing as disappeared (1992: 102).

The perceptually and epistemologically slippery visual account of whatat least on the surface often seems a grim portrayal of the modernity thatproduces the film itself, particularly in the work of such European directorsas Antonioni or Bergman, then soon Fassbinder and Chantal Akerman, andmore recently Michael Haneke, is exactly what often creates problems for

viewers. Here perhaps lies a central reason as to why there has never beenagreement for very long about the status of this modernism. During the firstflush of the New Wave moment, such work went very quickly from initialscandal to canonization and new orthodoxy. The exemplary and most extreme

case is again provided by Antonioni, whose Lavventura (1960) was votedsecond best film of all time in the 1962 Sight and Sound poll only two yearsafter being notoriously jeered at its Cannes premiere. Kovcs notes the waythat soon after this watershed moment in European cinema, for a few yearsat least, after 1962 important aesthetic achievements completely ignoring themodernist paradigm became extremely scarce (2007: 215). Yet outside theoften-faddish cycle of outrage, canonization and normalization, and then laterbacklash and purported superseding, such films from this period still have theability to disquiet and to annoy viewers when watched and discussed today (ifusually without the jeers greetingLavventura 51 years ago).

If these are simply old films, what explains their uncanny and still

unnerving power? In my experience, recent audience responses are far fromThats interesting, but weve moved on.4 Yet despite renewed interest overthe last decade and a half or so when it comes to publishing and, importantly,the online world of new cinephilia, post-war film modernism is still oftenlikely to be altogether skipped over in the new modernism histories seen inprominent research output and conference presentations.5 Yet such cinemaspresent-day potency as seen in audience and critical interest requires atten-tion, as does its unresolved status. Exemplary films of post-war modernismcontinue to cause classificatory and historiographical problems, it seems,for scholar-historians in a way that both Hollywood films and more overtlynon-narrative avant-garde work or experimental documentaries do not,

despite indeed perhaps because of maintaining the basic gestures of thedramatic feature film.A central cause of this unease is perhaps the fact that although particular

film-makers such as Antonioni or Godard in different ways pay immenseattention to the spaces of the modern world, the central conceptual andaffective plane on which their modernism carries out its violent impact is viathe very immanent, in-the-world human subject on-screen. This recognizablebody is never entirely convincing as a character in the classical sense, orperhaps even as a subject per se. Yet amorphously he or she suggests a kindof humanity in both an abstract and fleshy sense, not only because presentedby the real body of an actor, but due to exhibiting diverse and perhaps rather

recognizable symptoms of fragmentation and crisis. Yet while the viewermight relate to certain aspects of the different dramas, neuroses and traumas


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played out, the broadly sketched body-subject performing them remains akind of impossibility.

Kovcs describes the quintessential central figure of the post-war modernistcinema and its symbiotic relationship to the films aesthetic form as follows:

Features of modern narratives are consequences of the fact that theytell stories about an estranged individual who has lost all her essentialcontacts to others, to the world, to the past, and to the future or lost eventhe foundations of her personality, suggesting axiomatically that the morethis is felt, the more modernist the modernist form.

(2007: 66, original emphasis)

However, while I think Kovcs is often correct about this it is a useful peda-gogical and classificatory description that rings true for many such films sucha formulation also risks reinstating one of the great clichs about film-makerslike Antonioni that other recent commentators such as Peter Brunette (1998)are keen to put into perspective so as to find room to develop other lines of

analysis. Brunette argues that the familiar descriptions of Antonionis 1960swork in particular as offering vaguely existentialist fables about alienationand loss of identity downplay social and political context, and undersell thefilms conceptual radicalism. Stressing unknowability and incommensurabil-ity, he observes that nothing ever seems to add up in these films, nothing, thatis, beyond a vague sense of uneasiness and alienation, and thus most criticshave taken this to be what they are about (1998: 3). ConsideringLavventura,Leclisse or Red Desert decades after being made, Brunette argues that theirquestioning goes beyond that of simple identity, as this assumes that thereis or can be such a thing as a more or less fixed self, something that can be lostor recovered, a core being (1998: 103). Rather, subsequent post-structuralist

theory suggests that each human subject can just as easily be regarded as aneffectof language and cultural meaning, that various subject positions that

we occupy are preconstituted for us, as it were, by the culture of which weare a part (Brunette 1998: 103). Though Brunette might be striving to justify

Antonionis modernism through a particular theoretical lens, such critical workdemonstrates a way to see the importance of this modernist cinemas critiqueof modernitys regressive regimes: not only capitalisms temporal dictatesof production/consumption via Taylorism and Fordism (and the socialistequivalent in Eastern bloc films), and increasingly their post-industrial forms,but also regimes of the subject itself and our theoretical accounting thereof.

In Lefebvres 1958 foreword to the second edition ofCritique of Everyday

Life, Volume 1, written on the eve of post-war film modernisms famous simul-taneous New Wave hits the troika ofHiroshima, mon Amour(Resnais 1959),A bout de souffl/Breathless (Godard 1959) and Lavventura we read (in theoriginal gendered language) that:

[M]odern mans products and his works function like beings of nature.He must objectify himself, and social objects become things, fetishes,

which turn upon him. [ I]f man has humanized himself, he has doneso only by tearing himself apart, dividing himself, fragmenting himself.

([1958] 1991: 71)

In the main 1947 text, Lefebvre then makes an observation germane tothe disconnect charted in Antonionis and much other post-war modernist


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7. Perhaps just one, andcertainly much morefrequently cited. Justprior to his death,Roland Barthes generally no greatfan of the cinema, ashe makes clear at the

start of Camera Lucida(1981: 3) in 1979 wrotea now famous letter toAntonioni, publishedby Cashiers du Cinmaas Cher Antonioni, inwhich we read:[M]eaning, once fixedand imposed, once nolonger subtle, becomesan instrument, astake in the game ofpower. Antonionisfilms are special forBarthes precisely

for their refusal andundermining of suchpower, exhibiting aprecious attempt todeplete, disturb, andundo the fanaticismof meaning. (Barthes,1989: 11)

At the extreme, almost absurdist edge of this slippery subject-objectportrayal often reflexively suggested as being at the heart of cinematic repre-sentation per se is perhaps the cardboard cut-out, monotonal figures inTwo or Three Things I Know About Her. The film presents in detail the listlessmovements of a vacant-looking lower-middle-class housewife as she fillsher day minding children, shopping and engaging in part-time prostitution,all the while delivering political and philosophical lines clearly dictated toher on the spot by the hyper-reflexive unseen film-maker who also whispersconfessionally to us on the soundtrack. The technique may be totally uncon-

vincing as both realist drama and documentary, yet Godards concern is associological and political in its desire to analyse reality as is Lefebvres literaryinvestigation of everyday life in French post-war consumer society. Lefebvrestates in 1958 that we can tell a lot simply by looking at a womans life: herbiography, her job, her family, her class, her budget, her eating habits, howshe used money, opinions and her ideas, the state of the market, etc. (Lefebvre[1958] 1991: 57). But such an investigation does not in and of itself dictatean aesthetic form, and modernist cinema is famous for on the whole under-

mining realism in myriad ways. Yet for all the apparently baroque or abstractsound-image compositions of films such asPersona, Daisies, The Round-Up,RedDesertand Two or Three Things, and thenKatzelmacher(Fassbinder 1969), W.R.:

Misterije organizma/W.R: Mysteries of the Organism (Makavejev 1970), JeanneDielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman 1975), Zerkalo/Mirror(Tarkovsky 1974) and Je, tu, il, elle/I, You, He, She (Akerman 1976), post-warmodernist films primary interest is in a contemporary everyday real.

Although showing a very historically defined, secular and material reality,this modernism explores its uncanny, even bizarre appearance as poweredby rapid technological and environmental change including of course theheavily virtual reality of the moving image in sustained and very diverse

renderings of such a modern worlds very strange physical and perceptualconditions. Realism in its classical or even politically revolutionary formsimply will not do, because it is no longer realistic either in terms of whatit shows or how.

The confusion brought about by a genuine desire to portray realitysauthenticallymodern appearance, both in form and content, demonstratesambiguity as an absolutely central quality for post-war film modernism.To render the everyday in all its confusion and challenge the cosmic andthe quotidian, the distinction between which is voided means accepting,indeed diving deeply into, fundamental ambiguity and at best a very tentativepresence of meaning. Again, these are key properties of post-war modernity

for Lefebvre :

[A]mbiguity is a category of everyday life, and perhaps an essential cate-gory. It never exhausts its reality; from the ambiguity of consciousnessand situations spring forth actions, events, results, without warning.These, at least, have clear-cut outlines. They maintain a hard, incisiveobjectivity which constantly disperses the luminous vapours of ambiguity only to let them rise once again.

(Lefebvre [1958] 1991: 18, emphasis added)

Inside or outside film commentary, there may be no better description of the

kind of world, and the fundamentally paradoxical lens through which we seeit, brought to us by post-war modernist cinema.7


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8. For a general accountof the impact ofDeleuzes influentialphilosophy of cinema particularly thetime-image on filmtheory, see the finalsection of Ford (2008).

For a much more directexploration of the time-image in the contextof Antonionis cinema,using Lavventura asthe focus text to testthe productivity butalso possible limits ofsuch an application,see Ford (2003).

TROUBLING RETURN

Deleuze speaks of what he calls the time-image as exemplified in the films ofAlain Resnais, for him the driving element of post-war cinema:

The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where immediate and direct

confrontations take place between the past and the future, the insideand the outside, at a distance impossible to determine, independent ofany fixed point [] The image no longer has space and movement as itsprimary characteristics but topology and time.

(1989: 125)

Post-war modernist cinema at its 1960s peak returns to us because the filmsare already flooded with time be it elongated or cut up into non-chrono-logical fragments, or as manoeuvres enacted in tandem (reaching a famousand notorious early peak with Resnais Last Year in Marienbad). Productsof both real historical forces and contexts, these works also time-travel in

a most uncanny way. Not only are they born again every month, appearinganew as freshly restored in digital form (like many other old movies), thefilms also bring with them a still very much alive and virulent temporal poweranalysed by Deleuze as the time-image, in which temporality is finally liber-ated from its subservient role buried beneath narrative cinemas protagonisticaction.8 But the other factor that stops post-war modernist cinema from beingkept safely in the film history museum is that while the work of present-day(often non-western) directors such as Bela Tarr, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and TsaiMing-Liang frequently goes further than the modernism under discus-sion here when it comes to sheer slowness (often with Tarkovsky the pivotallinking figure), post-war modernisms peak films remain uniquely extremeand complex events in highly diverse ways.

Through aesthetic forms often emphasizing and utilizing the non-linearimpact of fragments combined, post-war modernism enables a destruction-enforcing openness through materially forged conceptual violence (both thatof film itself via often radical formal devices and that of the very modern worldas featured on screen), resulting in cinematic experiences relatively subduedone moment and lacerating the next. In addition to the long-take aestheticthat Julian Murphet (2010) and others argue is central to modernisms silentera, and today reaching a thus-far less studied apotheosis in the work of Tarr,Tsai, Hou, Jia Zhangke and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with the historicallyin-between films under discussion in this article neither first-generationmodernist nor cutting-edge postmodern or contemporary world cinema we

have the added problem of often fragmentary or cubist montage techniques(reaching a kind of absurdist apogee with Daisies) but also enormous confu-sion and layering of tense, perception and ownership of the gaze. JamesMonaco observes that every shot in Marienbad, the most famous featurefilm driving this multi-temporal and multi-spatial expansion, can be read aseither present tense, past tense, conditional or subjunctive, or pure fantasy,in which the truth, reality is beside the point (1979: 56, 59). And allthis despite the fact that such a radical film still gives us a narrative of sorts(albeit made up of perhaps impossible-to-put-together fragments) and evena kind of love story (both romantic and very dark indeed, suggestive of rape),not to mention a European upper-class incarnation of Hollywood glamour

(complete with dresses by Coco Chanel) and some absurdist humour.


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and movement as the central elements of the moving-image medium, whileat the same time refusing utopian gestures, maintaining in fragmentedor stretched form aspects of such classical foundations, the voice of whichbecomes cracked in Adornos phrase. These films demonstrate that at itsaesthetic and conceptual peak, audio-visual mechanical reproduction bothoverthrows the past and yet also enables its ghostly continuation and endlesspermutation as fragment and reflexivity, or as perennial rerun. In this sense,as with classicisms own fragmentary rendering within modernism, modernistcinema itself now returns to us as fragmentary (no matter how whole it lookson a maxed-out Criterion Collection edition) its aesthetic and conceptualpromise and subversion just surviving but on the cusp of disappearance. Hereis a cinema shot through with the palpable threat or promise that storytellingis/was/is disappearing, seriously attempting to render such a historical momentand movement via rigorously appropriate new forms of expression, all the

while demonstrating the inbuilt failure or fantasy of any such overthrow.Decades after film modernisms reported demise, we now know that

storytelling has far from disappeared. Even in the post-classical world of

contemporary Hollywood and beyond, more tenets of conventional narrativesubstantively remain than 1960s modernism suggested. Here lies one of theperennial attractions but also difficulties of this modernism and its myriadeffects, one that has only deepened over time. It offers us a science fiction-like

vision of present and future possibility, but shorn of any utopian/dystopianbinary choice. If the problems such films frame were entirely and safely inour presents past, and their aesthetic properties only a developmental stepin the road of cinemas relentless progress, they would not return. Rather,this modernism thrusts upon us a different and difficult kind of non-linearpast-ness that is both rooted in history and yet also appears as if from a futurenot taken, or a very strange vision of our own present. By casting itself adrift

from any one-way account of cinema history or time itself, this uncannytemporality has the effect of casting doubt over everything including,ensured by the films diverse reflexivity and auto critique, the efficacy and

worth of modernism in its various guises. As powered by a threatening anddigitally reanimated temporality that increasingly comes to define the sound-image compositions and experiential power of such films, the return of 1960smodernist cinema generates endless potential for ambivalent pleasure anddiscomfort within an increasingly belief-beleaguered, ever-later modernityinto which they perennially emerge as new.

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SUGGESTED CITATION

Ford, H. (2011), The return of 1960s modernist cinema, Studies in AustralasianCinema 5: 2, pp. 155170, doi: 10.1386/sac.5.2.155_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Hamish Ford lectures in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the School ofHumanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle.

Contact: School of Humanities and Social Science, Room MC127 McMullinBuilding, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan Campus, 2308 NSW, Australia.E-mail:

hamish ford the return of the 1960s modernist cinema

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