INTERPRETATIONS, ACTUALITIES

End of cinema

The author gives a pessimistic comment on the current state of film art. The principal idea is that the development of cinema went hand in hand with the birth and development of modernism in other arts, and the author concludes that film as art is at its best when it acknowledges its modernist roots, rejects conventional connotations of realism and questions the primacy of narration. He singles out the decade of the 1960s, the period marked by the triumph of formalism and auto reflexive and referential genre, and proceeds to quote Hungarian film scholar B. Nanay who wrote that Antonioni’s, Godard’s and Resnais’ films presented a fragile balance between narrative films and non-narrative avant-garde film. The balance was broken at the beginning of the 1970s with the domination of conventional narrative films. The author also claims that film criticism is in crisis because it is mostly descriptive, more often making subjective instead of analytical evaluations.

Ronald Bergan