INTRODUCTION INTO SUMMERFILM FESTIVALS
Shaking off the Past — the European Moment
Although film history notes
that the period of the auteur New Hollywood ended with
the beginning of the 1980s, the same changes in European
film passed rather unnoticed.
Since the early 1980s until the mid ’90s the focus of filmic
events was moved to the USA and East Asia. In Europe, on
the other hand, certain authors (P. Greenaway, D. Jarman,
B. Tarr, A. Kaurismaki, K. Kieszlowski) produced brilliant
opuses, British and Spanish cinema experienced a boost, nevertheless,
European cinema on the whole played a marginal role — they
did not generate trends, nor created many new authors.
One
of the reasons for this state was the collapse of the philosophy
of the auteur film additionally aggravated by the general
esthetical affinities of the period. Leading theoreticians
of the post-modern rejected the modernist utopian vocabulary
and promoted hedonistic culture, irony, and a return to
narrativity and communicability so that in the mid ’80s
even the established modernists such as Wenders and Tarkovsky
made ’lighter’ narrative films. The dominant type of European
art film lost the support of critics and normative poetics.
In Croatia, representatives of such objections with the
theses about the boredom of the auteur film were the magazine Kinoteka and
the followers of the self-proclaimed New Croatian film.
Lack of understanding of the poetical model incarnated
by Godard or Rohmer was evidently connected with the fall
in quality of humanistic education of the public and critics
alike, but also with the fact that representative directors
of the auteur film of the ’80s were nothing but shallow
epigones of Resnais and Rohmer. Postmodernist culture exhibited
an inclination towards communicability, hedonism, ludic
modes and combining, and film lovers turned to the works
of Hollywood authors like Burton and Coen brothers. At
the end of the ’80s critics’ antiauteur campaign reached
its peak.
The second reason for the crisis of European
film was the disappearance of traditional productions due
to the expansion of capital and political changes. European
cinema expanded their capital trying to create a pan-European
cinema that produced some sort of additive motion pictures
founded on the philosophy: ’a renowned director, plus English
language, plus famous European actors, plus a culturally
important theme’. In the mid ’90s European film has started
to acquire some speed. After many years Europe was getting
some new authors with the status of arthouse stars
(T. Tykwer, S. Gedeon, L. Moodysson), while a whole series
of European cinemas was experiencing the phenomenon of
local hits. This gradual ascension could be observed in
Croatia too, not only in the cinema repertoire, but also
in the programmes of festivals in Pula and Motovun.
This
year’s Venetian Mostra was, according to many, first great
festival in the last ten years that has not been dominated
by films from Asia and/or the USA. A recovered European
film is an unusual inversion of films from late ’80s and
early ’90s. Creative forces of those films resided on the
typically postmodernist stylistic features: visual hedonism,
stylisation, irony, the awareness of tradition, genre mixing,
fantastic heterocosms and pop culture inspiration observable
in different films such as Subway,
Nikita, Matador, The Elements of Crime, Shallow Grave, Jamon,
Jamon, Delicacy, While Nobody’s Watching.
They are
all visually luxuriant and stylised, include generic
paraphrases, recycle pop culture, use science fiction
and have populist aspirations. New generation is a poetical
antipode of the above mentioned. Instead of stylisation,
it is characterised by verism and naturalism, photographic
roughness and an interest for the material surrounding
so that in this manner it proclaims death to the film
illusion. Genre is no longer a ludic strategy but methodologically
forgrounded and reduced to a comic dimension. Croatian
culture too mirrors such poetic controversy. Within the
heterogeneous movement called the ’New Croatian film’
we can distinguish two generations. The first generation
of authors (V. Brešan, L. Nola, H. Hribar, N. Hitrec) is
significantly under the influence of the ’80s films and
leans towards stylisation becoming a creative mainstream
undergoing poetical changes similar to their European
piers. The second one has not yet left any trace in feature
films although their short films display familiarities
with the new European wave.
The new independent American
film also possesses similar poetical characteristics
so that the new filmic Europe is particularly fascinating
because of a rather large number of new, interesting
names. Thus we have M. Kassovitz, E. Zonca, X. Beauvois,
F. Ozon, D. Moll, M. Vernoux from France; F. Fonteyne,
P. Toye, L. Debrauwer from Belgium, and M. Winterbottom
and L. Ramsay from Great Britain. In Denmark, the ideological
centre of the new European film, beside the ideologist
of the Dogma 95, L. von Trier, we also have L. Scherfig,
T. Vinterberg and W. Refn; L. Moodysson from Sweden,
and T. Tykwer from Germany, probably the biggest star
among the younger European directors.
In Czech we have
J. Sverak, P. Zelenka and S. Gedeon; in Austria N. Albert
and J. Hausner; in Slovenia J. Burger, in Bosnia and
Herzegovina D. Tanović. While Serbian cinema lost its
two best younger authors S. Dragojević and G. Stojanović,
critics in Italy are beginning to appreciate new films
by N. Moretti, G. Piccioni, C. Mazzaruti and F. Archibugi,
while P. Virzi seems to be the most interesting among
the young authors.
This phenomenon of the young authors
producing radical and extremely ripe movies, so characteristic
of Europe and the USA, cannot be found in Croatia. Main
reasons are the inaccessibility of film information,
inertness of the system, and lack of film producers.
On the other hand, many authors have displayed talent
and sensibility similar to those that reign in the new
European film (Z. Matijević, Z. Jurić, R. Orhel, A. Nuić).
Jurica Pavičić |
