The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema

Abstract

Preface to the New EditionThe Altering Eye is a book about the most fertile period of filmmaking in the mid-twentieth century. This was a period of rediscovering cinema, of returning to zero (as Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed) and advancing beyond the conventions of the Hollywood style. Not merely advancing, but revolting against it. On the level of form and with a vital, largely left-wing political force, filmmakers worldwide explored their art, pushed its limits, made it articulate, eloquent and complex. Audiences responded in kind, their curiosity and desire meeting the imagination of filmmakers to form a nourishing film culture.While writing the book, there was every indication that the cinematic phenomenon I was discussing was an ongoing process. But just before publication, two of the major filmmakers discussed in the book died: the Brazilian Glauber Rocha in 1981 and Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982. Their deaths seemed to signal, or at least occur simultaneously with, an equally premature demise of the very film culture that swept across the world from the end of WW II until that decadal moment. The New German Cinema, the last movement in the wave that began with Italian neorealism blew itself out. Its most talented member was dead. Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders seemed to drift off into less creative spaces, though Herzog has found his footing in a number of amazing documentaries. In France, François Truffaut, a founder of the New Wave, died in 1983. Godard, after having brought about the second seismic change in film after Italian neorealism, went into a kind of exile and returned no longer as a perpetrator of a new cinematic vision, but as a narcissist of form. (He may have been this all along, but the formal experimentation he carried on in the 1960s pressed forward on cinema worldwide and changed it; once changed, Godard himself was changed-by the very cinema he helped create.)It seemed that the energy that coursed through European and world cinema in the 1960s and 1970s diminished. Some of it was transferred to the United States, where an auteur cinema steered by the successes Preface to the 1983 EditionNarrative film can set out to please its audience, soothe it, meet and reinforce its expectations. Or it can challenge, question and probe, inquire about itself, its audience, and the world they both inhabit and reflect. This is the kind of film that is my subject: film made in a spirit of resistance, rebellion, and refusal; made with desire. These films are made all over the world; they were made in America at one time-in the forties, in the late sixties and early seventies-and I have spoken about them in another book.Here I am concerned with the same periods, but with films made in Europe and Latin America, made in reaction to American cinema, often to America itself, yet dependent upon America, upon the conventions and attitudes of American film and culture, feeding upon them and sometimes spitting them out. These films are part of the modernist movement in twentieth-century art, a movement whose diver...

An offer they couldn't refuse (but probably should have): the ineffectiveness of Italian state subsidies to movie-making

“…Further, it has also been suggested that left-leaning parties would typically highlight considerable budget reductions to the Cinema when right-leaning governments were in office, playing on the need to preserve the "national cultural interest" that such films convey. Some have even argued that "leftwing welfare has sunk the film industry" (Kolker, 2009;Mecucci, 2007). 70 per cent of the score needed for a film to be recognized as of "national cultural interest" depends on the artistic contribution from the directors of movies -a contribution effectively deriving from a variety of other awards and nominations -so this is a more subjective rather than objective valuation.…”