Page 13 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Introduction 3

advantage of the cracks in the crumbling studio system against which the
New Cinema was a reaction. The big-budget B-grade movies that in the
1970s restored Hollywood's fortunes were not committed to Hitchcock's
insight into the horror of the everyday but sought in the supernatural
and the extraterrestrial new resources for illusionist cinema. And the re-
cent work of Claire Denis, the last director covered here, inasmuch as it
eschews the marketable conventions of Hollywood and its foreign aspi-
rants, as well as the hermetism of so-called experimental film, participates
in the New Cinemas desire to extricate a medium of mass appeal from
the clutches of cliché.
The philosophical interest of the New Cinema is its simultaneously
material and political interest. Siegfried Kracauer clarifies this conjunc-
tion of the material and the political when he sets out the dilemma by
whose refusal the New Cinema might be defined: "Average theatrical
films and certain high-level avant-garde films must be lumped together in
spite of all that separates them. Films of this kind exploit, not explore, the
material phenomena they insert; they insert them not in their own interest
but for the purpose of establishing a significant whole; and in pointing up
some such whole, they refer us from the material dimension back to that
2
of ideology." Kracauer regrets these two paths of cinema because they be-
tray cinemas specific innovation of a passivity before phenomena. 3 What
the New Cinema advances against ideology, in the wake of fascism and
Stalinism, in the context of Algeria, Vietnam, and military dictatorships
in Latin America and elsewhere, is the longueur. To the extent that bore-
dom breaks open the ideological whole, it is an avatar of the wonder of the
Greeks (the decadence with which Heidegger, Duchamp, and Beckett, for
instance, espouse boredom is also their originarity). What is at stake is the
proximity of the New Cinema to philosophy and the redefinition of art,
politics, and their relationship that is the corollary of this proximity. The
generality of such a statement, offered as it is in the introduction to an
anthology, is not so much the articulation of the program of the collection
as its problem: the point of indifference that an introduction might extract
from the individual contributions is either so general as to be indifferent in
the bad sense or at risk of being taken for true on no better grounds than
consensus. It is not an issue of posing the question of cinema but of search-
ing for new ways to pursue the debate around the phenomenon.
As each essay in this collection revolves around the work of a single
director, it might appear that a decision on the nature of the phenomenon