Page 17 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Introduction 7

of breaking the technological spell in which the masses are held—cinema
is to leap out of the hermetically sealed abstract space of its reception into
the here and now of the political.
The struggle against the intrinsic unreality of cinema is invariably
tied up with the struggle against the illusionism that is the prevailing
possibility of film, in other words, with the struggle against Hollywood.
Campaigns in defense of small national film industries often claim too
much and too little politically for local productions, since substitut-
ing familiar accents, scenery, and so forth is incapable of annulling the
cinemagoer's entrenched alienation, just as framing the debate around the
notion of "cultural products" needlessly preempts the decision regarding
the relation of these works to the (other) arts, the political, and truth. The
extraordinary appeal of cinematic illusionism is due, not in small part, to
the plausibility that the cinemas technological exactitude of reproduction
lends to the fantastic: the cinema offers not so much fantasies as docu-
ments of fantasies. The truthfulness of cinema, its forensic admissibility
(Hitchcock s films, for instance, are films of information), distinguishes
it from a cultural product (nonetheless, this distinction, never absolute, is
in the process of being corroded by the incursion of computer-generated
images). Hence what the flourishing of national film industries in the
1960s and 1970s could set forth in self-defense was, above and beyond an
upsurge of non-American perspectives, the works' truthfulness.
Yet the culturally and regionally specific truthfulness of what the
image presents is rarely in accord with its conditions of possibility in the
imported technology. In this way, as well, realism in cinema is both a
given and a problem. Illusionist cinema, which could long be recognized
by its disavowal of the problem, has of late applied itself, by means of a
saturation with special effects, to erasing realism even as a given of the
cinematic image. Such films stage the bankruptcy of the skeptical tradi-
tion of Anglo-Saxon culture. It is the essential absurdity of abusing film to
advance the thesis of the unknowability of reality that makes The Truman
Show, Fight Club, and The Matrix suffocating exercises. The New Cinemas
suspicion of the image is taken up, but its "exaggeration" to the point of a
hackneyed metaphysical position amounts to the vitiation of the properly
political critique of illusionism. As in the days when Jack Valenti, head of
the Motion Picture Association of America, crisscrossed the world bully-
ing heads of state into rescinding support for local film industries, illu-
sionist cinema knows when to put aside its doubts concerning its relation