Art movies: R.I.P.

Long before Bergman and Antonioni died, the mystical art-house film experience faded to black. Plus: How rock can rehabilitate, and a vote for Kelly Clarkson.

By Camille Paglia

Read more: Camille Paglia, Ann Coulter, Opinion

Aug. 8, 2007 | The 2008 presidential sweepstakes have hit the doldrums as the pack of eager candidates of both parties dutifully make their rounds and tread water like tar. Whoever survives this corrida-by-boredom will presumably have the brass cojones to run the government. By what national curse must we suffer another year of this?

Trivialities and missteps clog the political news: is Mrs. Rudy Giuliani a vampy, trampy film-noir gold digger? Did Mrs. John Edwards, playing phone tag, put her foot in her mouth by single-handedly rehabilitating Ann Coulter's reputation for seat-of-the-pants, high-testosterone counterpunching? Why was Clinton campaign advisor Ann Lewis (sister of Barney Frank) so addled and strangely superheated by the Washington Post's whimsical meditation on the saggy Hillary cleavage that she instantly turned it into a crass cash come-on?

Meanwhile, the war drags on in Iraq, where the worthless Baghdad government has fled the blistering summer heat while American soldiers, laden with their battle gear, suffer and die. When will this fruitless exercise in nation building end? No one will ever resolve the eternal hatreds and ethnic rivalries of the Middle East, which have been churning and festering for 5,000 years. The extremist Muslim drama is only half the story.

As I replied to a Salon reader in my last column, yes, if the United States makes a strategic retreat from Iraq, we may well be returning in a decade or two, this time with regional allies. But things will be vastly different: no more happy facade of pacification and reconstruction; no more corrupt protectionism of commercial contractors; no more costly police or military training of volatile, faithless local recruits; no more intrusive neighborhood patrols with our soldiers blown to smithereens by cheap booby traps. It will be real war, heavily applied by air force, with maximum damage inflicted at minimal cost to our troops.

The thick-headed Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld triad may have grotesquely bungled the Iraq incursion, but Republicans (barring a breakaway third party) will still comfortably retake the White House next year if my fellow Democrats don't get their act together on the cardinal issue of geopolitics. Terrorism isn't going to go away if and when we withdraw from Iraq. We need to recalibrate our global strategy and more intelligently address the fractured, dispersed nature of jihadism, which is germinating everywhere from Indonesia and the Philippines to the Western world. Throwing billions into the desert morass of Iraq isn't getting us anywhere -- especially with our porous domestic security and our alarmingly decaying infrastructure needing urgent remediation.

On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s. We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces -- what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" or "Persona"? Perhaps only George Lucas' multilayered, six-film "Star Wars" epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.

Tragically, very few young people today, teethed on dazzling special effects and a hyperactive visual style, seem to have patience for the long, slow take that deep-think European directors once specialized in. It's a technique already painfully time-bound -- that luxurious scrutiny of the tiniest facial expressions or the chilly sweep of a sterile room or bleak landscape. What my generation was passionately responding to in European films was their sexual candor and their low-budget protest against the peachy Technicolor artifice and forced jollity of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking in the Marilyn Monroe/Rock Hudson/Doris Day era, with its postwar myths of ever-imperiled virginity and ideal marriage.

I'm not sure who, if anyone, still views moviegoing as a quasi-mystical experience. As a college student in the mid-'60s, I saw the movie screen as a door into another world. When Roman Polanski's hypnotic "Knife in the Water" was shown in my very first week at Harpur College (the State University of New York at Binghamton), life seemed to change overnight. Jean Cocteau's "Orphée," a surreal modernization of the Orpheus legend in existential Paris, sent me staggering out speechless under the twinkling upstate stars.

Other indelible memories: the grinding of the collapsing stone balustrade in the baroque gardens of Alain Resnais's "Last Year at Marienbad." The night wind eerily stirring the spray-painted green trees in the London park of Antonioni's "Blow-Up." The column of army tanks ominously rumbling through the city street in the unknown land of Bergman's "The Silence." The life-giving waters of the Fountain of Trevi suddenly stopping in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," stranding Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg mid-kiss.

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