When Antonioni's plotless "L'Avventura" was shown at Harpur, the entire theater emptied within a half-hour -- except for the front row of me and my friends, transfixed by the aquiline profile of a very anxious Monica Vitti, her blond locks tossed this way and that, as she searched a desolate Italian island for her capriciously absent friend. When I saw Bergman's "Persona" at its first release in New York in 1967, I felt that it was the electrifying summation of everything I had ever pondered about Western gender and identity. The title of my doctoral dissertation and first book
But art movies are gone, gone with the wind. In some cases, what once seemed suggestive and profound now feels tortured and pretentious. For example, why should the rivetingly supersophisticated Jeanne Moreau have to drive her car off that damned bridge at the end of François Truffaut's "Jules and Jim"? It's factitious and absurd. All of the major European directors hit the skids in the '70s. I, for one, had little interest in late Bergman, Antonioni or Fellini, who seemed to decline into pastiche and self-parody. With Bergman in particular, the austere turned sentimental. But why should any artist have to compete with his or her peak period? We should be satisfied with the priceless legacy of genius.
Art film as a genre has waned with the high modernism that produced it. The premier modernists -- from James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf to Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and Martha Graham -- were rebelling against a hierarchical, authoritarian tradition that suffocated their youth but whose very power energized their work. They became larger from what they opposed and overcame. Today, anything goes, and nothing lasts.
Ingmar Bergman's creativity was certainly stimulated by the overly cerebral, puritanical Protestantism in which he was raised. In film after film, he militantly made space for emotion and intuition, usually embodied in elusive, charismatic women, whose faces his inquiring camera obsessively searched. Bergman's artistic drive was inextricable from the religious impulse.
Now, in contrast, aspiring young filmmakers are stampeded toward simplistic rejection of religion based on liberal bromides (sexism, homophobia, etc.). Religion as metaphysics or cosmic vision is no longer valued except in the New Age movement, to which I still strongly subscribe, despite its sometimes outlandish excesses. As a professed atheist, I detest the current crop of snide manifestos against religion written by professional cynics, flâneurs and imaginatively crimped and culturally challenged scientists. The narrow mental world they project is very grim indeed -- and fatal to future art.
My pagan brand of atheism is predicated on worship of both nature and art. I want the great world religions taught in every school. Secular humanism has reached a dead end -- and any liberals who don't recognize that are simply enabling the worldwide conservative reaction of fundamentalism in both Christianity and Islam. The human quest for meaning is innate and ineradicable. When the gods are toppled, new ones will soon be invented. ("Better Jehovah than Foucault," I once warned. For more on this, see "Religion and the Arts in America," a lecture I gave at Colorado College earlier this year that was broadcast on C-SPAN's "American Perspectives" series and that has just been published in Arion.)
The waning of art film has been just one of the bitter cultural disappointments that the baby-boom generation has had to endure. Rock music, which exploded in the artistic renaissance of the '60s and '70s, seems to have exhausted its formulas. At the moment, hip-hop and disco-derived dance music enjoy far greater prestige everywhere.
It's no coincidence that the geriatric Rolling Stones are still going strong: Their style is grounded in African-American rhythm and blues, which the ultra-virtuoso Keith Richards still spiritually mainlines in hotel rooms on the road. Hence I was thrilled to discover a home video of a young British acoustic guitarist from Liverpool/Manchester, Naomi Mather, studiously working her way through the great Howlin' Wolf song "Smokestack Lightning," which the Yardbirds (seen in Antonioni's "Blow-Up") had turned into blazing rock-god theater:
Way to go, Naomi! Rock will be spectacularly reborn by a faithful return to roots.
Next page: Mariah's girly epidemic of faux crescendos
