A Film’s Importance Should Be Inversely Proportional to Its Audience or Box Office
I have been lazy lately, so today I am marking the birthday of Alain Robbe-Grillet (August 18, 1922–February 18, 2008) by sharing an article I translated some time ago.
Film and Ideology
By Alain Robbe-Grillet · Translated by Zhang Fengming
Originally titled “Money and Ideology,” published in Le Monde on February 26, 1976. Collected in The Traveler (Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2012).
A retrospective organized by the Centre Pompidou has brought an old debate back into view: should films be made within the system?
For Peter Kubelka, one of the curators of the retrospective, the answer is simple. “Real cinema—that is us,” he says. By “us,” he means everyone who avoids commercial distribution, thereby excluding Bresson, Godard, Duras, and others. This position cannot stand, because it leads to absurd conclusions. “Real” cinema would have to include countless films made on holiday by a thriving army of amateurs, even though what they care most about is moving as close as possible to commercial storytelling. Marcel Hanoun’s films would have to be split into two categories—bad or good—according to whether a producer (or France’s National Centre for Cinema) financed them. Consider Chantal Akerman: the moment Jeanne Dielman finally reached theaters, her work suddenly became unprofitable. In the end, a film’s importance should be inversely proportional to the size of its audience or its box office.
With this kind of criterion, we can see two things: on one side, a purely moral quarrel, in which the incompatibility of art and money becomes an untouchable dogma; on the other, a fundamental misunderstanding of the supposed rules of commercial production. Money imposes constraints whether a film is “independent” or not: film stock, cameras, and lighting equipment are made by the same companies and cost the same (unless 8mm is good, 16mm barely acceptable, and 35mm terrible). Money becomes a bad thing because of the producer, who wants to recoup the film’s production costs from its audience. This is where people misunderstand the facts. At a recent discussion at the École Normale Supérieure, I noticed that the uninformed public often imagined that Bresson, Godard, or I had signed Hollywood-style contracts with producers, giving investors total control to change the title, script, edit, music, and anything else to maximize profit. That is plainly wrong. As the person responsible for a film, the producer’s only power is to keep costs within the budget—a situation no different from that of so-called independent films.
Jonas Mekas, founder of the Anthology Film Archives in New York, whose collection was central to the Centre’s recent exhibition, takes a more generous and less puritanical position: all forms of cinema are equal, whatever their production costs, the number of people involved, or their genre and form. Unfortunately, by refusing to classify films, he also strips ideology of all weight and of the varying role it can play in filmmaking. Roland Barthes said, “Tell me how you classify, and I will tell you who you are.” I would therefore like to propose a general classification of cinema to better understand the relationship between films and the society that produces them.
Films organized according to the rules of storytelling should be called “narrative films.” They limit themselves to reproducing accepted forms, becoming one component among many and deriving their value from that role. This is the kind of film taught in schools, pursued by most directors, and favored by traditional critics: a good film is a well-told story. It is the type Christian Metz studied in developing his theory of the “grande syntagmatique.”
By contrast, Kubelka made a film composed entirely of sequences of pure black or white images. His work should be called “non-narrative cinema.” With few exceptions, the films in Jonas Mekas’s archive are non-narrative, or have narrative effects—when they exist at all—that take up only a very small portion of the running time. This category includes captivating works by Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton. The fairest criticism of these films is that they have no distribution channels in France or the United States.
Let me explain further. It is no accident that Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Made in U.S.A. were produced and distributed within the system. It is precisely because they exist within ideology. Their subjects, cinematography, sets, actors, and dramatic situations all demonstrate an essential fact: Godard does not pretend to be an archangel who can escape the social myths that raised him. He understands that we cannot fight ideology from outside it. Anyone who tries to escape it can only be silenced.
Between narrative and non-narrative, then, I would define a third kind of cinema, which we might call “disordered narrative.” The term introduces a creaking system: an alternative order made from fragments of mainstream discourse, one that resists the total effect of continuity (ideology can operate only in total, closed, continuous forms); a kind of magic, reflected through the skillful use of materials and techniques (ideology can hide only beneath a mask of naturalness); a casing around a motor and its mechanisms (ideology works best when we cannot see it at work).
This revision is not meant to provoke a dispute, for example between the United States and the Old World. On the contrary, it is meant to return to the opening Mekas created and to refuse to condemn any form of experimentation—whether in the name of morality, a particular dogma, or the program followed by most European scholars.
Author: Alain Robbe-Grillet (France)
Publisher: Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House
Original title: Le Voyageur
Translators:
Yu Zhongxian · Gong Linlin · Li Jianxin · Zhao Danxia · Wang Siyang · Zhang Fengming · Zou Yan · Hu Xiaoyue · Sun Tingting · Lü Yanxia · Wang Daogan · Li Jieqiong · Gao Fei · Du Li · Yang Haiyan
Publication date: February 2012
Pages: 717 (two volumes)
Price: RMB 73
Format: Paperback
Series: Experimental Art Series
ISBN: 9787535647764