COMMITTED CINEMA: Time To Name A New Movement

Granted, it's one that's been happening for awhile -- yet everyone's missed it!

We know this, but society – or at least the official organization of global business leaders – doesn’t like to admit it: art, artists, and audiences move faster than industries or markets do. It is the art, and those people who live by it, that move society forward. And now more than ever, we need to move forward. It is time to take stock of a vibrant new creative movement, one so new that it has yet to be named, or perhaps even spotted, but that has been toiling away for well over a year now.

A drift towards mediocrity has infected culture at pandemic velocity. Maybe it due to our insistence of convenience and immediate gratification. Maybe having everything accessible where ever you are and whenever you want has a downside (or several). Be it perhaps because of the present’s abundance of film production necessitates new methods and forms for work to break through the noise. Or that everyone’s totally and utterly distracted by competing leisure time options (not to mention the necessities of survival). Maybe we all require the hooks Alex Delarge had fastened to his eyeballs if are focus isn’t to wander. Me, I’d prefer a different sort of treatment.

Eyes Wide Open

Regardless of what the factors are, there is an emerging antidote.  Call it Committed, but it is not to be ignored.

Utilizing all aspects of cinema at full throttle in the service of a singular expression, both disciplined & ambitious and yet also fully willing to select limits, grabbing the viewer by the throat, never willing to be polite, chasing the unknown and opting for a visceral connection above all else — aiming more for the experiment than the proof but definitely discovering and building something bold in the process. Committed Cinema is committed first and foremost to advancing the language of cinema — regardless of success, failure, or alignment with the status quo. It will burn an image or a sequence onto your brain that will never leave you. It will use all of cinema’s attributes to create an experience into the unknown that reveals the maker’s love of the medium.

Be you a creator or a curator, an ally or antagonist, you need to know where we are to lead us where we may be going, and if you want to drive, you best know the roads that led us here in the first place.

If you want to spot it, perhaps you best start with some simple questions: 1) what’s “wrong” and “right” in cinema today; 2) how does boldness in the creative industries make good business sense (or not); 3) the difference between an experiment and a proof (in the creative industries); 4) what makes for indelible art & cinema (what makes something you won’t forget, when is it more than shock value, what is an authentic image or sequence); 5) what are cinema’s unique attributes, a film’s own language; 6) what are the qualities of cinema that transform the good into the great (and what is it that we truly love); 7) the role of the unknown, unexplained, inexplicable, and ambiguous; and 8) what is cultural relevancy now, then, and tomorrow.

One may be tempted to put certain directors into the realm of regular practitioners of Committed Cinema: Carax, Decker, Denis, Innaritu, Lynch, Park, Ramsey. Others are definitely dancing on the divide, but I am not yet sure where they fully stand (even if I am excited by most all of what they do): Baker, Eggers, Guadagnino, Noe, Refn, Von Trier. And really who cares if they do or they don’t, are or they aren’t? It is a way of looking, and these lists are not complete by any means. I am trying to help us see what may be there.

If you ask me to make a stab at some fairly recent examples and their forbears, how’s this for a start:

Annette (Leos Carax 2021) – delightfully misanthropic, willing to annoy or offend, disciplined in its willingness to throw out all rules and preconceptions.

Beginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili 2020) – using less to do more, searing our synapses with sound, image, and substance, it sets a path all of its own while still recognizing landmarks

The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent 2018) - an ethical use and exploration of violence, without glorification, but a commitment to see an idea and feeling through to its conclusion.

Palm Trees And Power Lines (Jamie Dack 2022) - Everything in the film reverberates for me about the border of trust and confidence, how it is earned or stolen. Form and content aligns and what is natural is formal and what is formal is natural.

Spencer (Pablo Larrain 2021) – the strongest choices can deliver the most delicate of moments; how to construct the architecture and environment where nothing can be denied.

Titane (Julia Ducournau 2021) – You CAN have your cake and eat it too, and for breakfast. The content is the critique and we are joyfully becoming our own poison, seemingly with preplanned reckless abandon as both the goal and process.

Zama (Lucrecia Martel 2017) – Our chains will set us free as colonialism is the subject but the form is the true revolution.

Zola (Janicza Bravo 2020) – We become what we consume – and then some, as FOMO  leads to WTF & OMG and we are only just getting started.

Committed Forbearers:

Breaking The Waves (or virtually any of Lars von Trier)

Godard, anything and everything, but for me, Weekend truly delivered it.

Eraserhead (but really all of David Lynch)

In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-wai 2000) – leap into the bath where denial itself is an indulgence of all senses, and nothing on the palate is neglected.

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski)

Run Lola Run

There is obviously a lot more thought and analysis that can go into this. I hope someone will take it much further than I have here. But I see it. It is happening. And I for one would appreciate a lot more of it.