Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

Life Intimidates Art: Irma Vep

163 Life Intimidates Art Irma Vep The whole point is that the world is constantly changing, and that as an artist one must always invent new devices, new tools, to describe new feelings, new situations. . . . If we don’t invent our own values, our own syntax, we will fail at describing our own world. —Olivier Assayas, in a letter to critic Kent Jones Like many other eras, ours is not inordinately fond of examining itself, and any movie that does that work for us risks being overlooked, resented, or simply misunderstood. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwanese Goodbye, South, Goodbye, one of the major films at Cannes last year to perform this task, was greeted mainly by bored puzzlement. But a Peruvian film critic in Chicago a few weeks back mentioned to me that this movie told him more about what was happening in contemporary Peru than any other he’d seen—which suggests that our awareness of global capitalism’s recent activities may be more germane to appreciating certain movies than their particular nationalities. National identity can often obscure what certain films are saying, however, especially on the film’s home turf. Take Jim Jarmusch’s American movie Dead Man, which premiered at Cannes in 1995 and did pretty well globally, both critically and commercially, before straggling into this country a year later, where it was widely written off. Or consider Olivier Assayas’s French movie Irma Vep, another exciting state-of-the-planet address, which I saw at Cannes in 1996: it did terrible business in France the following fall but enjoyed an unexpectedly brisk box office at New York’s Film Forum last month, where it’s already been held over several weeks. Creepy and hip, fast moving and provocative, occasionally quite funny, and adept in its uses of pop music, Irma Vep has a good many calling cards, though disagreements are likely to start as soon as one has to consider what it’s about. This week the Film Center is showing Irma Vep no fewer than eleven times, so you’ll have a chance to make up your own mind. You may decide that this dark, brittle, disturbing comedy about low-budget French filmmaking doesn’t say anything about the capitalist world right now—and I don’t mean to suggest that you won’t be able to enjoy the movie on a more modest level. Indeed, if you know as 164 ESSENTIAL CINEMA little about French cinema as David Denby, you might arrive at a conclusion comparable to his in his recent rave review in New York magazine (so positive it was reproduced in its entirety by the distributor): ‘‘The French have a great culture, a great history, but they are in a state of futility. A filmmaking industry that was both artistically innovative and financially resourceful now lies in ruins, destroyed by vanity, inconsequence, and the philistine exuberance of American entertainment, which both enrages the French and leaves them sick with envy: They can’t make our movies, and increasingly they can’t make their own. . . . Irma Vep may be a bitter lament over a dead art form, but the movie itself is an extraordinary sign of life.’’ I can’t imagine what sort of French people Denby hangs out with, because this cosmic description of ‘‘the French’’ excludes virtually every French filmmaker, critic, and filmgoer I know—many of whom are even more delighted by ‘‘the philistine exuberance of American entertainment’’ than Denby is. (When I was in Paris last month, Everyone Says I Love You was playing everywhere.) But from Denby’s comments I can easily infer what French movies he doesn’t see: the industry he finds in ruins last year produced, along with many other commercial successes, When the Cat’s Away, Encore, Le garçu, Ninette and Boni, Thieves, and Three Lives and Only One Death—to cite only the first few titles that come to mind. If you ignore French cinema as studiously as Denby does, however—and this isn’t only a matter of not attending festivals like Cannes—any sort of selfvalidating generalization will make sense. Many of his most prestigious New York colleagues see only one or two movies a day at Cannes and then write back to their readers with the same breezy, confident expertise about the moribund state of world cinema, usually concluding that the parties were better than the movies. (And no wonder—the parties speak their kind of language...