Jun-Dai wrote:So this "obvious" point still needs some explanation at least for this dimwit. I don't understand what "actual quality" is, as opposed to what a film's "fake qualities" might be, or how a film's catering to a specific audience isn't a significant part of its social context.
More importantly, kieslowski has made a fairly accusatory remark without providing any evidence of it:
However, I do see a dangerous trend on this board, especially in certain threads that some really mediocre features are raved simply because they went far enough to cater for certain queer audience. That, to me, is not really fair film criticism or comment.
This statement bears some examination. At its most honest, kieslowski's statement is critizing people here for taking what they can get as far as quality gay films are concerned (which is exactly what Ehrenstein is being accused of
not doing as far as
Brokeback Mountain is concerned). Further than that, kieslowski's being quite presumptuous in claiming to be able to distinguish the mediocrity of a film (where I would suggest that his inability to get into the films could just as easily be his failing as a viewer) where others fail to and then using that to accuse people of having ulterior motives.
I'm not going to say that there is never a call for this kind of comment, just that making the comment without extensively backing it up is akin to saying "you're racist because you hire mediocre Latinos when qualified white people are available" without attempting to back it up.
I'm sorry for jumping in here but this is something I simply do not understand-- people getting angry because others find themselves able to disregard social context while making pronouncements vis a vis a film's artistry. Those who've been following the Mabuse thread are familiar with the hopelessness of this debate because people have Too Much Practice Being Who They Are... and therefore process information according to their own programming, often despite their own best efforts-- particularly at the visceral level-- not those of a poster dropping by with a point he'd like to make. This is not to say that nobody is capable of being stricken profoundly by the irresistably compelling logic of another, and put Lessons Learned into practice. I've witnessed on this very thread folks confessing their own helplessness in the face of Ehrenstein's logic, of Dave Hare's taste. As to myself I want to express the following:
This sniffing at folks who find themselves capable of seperating social context from artistry really worries me. Listen... we've grown so inundated with so much information via so many sources-- blogs, cable, googling, sattelite radio, etc-- that good points wind up getting bulldozed by the next cycle "refresh". Whereas before the internet those who wanted to acquire information had to get up off their ass and get out in Life and Acquire It (thereby acquiring an additional element, experience, in the process), souls today are digesting lots of opinions and information at an accelerated rate. There is a sort of new animal today-- hyperinformed with a mass of "facts" given equal weight due to uniform method of comfortable, uninterrupted acquisition. Without debating the ins & outs of seeing with your own eyes, I want to move to specific repercussions very briefly.... The concept of wise and unwise have become almost embarassing, so antiquated owing to this sludge of a thousand free opinions coming from a thousand valid worlds-- and the thousands of snarky hipster attackers waiting in the anonymity of the web to roll over an o so serious point-- and I'll tell you, although the idea of wisdom might have been relegated to the antique world of uh Serious Literature (as well as one's private interior life)... people, there are some very basic universal ideas in life which cultivate pure profit for the individual, ideas which seem to be fading away generation by generation before my own eyes and I'm a still-hydrated 38.
An artwork is an artwork. The world outside is the world outside. You don't have to connect a painting, a rollercoaster, or an opera to the world outside to enjoy them. Children love movies knowing very little about the world outside. People go to & cry at operas, moved to the marrow-- without even understanding the language or plot being sung in/about. Humans like to be lifted above the mundane world of human idiocy by the sublime work of geniuses (probably not Ang Lee incidentally, not seen the flick... just talking the general practice of Processing Art.) as well as simple moving entertainment. But this 'social contextualization' pulls the timeless work right out of the sky & sucks it right back down into the mud of fucking ponderous daily news & angry politics which is the zone of permanent misery.
Judging an artwork according to it's political co-operation with a minority's ideology does even less for the judger than it does for the political dialog over a perhaps very real potential oppression. Look. If you feel like an oppressed minority, permitting or encouraging artistic condemnation for socio-political reasons is only going to give your enemy permission to encourage the same for his own reasons. Once the black cat's outa the bag, then it's available to everyone... just a matter of perspective, which is intangible. If you want FREEDOM you've got to be prepared to give it at all costs, despite the aggravation and pain. (Again, of course, we draw the line at criminal incitement and insane viciousness.) Everyone is entitled to their own viewpoint-- and I want to emphasize that here on this atomic thread: everyone is entitled to their own viewpoint. But I question the idea that art cannot be seperated from it's context. On the Mabuse thread I debated an individual who was clearly unable to understand why BIRTH OF A NATION, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, as well as the Soviet Silents of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko & Pudovkin are available on video and studied by film scholars. She simply could not process the idea of the literally stunning artistry involved in the rendering of these films, then as well as now, and was unable to address seperately 1) the mind-bending originality that exploded in these films, and 2) the goal that party chiefs (in the case of the Soviets) had when assigning these films to their directors. Nor was she able to view those who admire these films (for the virtuoso photographic rendering, completely new conception of what the very essence & utility of film actually is, as well as the universality with which the humanity of the characters is presented, permitting empathy even by the blood enemies of the Soviets
back then during the era) as anything but latent participants in mass-murder.
I admit I couldn't believe that this person was serious, that someone would actually, on this board, condemn a film of such well-known exquisite artistry as EARTH, simply because it was created in the USSR for the purpose of propaganda... knowing & appreciating none of Dovzhenko's getting into serious problems with the party, and audience, for his disinterest in(and deliberate skirting) the insertion of propaganda in favor of making a very personal, extremely innovative & modern film focusing on
universal, human themes of life, death, and regeneration.
There are a few kind of socially conscious films assuming or
inviting contextualization i.e. mockumentaries (i e JFK), and documentaries. That aside, I maintain that it is absolutely possible for a repulsive individual to render a repulsive story about nauseating people in a way that is aesthetically pleasing-- in fact I'd suggest we all have them in our collections. We know only what is told to us about our favorite directors whom we don't know personally, and many of the films we enjoy the most are about horrific events. Many films about awful things in horrible places which trigger automatic gut-knots & therapy-sessions in others blow right by you (when does Hollywood get Real Life right?) because they don't hit close to home like gay-topical films do for those gay people on this board, films about the third reich or germans for those who've been touched by the holocaust. I'd suggest that this sort of special-magnifying-glass-passing/social-context-rendering is put into place on a lazy basis at best, as is it's reverse process, which is a sort of affirmative action aesthetic where flaws are forgiven because a perceived deficit exists in the mind of the individual for this particular kind of film. Look at this thread, how many posts by the same folks concerned with this-- an active loyalty to the bitter end you'll not find on other threads with key parties involved. We all wake up over issues that piss us off, and go back to sleep when unruffled.
It's called an agenda, and we all bring it to the theatre-- all of us. This is why I said in the Mabuse thread that feelings are not facts, passion is not rational, and a raging urgent need to Do Something is not Final Insight. We all bring the most important actor/director to each film, with final cut priveleges superceding filmmaker & studio-- ourselves. The world has predicatably folded in on itself debating BROKEBACK, as nobody is seeing the same film upon attendance. You can't insert the Not Real (the film) into the Real (life itself) and hope for consensus.
I'd also maintain that the finest films provide a timeless universality that dwarf the transitory specifics of the particular moment that midwived them-- and those which
do correspond to & operate in well-oiled conjunction with their times have no future aside from the dated topical cubbyhole of nostalgia, or social study. I'd suggest that, despite all the best intentions of this furious thread, when the debate fades into obscurity the primary factor determining BROKEBACK's longevity in the film canon will be How Much People Liked It as a piece of entertainment-- not how well it interacted in conjunction with it's social context. There is no fucking social "context" anyhow, save a bunch of people fighting helplessly for their own individual opinions, trying to connect/not-wanting-to-have-connected the Real World Of Gay Dudes to the film. The debate is the stuff of life-- only thing which bugs me is the condemnation of another man's Art Perception for not socially contextualizing the film when assessing it. Make art contingent on political requirements/agendas of another and we're all fucked, folks. Some right wing son of a bitch gonna come walking in & show you what judgements of Socially Bad Art are
really all about.