Wild Surmise

So. In movies, my taste runs in two different directions. One is toward the formal, set piece, indisputably built and reasoned out film. This kind of work has no loose ends, no unarticulated mysteries. Its meanings, ironies, epiphanies and overall specific gravity have been fashioned with craft, if not genius. There is a sure handedness in the way building block is lathered with mortar and placed in its inevitable place. The only thing I ask is that the filmmaker be smarter than I am, that he stay ahead of me, leading me to thoughts, feelings and even conclusions which thrill and instruct. In this regard Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, Kieslowski and Kurosawa are filmmakers who lead me like an eager student to places I’ve never known. Other masters of structure and Mozartian aforethought such as Hitchcock, Kubrick and David Lean leave me cold. Maybe I can be brought into states of tension and suspense… maybe I can be entertained for awhile, but in the end they don’t tell me anything I don’t know or already feel and so… no thrill. No instruction. No fatal insight which sends you reeling around the city at 2 AM in the morning with an arrow in your heart. I guess I’m an extremist. I want to be seized and ravaged by Art. I don’t care for the cross word puzzles of forced significance, the hushed whispers at the emperor’s bare bum, the breathy delectation accompanying the discovery of another Warhol clone who causes bated breath in the academies, galleries and museums. I already know this earth as a dubious long term proposition, especially for the poor and ethnically assailed, and I know for all that GUERNICA speaks to the slaughter of innocents, neither Capitalist nor Communist knew what to do with Picasso, nor he with them. The best art is a high wire act soaring above the Boschian landscapes we fear to fall into… but do. I’m not interested in either the decent tropes of the cautiously Correct or the Dada abracadabra. I like Art which has no other agenda than nerve and curiosity. Which leads me to the other kind of film I like even more… open ended, careening, dizzy voyages into the unknown of everyday living. This is the kind of film which just seems to happen… which has intuition and proceeds on hunches, which has energy and brilliance and a sinewy, subtle structure which wells up organically like the triple helix of DNA… a purpose seeded with juices of all kinds… adrenalin, testosterone, serotonin… a shapely chaos which, in the face of the teem and pour of the universe, shows us we’ve not gotten very far in the knowledge department. There aren’t very many films like this in the world. They can never be popular because they offer no security, no deserved rewards, and no happy fictions with which to hold off the deluge. In fact they ARE the deluge and suggest that the only safety we can ever have is to hold on tight and get drunk on velocity. THE CELEBRATION and most of BREAKING THE WAVES were like that. But they were made by Danish filmmakers tuned into the slipstream. An American from Tulsa, Larry Clark comes to my mind. KIDS, his one terrific film, had the energy and courage to step up to a truth we don’t want to hear about… a truth of not knowing, not having a clue what is happening, why, or what to do… a truth of change, mayhem and of loving the struggle anyway. The strangest irony is that in the very home of stylistic rectitude, in Hollywood’s colonial enclave with its close-ended and strangled dime store Classicism, the greatest American films which portray life as an unknowable spectacle with impulse and feeling our only guides… have appeared. Made by a dissenter, of course, an undercover agent for “the way things seem to be.” John Cassavetes was that off beat pioneer with films such as SHADOWS (made in New York), FACES, HUSBANDS, MINNE AND MOSCOWITZ and WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE.