February 2007
Didier Drogba (left).
Last summer, Christoph Huber and I watched the first leg of the Football World Championship together: I was in Vienna to follow a retrospective of Soviet Cinegenius from the '30s and, as usual, stayed with Christoph. Just about every day we went to the Österreichisches Filmmuseum, occasionally ripping apart our shirts humbly declaring, "I'm a Ukrainian Worker", more often shouting with trembling voices and slightly Russian accents, "Der Klassenkampf brennt", usually to somewhat puzzled looks. We didn't care (the Milwall-hools would have been proud of us).
What we cared about was the problem of how to fullfill our ardently beloved duty towards cinema and follow the whole tournament, three matches a day (not to mention that, occasionally, we had to do some work - but what, then, are mornings for [press screenings ... ]?). We solved the problem in the only manner which was just and honourable: we went to the cinema, taped the matches, and watched them at night. Now, we're quite aware that this sounds nuttier than shouting, "Der Klassenkampf brennt", and meaning it: why on earth would we tape a live event in order to be able to go to the movies and watch films which we not only (in some cases) already knew, but which were then and still are readily available to us on tapes and DVDs (albeit without subtitles)?!
Esprit de provocateur
For one thing, these films were meant to be seen like this: they talk about, as well as to, a group of people, and you can feel this, frame by frame - this is about individuals in masses.
Also, we actually believe that watching a film is about more than 'digging in' some content or product, and about much more than having something to talk about at some later date, in the manner suggested by Gertjan Zuilhof, whom we love for his esprit de provocateur (which means: we don't - want to - think that he's completely serious about his visions and suggestions; he's just putting us all to the test in the most typical Dutch-Provo fashion). Cinema is a social object, a communal activity: it is being together with people, some of whom you know and some of whom you don't, at a given time and place, to share an experience, thoughts and feelings - feeling the thoughts ripple and ricochet through the venue, the people, their pleasure and disgust; and your own disdain for what makes others happy and your own puzzlement at others' incomprehension of something totally obvious to you, and vice versa, and... all that: which means being part of a group, a mass, the immediate give-and-take, and all that which can happen there and then as well as right afterwards, starting a chat with somebody you never saw, or maybe you saw her but... and suddenly you talk. Put simply: we believe in the intelligence of these groups - something happens there and then when people watch a film together in a cinema, something changes, if we want that change, and if the film is willing to communicate with us as citizens, not consumers: if it thinks it's one of us.
Public space
Cinema is - or ideally should be - a democratic space where ideas are made public, contemplated, considered and debated - not necessarily in a literal but certainly in a symbolic sense. Cinema means finding shapes for longings, and to consider them as suggestions towards a common good, in the demos, the individual at play in the community - let's call it a Realism of Longing. In opposition to the Realism of Making-Do for which all this is probably just a huge load of idealist rubbish: cinema will become a commodity of the middle-class (so it is claimed), just as going to the theatre or the opera or watching football at a stadium... Film will be digital, and everything will be about downloads and DVDs, it doesn't matter that the carrier media are becoming ever less stable and reliable.
We wonder - well, not really, because we know - why, in the future sketched out by Gertjan, Cannes should still exist and be of importance: why can't the new Wong Kar-wai be made available on DVD or as a download right from the start, why should we care about the middlebrow opinion, why do we have to channel the opinion-making process? Or, put another way: it seems that this public space, that putting something up there and making it part of a debate, of deliberations, is still something considerd important... if only for appearance's sake.
Bollocks
It doesn't sound too democratic, this future where, on the one hand, there'll be Cannes, and all those who are there will be the makers and shapers of manners, those who go through the motions of deciding some piece of AV-art's worth; and then, on the other hand, there'll be all those channels through which to get films, legally or illegally, everybody busy with his own obsessions and opinions, everybody an original - which doesn't matter as long as s/he doesn't make any claims for her/his thoughts to be anything other than... well, you know... something to say when you, like, talk... an opinion, you know, that thing we all have. Watching a film in a theater, in this scenario, becomes even more of a visit to a theme park then it has already become these days, literally or meta - for stuff like volver or the departed are just as much theme-park-flicks as the pirates of the caribbean franchise. Marvel at the sterile wonders of middlebrow taste, obvious mastery for easy consumption, disposed of in a second; the screening of bronenosec potemkin in Vienna, on the 8 June last year, was also such a theme-park experience: masses of culture-conscious middle-class zombies you never saw before or again in other films of that Soviet season clogged the entrance way and made a major fuss about being there, in their Sunday best, ready to watch a piece of established art - originally intended to get people unlike them to waste them and their Besitzbürger-asses.
The Realism of Making-Do says: but things will change; films will be experienced only by shards of society, fragments unwilling to add up to an image, a mirror... And the Realism of Longing answers: bollocks to that, we can change things when we really long for change and want to see that change happen, even if that change might look at first like a move backward. For we are traditionalists: which means we don't believe that there is a history of cinema, because we don't believe in that kind of order and closure, but we do believe in the process - an aesthetic calculus instead of a canon. And we believe in Didier Drogba - if he'd only be so kind as to consider scoring the right and just thing to do.
The Central Committee of the Ferroni Brigade
