"The more unique, unusual and difficult your film is, the harder it is to get it financed. That's why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television." - Cronenberg
(For Part 4, see my review of Cronenberg's "Spider")
Edward Ruscha quit painting in 1974. For two years he made nothing but prints and drawings, a time period many tout as being the official "End of Painting", an idea that had been building in the art community since the early 1960s.
Today you can almost imagine an ancient painter toiling away at his latest painting. Fast forward to the invention of the printing press, film, TV and later the photocopy machine. In this new world, the artist's work has now been replicated ad nauseam. While there are countless positives, a certain economic logic also results in an over production of copies, over-familiarity and perhaps even a decrease in the "value" of these copies. Paradoxically, the "real image", the artist's original, may increases in worth due to the formation of elite circles who are able to put the original in context. Pretty soon you end up with a strange situation: while nobody now cares about or enjoys the Mona Lisa ("Fck paintings, man! Film takes 24 paintings a second!"), there always exists a select/educated community willing to spend billions on procuring this very item.
It's the same case with theatre. Movies started the move away from stage, broadcast television amplified this transition and then cable/satellite took things further. Now high-speed networking strangles cable.
Likewise with films. The days of filmmakers being limited to ten-minute reels and physical constraints are long gone. In our digital world, every composition is possible and one can shoot as much footage as one has hard-drives. Paradoxically, now that everything is possible, the perception exists that everything has already been done - not true at all, the limits are purely socio-psychological - and that the very ease at which it can be done lessens the value of the outcome. With this, the subversive, critical, oppositional function of modernist art is gradually replaced with a postmodern world that is atemporal, ahistorical and artistically impotent. This is a "pick and mix", "pastiche" or "cut and paste" world in which films are increasingly just pieces of other films, existing nihilistically for no larger purpose (eg the Coens, late-Scorsese, in which nihilism is the purpose; postmodernism at its purest) and yet are increasing digested because of an increasingly schizophrenic inability to put anything in context. (Cronenberg: "All that's left is playing with the pieces...and when you're done, all that's left is playing with the pieces faster.")
This impotency has been produced by our extreme alienation from the incomprehensible network of economic and cultural production, the west having long moved from a society of production to one of consumption. Unable to conceive of the global network that produces the commodities we consume, we find ourselves thrown into spatial (as well as social) confusion and thrown back on an experience of both "elite" and "mass art" as sheer reception. We consume fragmented yet homogeneously commodified "surfaces" without spatial or historical depth. Postmodernism traded in art's radical history only at its retail value, so to speak.
This does not mean that avant-garde art is no longer possible, but that such art will perhaps become increasingly niche and financially insupportable. Think modernist fare like "The Wire", a series obsessed with "mapping", which survives on word of mouth only, or the way that today's challenging films are absolutely destroyed upon release (to paraphrase Jameson: "As film dies, television matures, as television dies, so will the new cyber medium rise." Ie- only frantic mediums can keep up with an era of cultural overload)
Now, with postmodern theory supposedly on the decline, we enter what is now being termed "critical postmodernism", in which some modicum of objectivity is possible and radicalism shows signs of recovery. "This new critical art," philosopher Frederic Jameson says, "is concerned with the world space of multinational capital, seeking a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representation, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial and social confusion."
The key words there are "social confusion". The great con of postmodernism has always been, in late capitalism's inherent dead-endedness, how to keep people watching. How to project the illusion that something new is being consumed or said when it isn't. How to sell the possibility of change, the illusion that products still have any power, let alone need to be digested, while doing the opposite. This is the very ruse of capitalism (Capitalism has made a career of celebrating the individual/product/nostalgia/desire while mutating him/her/it). The solution was once sheer spectacle. Now its schizophrenia. Or rather, schizophrenic art mirrors a schizophrenic world, and so any hopes of "critical postmodernism" or simply "modernism" getting a foothold, depends on budding artists unscrambling or mapping the schizophrenia.
Anxieties about the inability of future artists to do precisely this is what Cronenberg's "Camera" and "The Last Cinema in the World", are about. "Camera" is narrated by the past and "Last Cinema" by the future, but in both Cronenberg symbolically kills off cinema (now associated with toilets, garbage and junk storage) and ushers in the network society, the artists of which are associated with children and juvenilia, all of which exist in a kind of flat, digital, mixed media space. But whilst these artists are proud to be ushering in "the new flesh", to themselves give their bodies over to "it", Cronenberg mourns the intrusion of this malevolent new media, as it penetrates and parasitizes both society and the home, obliterating the last vestiges of humanity along with it.
(For Part 6, see my review of "Shutter Island")
(For Part 4, see my review of Cronenberg's "Spider")
Edward Ruscha quit painting in 1974. For two years he made nothing but prints and drawings, a time period many tout as being the official "End of Painting", an idea that had been building in the art community since the early 1960s.
Today you can almost imagine an ancient painter toiling away at his latest painting. Fast forward to the invention of the printing press, film, TV and later the photocopy machine. In this new world, the artist's work has now been replicated ad nauseam. While there are countless positives, a certain economic logic also results in an over production of copies, over-familiarity and perhaps even a decrease in the "value" of these copies. Paradoxically, the "real image", the artist's original, may increases in worth due to the formation of elite circles who are able to put the original in context. Pretty soon you end up with a strange situation: while nobody now cares about or enjoys the Mona Lisa ("Fck paintings, man! Film takes 24 paintings a second!"), there always exists a select/educated community willing to spend billions on procuring this very item.
It's the same case with theatre. Movies started the move away from stage, broadcast television amplified this transition and then cable/satellite took things further. Now high-speed networking strangles cable.
Likewise with films. The days of filmmakers being limited to ten-minute reels and physical constraints are long gone. In our digital world, every composition is possible and one can shoot as much footage as one has hard-drives. Paradoxically, now that everything is possible, the perception exists that everything has already been done - not true at all, the limits are purely socio-psychological - and that the very ease at which it can be done lessens the value of the outcome. With this, the subversive, critical, oppositional function of modernist art is gradually replaced with a postmodern world that is atemporal, ahistorical and artistically impotent. This is a "pick and mix", "pastiche" or "cut and paste" world in which films are increasingly just pieces of other films, existing nihilistically for no larger purpose (eg the Coens, late-Scorsese, in which nihilism is the purpose; postmodernism at its purest) and yet are increasing digested because of an increasingly schizophrenic inability to put anything in context. (Cronenberg: "All that's left is playing with the pieces...and when you're done, all that's left is playing with the pieces faster.")
This impotency has been produced by our extreme alienation from the incomprehensible network of economic and cultural production, the west having long moved from a society of production to one of consumption. Unable to conceive of the global network that produces the commodities we consume, we find ourselves thrown into spatial (as well as social) confusion and thrown back on an experience of both "elite" and "mass art" as sheer reception. We consume fragmented yet homogeneously commodified "surfaces" without spatial or historical depth. Postmodernism traded in art's radical history only at its retail value, so to speak.
This does not mean that avant-garde art is no longer possible, but that such art will perhaps become increasingly niche and financially insupportable. Think modernist fare like "The Wire", a series obsessed with "mapping", which survives on word of mouth only, or the way that today's challenging films are absolutely destroyed upon release (to paraphrase Jameson: "As film dies, television matures, as television dies, so will the new cyber medium rise." Ie- only frantic mediums can keep up with an era of cultural overload)
Now, with postmodern theory supposedly on the decline, we enter what is now being termed "critical postmodernism", in which some modicum of objectivity is possible and radicalism shows signs of recovery. "This new critical art," philosopher Frederic Jameson says, "is concerned with the world space of multinational capital, seeking a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representation, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial and social confusion."
The key words there are "social confusion". The great con of postmodernism has always been, in late capitalism's inherent dead-endedness, how to keep people watching. How to project the illusion that something new is being consumed or said when it isn't. How to sell the possibility of change, the illusion that products still have any power, let alone need to be digested, while doing the opposite. This is the very ruse of capitalism (Capitalism has made a career of celebrating the individual/product/nostalgia/desire while mutating him/her/it). The solution was once sheer spectacle. Now its schizophrenia. Or rather, schizophrenic art mirrors a schizophrenic world, and so any hopes of "critical postmodernism" or simply "modernism" getting a foothold, depends on budding artists unscrambling or mapping the schizophrenia.
Anxieties about the inability of future artists to do precisely this is what Cronenberg's "Camera" and "The Last Cinema in the World", are about. "Camera" is narrated by the past and "Last Cinema" by the future, but in both Cronenberg symbolically kills off cinema (now associated with toilets, garbage and junk storage) and ushers in the network society, the artists of which are associated with children and juvenilia, all of which exist in a kind of flat, digital, mixed media space. But whilst these artists are proud to be ushering in "the new flesh", to themselves give their bodies over to "it", Cronenberg mourns the intrusion of this malevolent new media, as it penetrates and parasitizes both society and the home, obliterating the last vestiges of humanity along with it.
(For Part 6, see my review of "Shutter Island")