EUROPEAN ART CINEMA

                                                       

                             Cinema is truth twenty-for times a second.
                                     Le Petit Soldat, Jean Luc Godard

Cinema is interesting because it seizes life and the mortal side of life.
Jean Luc Godard



Nous vivons dans l’oubli de nos metamorphoses
Mais cet echo qui roule tout le long du jour
Cet echo hors du temps d’angoisse ou de caresses
Sommes nous pres on loin de notre conscience
Le Capital de la Douleur, Paul Eluard

         In 1895, The Luimiere Brothers in Paris and The Skadanowsky Brothers in Berlin organized the very first cinematographic events. In space of twenty years, cinema became a major industry both economically and culturally in Europe.

The two World Wars drained and deeply affected Europe physically, economically, culturally and artistically. Particularly during the Second World War which saw huge migration of intellectual émigrés to the United States, especially German Film-makers, actors and technical staff. This influx of European film makers in the States led to the rise of America as a leader in the Cinema Industry.

The post-war period in Europe was quite a struggle as systems and institutions had to be re-built & revised to try to deal with the new period of hardship and recovery. It was time to establish a new cinema language, a re-birth from the ruins, like Phoenix, after the latest war and the fall of Fascism. Devastated by World War II., and after the German occupation, Italy was then occupied by the Allied troops. In fact, the struggle of Italy’s civilian population to live normal, day-to-day lives under the extraordinarily heavy conditions and difficulties of changing occupations in their country (and the new cultural and political influences they brought with them), was almost unbearable for a people who were also trying to hold onto their own cultural identity and consciously doing what they could to resist these occupations. Upon the end of the Second World War, Italy descended into social chaos having lost their leadership & with thousands of displaced people wandering the country, no hope was given from the Christian Democrats or Communist Party (PCI). Up to that point, religion, the Vatican, had been relied upon to dictate social values; the Catholic Church has always had a profound impact and effect on Italy’s social and political perspective. The Catholic Church and politicians have always been involved in various systematic corruption and scandals. That is the clear statement of the socio-political background of Italy. Under the Allied Troops, the Italian film industry had no brilliant days.

The American, Admiral Stone (the chairman of the Allied Film Board) made quite a strange declaration; Italy did not need a film industry and should not be allowed to have one. There were also practical considerations and reasons for this; the studios and the cinema industry itself were in ruins and had collapsed. In those days, Italian film-makers transformed the country’s reality into the cinematographic vision.

     The most notable characteristics of Italian Neo-Realist expression are the post-war period of Italian socio-economic structure, daily routines, portraits of the proletariat, social truth, re-structuring, re-building and the social panorama of Italy. The new breed of Italian film-makers all explored the link between social reality and political statutes, and challenged the moral values of postwar Italian society. The other major issue was using non-professional actors, like an ordinary man from the street. It was the time of slogans: no more professional actors, no more artificial decors, no more sets, and no more cliché stories. It was time for the kinds of films in which observations were being made of the social circumstances in which the Italians were living. Simply observing how this society was dealing with this incredibly tough situation: what’s the meaning of survival syndrome, paradoxical human conditions and ethics. The subject matter involved life among the impoverished and the proletariat.

The aim was to depict characters marked by simplicity. According to Bazin,”realism can only occupy in art a dialectical position - it is more a reaction than a truth…”

And he added,”…neorealism knows only immanence. Is it from appearance only, the simple appearance of being and of the world, that it knows how to deduce the ideas that it unearths. It is a phenomenology….”

The leading authors of the period are; Vittoria De Sica, Roberto Rosselini, Luchino Visconti.

      One of the cult films of the period is I Ladri Di Bicicletta which involved similar principles; a story about the daily life of the lower classes. The film was released in the street. I Ladri di Bicicletta is the story of wandering around Rome with a child and his father. The city has no glamour, elegance or charm.
It has social significance for the period. It was just a simple story: Antonio Riccio, the protagonist of the film, is an unemployed worker who finally manages to get a job after desperately searching but he must first procure a bicycle, necessary for the job. When his bike is stolen the story turns sharply to Antonio’s mad search for his stolen bike with his little son. After the bicycle disappears, Antonio becomes increasingly aggressive towards and, at the same time, distant from his son, completely insecure, lost and sceptical about society.


Another interesting anecdote about the period is that Neorealist films generally feature children in protagonist identity, though their roles are frequently more observational than participatory.

From the Neo-Realism perspective, the children played key roles as observers of the difficulties of the emerging present who held the key to the future.

One of the other remarkable directors of the period was Luchino Visconti, and his cult film La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) La Terra Trema is structured in a semi-documentary realist style. The film starred only non-professional actors & was filmed in the Sicilian fishing village called Aci Trezza. It’s a story about a Sicilian family struggling with the harshness of nature and commercial reality.

Italian Neo- Realism developed in parallel with Italian Post World War II literature. Notable novelists of the time being, Pavese and Vittorini.

Italian Neo-Realism was inspired by French cinema verite, German Kammerspiel, the documentary movement in the States and Polish Film School. The movement of French New Wave was profoundly influenced by Italian New Realism.
    Within La Nouvelle Vague, The French New Wave, collaborations between cinephiles & theorists flourished.
Leading directors of the period are: Jean Luc Godard, Francoise Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Erich Rohmer who were to become the auteurs of the French Cinematographic Manifesto.

      Jean Luc Godard was considered the enfant terrible of the new cinema. Jean Luc Godard is one of the most important film directors of La Nouvelle Vague.Godard’s films are structured as philosophical language. He was terrifically creative, also the most extroverted, his work weaved together rich veins of implicit political views and profoundly personal endeavours (existentialist, modernist, poetic, sci-fiction, abstract, spontaneous, romantic} and was concerned with film language and logic in any artistic genre. His sinuous roots encompass a broad scale of intellect and sensibilities from Bach to Renoir, Nietzsche to Hegel, and Brecht to Rosselini. He had a leading intellectual influence on French Cinema. Le Mepris is an adaptation from a novel by Italian Writer Moravia translated as A Ghost At Noon. Le Mepris directed by Jean Luc Godard made a film extremely self-conscious, modernist, and highly stylized. Le Mepris was based on love story narrative.



Jonathan Romney interprets Le Mepris,”…Le Mepris is a film about ghosts. It begins in Rome’s Cinecitta studios with Palance be-moaning the worldwide decline of studio system, the end of cinema.Cinecitta is a ghost town, and Lang, wandering through its ruins, is it s most noble phantom…” Le Mepris is about cinema, and Fritz Lang in the role of himself. Cinema has the face of Fritz Lang who made masterpieces of Cinema history like Metropolis (1927), M Murder (1931) and a handful of great Hollywood film noir.

Bridget Bardot becomes a phenomenon like G.Garbo and M.Dietrich. Godard created a modern portrait of women who have self-determination and also many layered complexity: at once illogical, regal, mysterious, capricious, disarming and exasperating.

       Le Mepris is an incredibly rich-text, affectionately drawing from European cultural heritage. Godard completely admired European Culture and notions: Homer, Holderlin, and B. Brecht. The story is about struggling European intellectuals, the clichés of love, miscommunication, alienation, the sharing of European culture, Brechtian distance and German philosophy. The film is a tower of Babel, in which the characters struggle to understand each other; Italian, French, German, and English. Prokosch is an American producer who was able to speak only English as a symbol of the monopolistic and imperialistic approach of Hollywood. The film surrounded by, and full of, strong cinematic personas such as Jack Palance, Bridget Bardot, and Michel Piccoli with European coproducer, Joseph Levine (French) and Carlo Ponti (Italian).



      European Art Film makers were also highly politically aware of social tension. One of the different faces of European Art Film was the director Gillo Pontecorvo.
The Battle of Algiers (1966) was directed by Pontecorvo. Most of Pontecorvo’s films were highly concerned with political issues. Pontecorvo has profoundly influenced by Rossellini’s style: working with non-professional actors, filming historical subjects in the actual environment as the setting and using minimal camera equipment (hand held etc). Pontecorvo had almost the same ideals as those with a Neorealist vision.

Pontecorvo’s conception of political filmmaking was derived from situations where the historical background played a major role, with nuances of personal psychology. The protagonists are struggling in a social atmosphere where they are forced to fight in the name of freedom, liberty, social rights and what makes life worth for living. Battle of Algiers is anti-imperialist and anticolonist, and structured by Marxist terminology. According to Mike Wayne,”…these signifiers of the crucifixion, the Christian motif of suffering and the religious music, so culturally remote from the story material, de-historicise a specific struggle in time and space, turning a story from anti-colonial liberation movements into timeless tragedy, a universal story, a comment on the human condition and other such depoliticising aesthetic concept….”



The 1970’s and 1980’s was quite a challenging period for the Euro-Med Countries. It was a period of struggle for Democracy and freedom. Some countries, like Spain and Portugal, were under the dictatorships. Others, like Turkey (coup d’etat, 1970 and 1980) and Greece (military junta of 1967-1974- it called also the regime of the colonels), were under military-oligarchy regimes. In Portugal, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar began governing by anti-democratic, anti-parliamentarian, fascist and Catholic methods. Meanwhile, Italian militants started to kill judges and some civil servants from both left and right wing fractions. These are the general socio-political characteristics of the panorama of the Euro-Med Countries.

Spain was under the fascist dictator, Franco, for over forty years. Franco’s rebellion sparked off the civil war in Spain. He was allied even with Nazis during the Second World War. The German Condor-legion, made infamous by the bombing of Guernica, provided air support for The Nationalists. Guernica is an unforgettable tragedy and a shameful blight on the history of Spain. The heart of Franco’s government was Castilian, which offered no rights for the other ethnic nations in the Iberian Peninsula, like Catalan and Basque Countries. When Franco chose his heir, Juan Carlos, the dictatorial regime had been transformed into a pluralistic democracy without civil war. The democratic transition led by Spain rapidly transformed with another dimension. The period of political repression fell, barriers were broken and the limits pushed. It was time for the flourishing and rising period of Spain. The 80’s paralleled the new freedom, cultural re-birth, general blossoming all over Spanish cultural life. That movement was followed by Spain’s joining The European Union and the socio-economic reforms adapted rapidly during the leadership of the Socialist Party under Felibe Gonzales . In the 90’s, progress had been absolutely and surprisingly established successfully. Madrid was declared the cultural capital of Europe in 1992, and Barcelona hosted the Olympics in the same year. The post Franco period of the mid 80’s was characterised by an ambience of celebration led by the new generation of Spanish film-makers. One of those being Pedro Almodovar.

Almodovar is a highly regarded and well-known contemporary director from Europe, respected by an international audience.
Tacones Lejones (High Heels, 1991), Almodovar based the story on the Hollywood melodramas of the 1940’s and 1950’s and transformed postmodern comedy- melodrama.
     High Heels closely related to Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), certain parallels are formed with American traditional Melodrama but in the Spanish way.
      Tacones Lejones would have been similarly based on F. Garcia Lorca’s play The House of Brenarda Alba. The story is about a domineering mother and her two daughters, who leave home in the name of freedom, escaping the mother’s tyranny.In High Heel, the story is set between mother and daughter, all cacophony and entanglement.
Tacones Lejanos’s heroines are characteristic of the Almodovarian existence. Almodovar drew a portrait of the stereotypical career woman and the sacrificial mother, the central theme of the film is motherhood and is shown in a variety of representations. Initially the women are shown performing. One a singer, the other a TV presenter.

Mother Becky is a glamour singer; daughter Rebecca is a TV presenter who’s emotionally linked to her past childhood trauma. Miguel Bose’s (the son of Lucia Bose who was quite a famous actress for Bunuel, Antonioni, and Fellini) triple role as three different personalities of male gender: drag queen Letal (miming the hit song of Rebecca’s mother”Un ano de Amor” (A Year of Love), undercover cop Hugo and judge Dominguez. Judge Dominguez and his unforgettable eccentric mother image. He can’t survive without her presence; she is the one who knows all the details of celebrities. She can handle all investigative stories (even from her bed) and interestingly with the absence of a father figure in his life. How daring was her influence on his life? He is the most notable and intriguing male character in the film. Through this film, Almodovar is playing where the profound psychological phenomenon of paradoxical ways confound like a griffith narrative. Dress by or Persona…kind of different existence of Fernando Pessoa….Also the relationship between Letal and Rebecca is completely absurd and ironical, because Rebecca slept with Letal who’s imitating her mother. In sequence where Rebecca has sexual intercourse with Letal, who had been dressed as her mother, as metaphorically he had irresistibly taken her place. Sleeping with the mother image, unpredictable incest. Femme Letal’s impersonation of her mother has a more realistic quality than Becky’s own existence.

Almodovar draws such performances from his actors that he also plays a crucial role: compelling, eccentric, enigmatic, zany, wacky, camp, neurotic, hysteric characters. Completely cliché, kitsch, tacky tele-novellas. Almodovar enlarges on romance as it is shown in daily TV soap-opera.

The glamour world also has artifice, imitation, and a synthetic life style where women are under the meta-fetishism. The film shows us the pleasure that can be had with female accessories such as Armani suits, Channel bags etc.

      The central characters in the film are two charismatic female protagonists played by eccentric and vivid actresses; Victoria Abril and Marisa Paredes .Woman are at the centre of almost all of Almodovar’s films as his alter-ego. Generally, Almodovar’s characters have strong personalities and exist in a variety of complex situations, mostly within a highly repressed atmosphere in terms of the socio-psychological background. The film truly bears Almodovar’s own mark, where meticulous combinations meet his particular style and concerns. His films have played a vital role in explaining Spanish culture through overblown sketches of life. Almodovar’s camp style is outrageous, extra avant-garde, decadent, kitsch, socially iconoclastic, affectionate, obsessed, frantic, and completely free of apolitics. Susan Sontag’s article, Notes on Camp, defined a parallel sensibility as the way for an intellectual approach. She said…..”Camp is a certain mode of Aestheticism .It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. But all style, that is, artifice is ultimately epicene. Life is not stylish neither is nature”…..

      We should indicate briefly how the various elements are structured in European Art Cinema. The central elements of European film makers marked an awareness of the social reality of the period. All the movements reflected social tension, political vision or aesthetic movement. They created a new aesthetic platform from which sprouted endless possibilities for creating a new language or rhetoric on cinematographic vision. One the most important concepts to have emerged during this time was the concept of the ‘zeitgeist’, expressing the film makers’ parallel creativity.

One of the other cultural elements was that as European film makers and aestheticians established the theory of cinematography they began to be taken seriously as practitioners of an intellectual Art platform in its own right. The first step here was undeniably taken by the Russian film makers of the twenties. The theoretical approach of Russian film makers was used in direct reference to the method of dialectical materialism. Eisenstein was an extraordinary montage theoretician. Later on the existence of Andre Bazin and the other writers of Cahiers Du Cinema were to play great roles in theoretical articles and criticism, analysing structure and narrative, the meaning of mis en scene on cinematography. Mis en scene is the manner in which the director has chosen to express himself.

The other theorician Roland Barthes,”Cinematographic expression also belongs to this order of large scale units of meaning, corresponding to global, diffuse, latent signifieds which are not in the same category as the isolated and discontinuous signifieds of articulated language…..” . The European Art Film-makers elaborated and applied a critical theory of the cinema, a specific methodology , particular definition, semiologic dialectical materialist way .Christian Metz, Andre Bazin, Piere Paolo Pasolini, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, C.Levi Strauss and the others.

      European Art film makers were undoubtedly cinephiles between whom collaborations were made of a variety of different positions on film-making. This was vital in terms of the functional roles in film-making. Apparently, they introduced the concept of the Auteur that enabled the writing of scenarios, directing, editing, montage etc. For example, Jean Luc Godard, Francoise Truffaut, Pasolini, Jean Cocteau….

The elements drew attention to the creation of a new art form and seized the moment. Memento Mori reflected a different expression and built sense of the Avant-garde. The early Avant-garde filmmakers and Russian intellectuals showed the way and others followed in their footprints; significantly Cahiers and the New Wave’s Auteurs. The revolutionary Russian Film culture had a deep influence on European Art films, also the role Eisenstein played as a mentor and guiding reference.


Films are a dialectical part of the socio-economic system and also a part of the ideological movement and system. The nature of dialecticism in cinematographic vision is politic. Clearly, the power of cinematographic vision reproduced reality. European Art film came up with a radically different way of film making like replacing the studio sets with real settings. Also, going against the star system by using anonymous players. European film makers made progress in the way they expressed the revolutionary evolution of the language of cinematography. They pushed cinematographic vision to its limits and improved the technical and psychological dimensions. European Art Cinema is a particularly different manner of producing films with more creative freedom for auteur film-makers.

European Art Cinema has meaning where human beings struggle, in social tensions and human conditions. These things are not separated from cinematographic movement. Cinema is a part of life and an art form too. European film-makers are always concerned with political tension.

Is speculation over European Art Cinema still with us or not? European Art Cinema has played a leading role for other directors around the world. Even now, a variety of different aesthetics and visions are copied or imitated from what the European film makers have done before through re-makes or collage works, most notably in Post Modern times. And European Film makers try to be more experimental, creating more Avant-garde forms and they will continue to push the limits and dimension even further and find new way for the future of cinematographic vision.

                                                       2006, London & Cuneyt CERIT

 
 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema? vol.I. Foreword by Jean Renoir, (University of California Press, LA, 1967)

Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema? vol.II. Foreword by Francoise Truffaut, (University of California Press, LA, 1971)

Browne, Nick (ed.) Cahiers du Cinema vol.III. 1969-1972: The Politics of Representations, (Routledge, 1990)

Edwards, Gwynne, Almodovar: Labyrinths of Passion (Peter Owen, 2001)

Marcus, Millicent, Italian Film in the Light of Neo-Realism, (Princeton University Press, 1986)

Marie, Michel, The French New Wave, (Blackwell Publishing, Paris, 2003)

Mellen, Joan (ed.).Film guide to The Battle of Algiers (Indian University Press, 1973)

Metz, Christian, Film Language (Oxford University Press, 1974)

Smith, Paul Julian, Desire Unlimited, The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar (Verso, 1994)

Vernon, Kathleen& Barbara Morris, Post-Franco Postmodern: the films of Pedro Almodovar (Greenwood Press, 2000)