|
Thankfully, the closing of the millennium has brought anything but the materialization of Godard's rather ominous declaration. After all, no art form that within a decade managed to accommodate the development of both Hou Hsiao-hsien and Adam Sandler can be said to be on its last legs. Enough time has passed to now consider the 1990s cinematic tides and waves. It was an astonishing time for world cinema -- the aforementioned Godard and Hou contributed magnificently to it, as did Abbas Kiarostami, Eric Rohmer, Theo Angelopoulos, Jacques Rivette, Mike Leigh, Wong Kar-wai, Pedro Almodovar, Emir Kusturica and Maurice Pialat, among many others. However, for this article, let us consider American film during that decade. That's definitely not to imply its superiority over other countries', but simply to examine it as taking- off point, one that I feel familiar enough with to discuss with confidence. As it happens, the '90s hold personal importance as the time when I came of age as a filmgoer. Of course, I had been going to theaters since my wee years, but seeing a movie and watching a movie, I was to realize, are two different things. Since then, I have been gorging myself nonstop on cinema's buffet, with no planned diet on the horizon. Yet even for a period one knows well, it would be absurdly naive to discuss it as an isolated entity existing in a vacuum. The weight of the previous decades can be felt on even the most supposedly cutting-edge of projects. Not that '90s cinephiles can be accused of ignoring the past. If anything, old movies now are so easily accessible -- and so often accessed -- that Gen-X filmmakers make even the erudite "Movie Brats" of the '70s (Spielberg, Lucas, et al.) look like a monastery of Franciscan monks. As much blessing as curse, this familiarity can have disastrous results. The line between sampling a classic for inspiration and recycling bits and pieces from it becomes thin indeed. Imitation may truly be the most sincere form of flattery, but are we able to tell when it slides into lazy plagiarism? That said, American filmmaking in the '90s strikes me on the whole as much more vital, stimulating, fertile and, yes, original, than in the previous decade. Whereas the '80s could only occasionally boast interesting work amidst crude commercialism and suffocating "quality" films, the '90s were looser and far more consistently alive to the expressive qualities of cinema. This rise is tied to the high amount of new voices that exploded throughout the decade, as well as to the further maturation of the established talent. There seemed to be not only good movies to be made, but also more people who wanted to see them -- the environment felt particularly fecund. And why shouldn't it? Following the excitement of the 1970s, American film throughout the 1980s turned circumscribed and reactionary. Just as the nation went from anti-war protests and women's lib to Ronald Reagan and military deism, films went from Nashville and Taxi Driver to Terms of Endearment and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was perhaps only a matter of time until creative impulses started rumbling underneath the deadness of American cinema during the time, but even the most admirable achievements of the '80s (Heaven's Gate, Blue Velvet, Martin Scorsese's and Jim Jarmusch's films) were acquired tastes at best as far as audiences were concerned. Artists were talking, but people didn't want to listen. Of course, it's not like audiences flocked to art-houses with the turn of the decade. Studios to this day remain glorified business conglomerations always ready to package products to cash in on whatever the latest fad happens to be. A smirky slasher thriller makes a killing? Then a dozen more is ordered in the exact same fashion. People like horny-teenager comedies again? Well, a hundred more are on their way. Thank you, come again. The big-budget action film in the 1990s is all too symptomatic of this. Never the most personal of genres, it nevertheless allowed for bursts of directorial expression in the '80s (Walter Hill, John Carpenter, Michael Mann, James Cameron before he fell off The Abyss). By contrast, the next decade saw it become exclusively a producer's corner, with the same mismatched buddies, car crashes and explosions popping up with the mechanical frequency of a computer dispensing minimal variations on the same program. Inevitably, people lapped it up. What has changed, then? Fortunately, the independent film, the yin to mainstream cinema's yang and a hitherto relatively esoteric area, emerged through the decade with bracing force and variety. The big boys had control over box-office hits, but the blanket of commercialism could not stunt the growth of independent artists. Now it would be a good time to pause and define what an "independent film" means. Hardly a narrow term (it can be applied equally to cinema-verité maverick John Cassavetes and gorefeast hack Herschell Gordon Lewis), "independent" suggests shoestring budgets, stark black-and-white photography and characters played by the director's uncle. In that sense, I disagree with John Pierson, who uses this definition in his book Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, one of the two important looks into American independent filmmaking. (The other being Emmanuel Levy's Cinema of Outsiders.) In his preoccupation with astringent guerilla technique as the very essence of independent filmmaking, Pierson underrates Quentin Tarantino as much as he overrates Kevin Smith, and ends up offering a reductive view of what could be considered original art. More than an aesthetic norm, the term refers not just to how a film is made, or how it is promoted and distributed. More vitally, it applies to the approach behind the project -- to the filmmaker's sensibility rather than to just his or her methods. Not every single small-scale, personal film is good, and not every big-budget, all-star movie is bad; the spirit of true art can exist in both occasions. This cross-pollenization of expressive instincts over different kinds of films that gave the '90s much of its flexibility and bite.
Politically correct updates of the noble-savage myth. Time-traveling with a Republican man-child. Coffee-table adaptations of classic novels. Would-be epics of the human spirit. That sinking ship. Skim the decade for its official "prestige" releases, and American cinema in the 1990s will inevitably look as safely embalmed in "class" as the 1980s. The tonic for this hemmed-in good taste was, inevitably, down in the dirt with the wise guys and the slackers, with the druggies and the hit men, and the aging gunfighters who tore up the screen with bullets and emotions. The American '90s could be bookended by Goodfellas in 1990 and Bringing Out the Dead in 1999, the first and last contributions to the decade by its most important filmmaker, Martin Scorsese. In between, film witnessed the meteoric rises of Tarantino and P.T. Anderson, the severity of Dogma 95 and the decadence of post-modernism, the rebirth of Robert Altman and the epitaph of Stanley Kubrick. In 1992, while James Ivory was proving yet again that a faithful, literal translation of a Victorian novel to the screen could only result in a lifeless movie, Clint Eastwood was summing up everything in his career into what turned out to be the last of the great Westerns. Yet so many people at the time were thirsting for different types of film that, within the same year, audiences could be equally receptive to Ivory's Howards End and Eastwood's Unforgiven. It was this kind of open-minded alertness that allowed creative seeds to be sown and talent to be nurtured at the time. In fact, 1992 is widely regarded as the year in which independent movies burst onto scene, changing the face of American cinema. In one year, Allison Anders' Gas Food Lodging, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Gregg Araki's The Living End, Alexander Rockwell's In the Soup, Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi and Tom Kalin's Swoon materialized in film festivals, heralding a startling variety of untamed talent. Just the year before, Richard Linklater had presented his audacious Slacker. A few years earlier, Steven Soderbergh debuted with his acclaimed Sex, Lies and Videotape. Clearly, a new movement of film was afoot. A number of variously gifted artists emerged in the next years, including Albert and Allen Hughes, David Fincher, Neil LaBute, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Todd Solondz, Edward Burns, Darren Aronofsky and Kimberly Pierce. To sum up the breadth of new talent in the decade, however, I suggest five names: Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes. Of those, Tarantino is certainly the most exciting, and the most deceptively easy to grasp. More ink has been spilled over Pulp Fiction than on any other '90s film, yet he is much more than the sum of his philosophical killers, profane-comic patter and movie references. His films, seemingly the polar opposite of the meat-and-potatoes realism usually associated with "indies," are dazzlingly rich essays on film disguised as glittery crowd-pleasers. Though far from prolific (three films in ten years), he remains possibly the directorial breakthrough of the decade. Tarantino's characters are compulsively secretive; Anderson's are boisterously emotive, grappling with their feelings with often-volcanic force. The trilogy of Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia levels showy, bravura filmmaking with an abundance of generosity towards screwed-up souls -- his gamblers, porn stars and aging whiz-kids seldom descend into facile caricature, no matter how degraded they may find themselves. If his work seems to overreach itself on occasion, Anderson nevertheless has the passion to back it up. Soderbergh, on the other hand, keeps his flame low but always burning. Saturnine where his colleagues are mercurial, his career is as interesting to follow as it is hard to pigeonhole. From the willfully deliberate esoteria of Kafka to the mainstream self-effacement of Out of Sight, he has fidgeted between the art-house and the blockbuster theater, refusing to camp on either side. His oeuvre seems at first dizzyingly eclectic, but a closer analysis of his finest work (King of the Hill, The Underneath, The Limey) reveals an artist with a distinctively restless sensibility. From Slacker to The Newton Boys, Linklater has kept his finger on the pulse of youth, the time when people with heads swarming with ideas have to put their feet on the ground and face the world. Dazed and Confused follows 1970s high school graduates and Before Sunrise asks if romance is still possible for Gen-exers, and Linklater is warm and attentive to all his protagonists. Limber and sympathetic, his films work as the best antidote against the jaded, limiting smirk of nihilism. Though roughly the same age as his peers, Haynes got his start much earlier, with projects that made up in ingenuity and genuine iconoclasm what they lacked in polish. His 1987 short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story became an almost legendary bootleg hit, while his first feature, Poison (1991), announced the arrival of the New Queer Cinema. With Safe and Velvet Goldmine, Haynes emerged as a rarity -- a subversive radical with his lenses directly fixed on the tensions within the American fabric. Before moving on, I should explain the absence of Kevin Smith here. An article attempting to cover a subject as large as a decade is bound to run into omissions, but I don't take Smith seriously enough to consider him an important creative force, despite his immense fan base. Whatever slender talent he displayed in Clerks -- mostly for superficially clever dialogue and unflinching locker-room humor -- has long been frittered away by stunted self-referencing and visual drabness. It is grimly fitting that his last movie, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, is virtually impossible to tell apart from the dozens of generic gross-out teen comedies now flooding the market.
Though exceptionally fertile ground for raw talent, the '90s were by no means restricted only to the young Turks. After all, the cinema is one of the mediums where age and experience enrich rather than erode the artist. Anybody still thinking of film exclusively as a "young man's game" needs to take another look at the later pictures of John Ford, Luis Buñuel and John Huston. Too young to be "old timers" but too experienced to be neophytes, Spike Lee, Tim Burton and Jim Jarmusch provided welcome alternatives in the '80s to the steady flow of impersonal pap hitting theaters. The following decade saw them enjoying creative freedom and even moderate success with target audiences without sacrificing their visions. Lee, already a notorious provocateur in the '80s, could hardly be considered mellower in the '90s, as ten confrontational features have shown. By no means a consistent artist, his films often feel like valises overstuffed with weighty ideas and agendas, all but bursting under the intensity of Lee's handling. In retrospect, his most ambitious projects (Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Summer of Sam) come off as overblown tirades, while his smaller, more intimate ones (Crooklyn, Get on the Bus, He Got Game) offer moving, cathartic moments with more humanity and less look-at-me! pyrotechnics. Unlike Lee's, Burton's films -- stylized fairy tales mixing childhood dread with Gothic exhilaration -- work on an evocative rather than explicitly political level, and are no less provocative for that. Throughout the decade, the director seemed to alternate between Burton the delicate fabulist (Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow) and Burton the darkly frenetic parodist (Batman Returns, Mars Attacks!). Yet his Ed Wood, a tribute to illusionism as the essence of cinema, stands as a genuine modern classic, one of the funniest and most touching odes to the joys and pains of film in any decade. Next to Jarmusch, however, both Lee and Burton are safely mainstream. A playful formalist with a fondness for backroads deadbeats and deadpan absurdism, he is perhaps the only major American filmmaker who's completely "independent," meaning he answers only to himself and always follows his own path. Of course, it can also mean he follows it alone, but the value of his work supports his august idiosyncrasy: his remarkable Dead Man (a druggy reinvention of the Western genre) and the neo-Zen Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai become more fascinating with each new viewing. One of the pioneers of the independent movement in the '80s, Jarmusch has become one of its invaluable masters. Going farther back, it is fascinating to follow the careers of the directors who flourished in the '70s. Coming from a risk-taking time before studios became corporations, they saw their instincts for artistic expression challenged by a system interested more and more in homogenous, audience-friendly confections: the following decades could be seen as make-or-break endurance tests for them. Martin Scorsese was never broken. The most consistently passionate and committed of all active American directors, his work alone would be sufficient to validate the 1990s. His pictures, chockfull of kinetic expressionism and tormented antiheroes grappling with their desires, were artistic peaks in the '80s, and the '90s saw an uninterrupted series of mature masterpieces as varied as they were personal. Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino and Bringing Out the Dead are intense and The Age of Innocence and Kundun are serene, yet all of them flow equally from Scorsese's blood. A virtuoso not afraid to use film's resources to their fullest (I have learned more about filmmaking from watching Casino than from any film class I've ever taken), he has proven again and again that seething, incandescent cinema can still exist. Of the '70s mavericks, Robert Altman has probably had the hardest time adapting. His cinematic methods -- loose-limbed, improvisational, exploratory -- were completely at odds with the commercial procedures preferred in the '80s, and he stumbled across the decade. The '90s, thankfully, saw a creative revitalization in Altman that, though often frustratingly uneven, was as invigorating as anything else during those years. A resolute modernist, Altman has always cultivated a restless, challenging personality, always at odds with the presiding system, interesting even in his failures. As befits his brand of artist, the good is inseparable from the bad in his work: Vincent and Me and The Player are brilliant, Ready to Wear is abysmal, and Kansas City, The Gingerbread Man and Cookie's Fortune fall somewhere in between, yet all of them are equally, unmistakably "Altmanesque." Short Cuts, however, is the product of a major filmmaker in full control of his art, and it is astonishing -- a panorama of American life, savage and delicate, ruthless and merciful, jaundiced and passionate. Contradictorily enough, one of the absolute masterpieces of the decade came from a filmmaker who could be considered the antithesis of Altman: the late Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. His first picture in more than a decade, it was met by baffled, bored audiences and derisive reviewers more concerned in coming up with smart-ass comments than in actually looking at the film. Were viewers disappointed that they didn't get the sexy Tom 'n' Nicole romp they came to see? Were critics hellbent on deflating an almost mythical hero of film buffs? No matter. The picture is nothing less than the summarization of a career that's spanned four decades, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket, with all the weight that statement carries. The chess pieces may look scattered all over the board, but a closer inspection reveals an old master's final checkmate. A symphony of encoded motifs and waltzing camera movements, Eyes Wide Shut emerged in 1999 to signal the end of an era but also a reaffirmation of the haunting power of film.
And I haven't even gotten to Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, Francis Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Brian De Palma,
Woody Allen, the Coen brothers, Terence Malick, Oliver Stone or John Sayles yet. Let's face it: a very thick book
would be needed to do justice to the 1990s. The new millennium has a lot of catching up to do.
|