Stephen Pollard, the UK writer and BBC Newsnight anchorman Jeremy Paxman may not agree about everything, but these two are certainly on the same page when it comes to a dismissive view of so-called “arthouse” movies. In particular, Paxman appears to have triggered a mini-storm when he said recently less than complimentary things – Paxman is not exactly what I would call a diplomat – about the late director, Ingmar Bergman. Quite right too. On Tuesday evening’s show, Paxman, journalist Toby Young and some film reviewer fellow from the Financial Times were having a right old argument about whether art house films are worth the effort. I tend to side with Toby Young: long after people have forgotten about the likes of Bergman, they will be watching the films made by Hitchcock, John Ford, Coppolla and the rest.
I think the problem are the words “art house”. It conveys the idea that the benighted viewer is not just watching a film, but is having some wonderfully clever experience which is likely to be lost on the plebs. There is a lot of anti-bourgeois posturing in such films. Worse, they are self-indulgent. I find most of them unwatchable. I’d rather watch Bruce Willis in Die Hard any day of the week than this stuff. And the point that the FT writer – I forgot his name – seemed to overlook is that films that lack plots, strongly defined characters, a sense of life and drama, do not achieve the lofty goal of somehow making us “think about the big lessons of life”. (He probably regards films with a beginning, middle and an end as “popcorn movies.”) Arguably, you are more likely to learn a bit about humanity if you watch The Simpsons or The Incredibles rather than some dreary French art flick.
Talking of witch, Die Hard 4.0 is on. I must get some tickets.
Paxman appears to have triggered a mini-storm…
Yes, my ears perked up too last night when Paxo introduced the piece. The key word, however, appears to be “mini”. There were, according to Paxman, no less than three letters of complaint. None of them, alas, were from Mrs. Trellis of North Wales.
Has anyone noticed the relevant terminology? Intellectuals go to see “films”, while plebs see “movies”.
Die Hard 4.0? You don’t have to embrace Critical Theory to have standards. 😉
What I find annoying is the change of title for non-US markets. “Live Free or Die Hard” was apparently something we were not expected to understand.
“Has anyone noticed the relevant terminology? Intellectuals go to see “films”, while plebs see “movies”.”
RobtE I don’t think that is true, movie is an American term and most British people I know would say film. Although movie is becoming much more common with American influence.
Oh god Johnathan, dont get me started!
I used to go an see these type films when a student in Nottingham.
They always started about 10.30 pm as if this was the ideal time for viewing this stuff. You know when you’ve already been down the pub or are ripped to the tits in some other manner, that might render them comprehensable.
I love to go to the cinema for a good read dont you?
Everybody else in this world dubs movies to their own language. Oh but not foreign films in Britain!
Sacreleige !!
No you’ve got to try to comprehend by reading as well as looking at the pictures. Look Film snobs the movies are pictures. Start dubbing!!!
But yes—-
Hitchcock Ubre Alles!!!
Films that qualify as arthouse films fit into a variety of categories. Firstly there are those that were made in foreign countries for local audiences and which wouldn’t get a release in mainstream cinemas here because most people are not in the habit of watching foreign language films. Secondly there are films made by aspiring film-makers on relatively low budgets as an attempt to establish themselves and get higher budgets for later films. Films from either of these categories can be good, and the very fact that a film in either category has made British cinemas at all tends to suggest it will be at least a decent film. (This contrasts with pretty much all Hollywood films, which get a release purely by virtue of being made). The third category of art-house film is that class of film being made principally to impress critics, festivals, and state funding councils rather than actual audiences. Films from this category can be self-indulgent, and also often politically tiresome. However, this doesn’t always prevent them from being good films, although I would argue that it does make them less likely to end up any good rather than more.
I think it is foolish to be dismissive of “art house” films in aggregate, because if you do you rule out seeing lots of interesting films, and in particular you miss out on seeing the output of many interesting foreign film industries. However, Sturgeon’s law (which in its original form stated that “90 percent of everything is crud”, although that is not actually how it is usually quoted) certainly applies to art house films at least as much as to commercial films.
What I really dislike is not art house films as much as art house filmgoers. You know, the sorts of people who utterly refuse to ever see a Hollywood film, and talk vast amounts of unbelievably pompous pomo crap about what they have just seen. (Somehow they also often seem to prefer seeing films in disgusting fleapits rather than modern cinemas, too). I am thinking of the sorts of people who attended (and ran, for that matter) the Cambridge Arts Cinema in about 1992. Than God for the invention of the DVD.
Does this really have to be an either/or issue? Bergman made a lot of very good films. He also made a few very tedious ones. I really liked the first Die Hard movie, but by the third it had got rather tired.
Mr. RAB,
For what its worth, foreign movies are very rarely dubbed these days in the US also, save for animated features.
Its interesing how this came about. There was a time when there were entire genres of foreign “B” movies were routinely dubbed – Italian sword-and-sandal epics, spaghetti westerns, Japanese samurai and Chinese Kung Fu flicks.
I think that this dubbing became a national joke in the 1970’s, maybe because of the poor quality and ludicrous potential of the material where it was applied.
Serious pictures were handled respectfully, with subtitles, from the beginning. If you want an example of a deliberate application of this principle in a Hollywood movie, have a look at “The Longest Day”.
Who gives a shit if a movie is good or not? If it was privately funded, somebody wanted to make it and did so, and it might be good and it might suck.
It’s the public funding–which mostly goes to “art” films–that is the problem. Because a shitty movie that no one will see won’t make money, so they extort money from the public to make it.
As said above, it’s the “art” film patrons that tend to be insufferable assholes. Pretensiousness is a seriously annoying personality trait.
Relatedly, in my experience, a lot of people who go to school or have dreams of making movies aren’t doing it for an artistic vision of making movies. What they want instead is to become someone who is known for making great movies. In other words, they don’t want to make movies that are as great as, say, Sam Peckinpah’s–they want to be as highly regarded as an artist as Peckinpah was.
This makes for shitty movies, because they aren’t interested at all in the product–only the results, and the ego-stroking.
May I modestly call attention to my own comments on this subject here:
http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/08/memento-mori/ ?
What Michael and Peter said. I actually like Bergman and Seventh Seal is one of my favourite films – and yes, it is meant to make you think about the big lession of life, in this case Death. 🙂
Some art-house films are tedious, pseudo-intellectual and pointless. But some are works of art (no pun intended). On the whole, I am faster to dismiss Hollywood movies than ‘art-house’ films.
As I grow deafer with age, I become increasingly fond of subtitles. The emotions of the voices come through clearly; the meaning, with subtitles. But if it’s Bergman and his friends, nothing will make it work for me.
Pollard might have more credibility if he had any arguments about what he thinks is wrong with Bergman (other than being Swedish and not fashionable). He certainly gives no indication of having actually, you know, seen and analysed a Bergman movie.
Bergman could be tedious (I hated 90 % of Autumn Sonata with a burning red-hot passion) and he could be uncomfortable (the scene with the broken glass in Cries and Whispers is one of the most uncomfortable scenes in the history of cinema) but he was one of the greatest filmmakers ever and almost every good filmmaker since owes something to him.
The danger of iconoclastic fun is looking like an ignorant, braying ass when the icon is tougher than you are.
“I think the problem are the words “art house”.
I think the problem is that you’re applying some strange sort of reverse snobbery to the effect that anything that isn’t massively popular must have no value. If so, that would be bad news for samizdata.net, wouldn’t it? Speaking as someone who watched both The Simpsons Movie and The Seventh Seal on Sunday and liked them both, I suggest you get rid of the chip on your shoulder and allow yourself to enjoy films on the basis of their merits.
My rule of thumb is that if you can’t imagine a rotund, cigar-chomping Hollywood mogul calling it a “picture”, it ain’t worth seeing. Bergman wasn’t in pictures.
The opening sentence of anyone you hear in the media who defends “Arthouse” starts with…
This deserves an audience…
You flinch instinctivly and think to yourself , so how much of my money do you want now to produce 2 hours of film a couple having an existential bad time in an attic in Paris in black and white.
I went to see John Luc Goddards epic featuring the Rolling Stones making Sympathy for the Devil, a garbage dump. Some seagulls oh and some Black Panthers running around the dump with Woolworths toy dept machine guns. I wish I could remember the name. 2 by 2? 4by 4?
I’m sure it was very deep, but whatever the point was missed me by a mile.
Benny Hill had an interesting take on this “Genre” in one of his Fred Scuttle sketches.
My point is I take umbridge with the “This is and that isn’t art” Even though the “that isn’t ” took millions.
Ok, the only thing I remember about Art-House movies, apart form them being foreign and sub-titled, was there was a bloody good chance there would be some reasonably graphic sex in there somewhere.
I think that was the reason for the late showings :), for a large portion of my formative years, ‘Art-House’ = ‘best available legal pron’. I cannot think if there was any other reason to go and see them? A better flesh fest than the latest ‘Adventures of a …’
I may have entirely missed the point, or maybe not.
I think I would “give a shit”, if I had been persuaded to cough up several pounds to watch a dreary film. I have nearly walked out of the cinema on several occasions after a friend had persuaded me to see such a movie; frankly I consider that several hours out of my life that I will never get back.
Of course, in a free society, people can watch and make what they want with their own money. But it also means that one should be free to criticise pretentious films and to call them as such.
Take it easy, Jim. There is no reverse snobbery on my part; if a so-called art house film is entertaining and interesting, I’ll watch it; if it isn’t, I won’t. It has got nothing to do with inverse snobbery, but then the art house folk tend to invite brickbats because some of them made so much play about how much their work was “not like all that Hollywood crap” or whatever.
I am also quite aware that massive popularity is not the same as quality; I hardly need to have that pointed out, thankyou very much. But popularity is a kind of barometer of sorts; after all, Shakespeare is still going strong, and he was quite arty, if I recall.
Reverse snobbery indeed….
To declare that all art house movies are pretentious rubbish is about as sensible as declaring that all Hollywood movies are shallow populist rubbish.
Die Hard 4.0, however, cannot possibly be worse than either Spiderman 3, the worst film I’ve seen about a decade. Worse by far than Inland Empire, which had good bits in it.
Transformers, on the other hand, totally rocked.
Right, OK, I winding myself up for this one.
I have watched the three colours trilogy and a few other things with frogs in and they are nowhere near as entertaining as Bruce Willis in a vest kicking the bejesus out of people.
I don’t regard cinema as being a great art-form – it’s entertainment. The greatest films (movies, whatever) are pure adrenaline. My wife (a huge Hitchcock fan and also, God help us, a fan of Soviet cinema) considers me a Geordie scumbag for really enjoying Con Air. I fail to understand this. You’ve got John Malkovich being hammy as hell and folks singing “Sweet Home Alabama” on a C-123 and the movie pretty much ends with a plane crash landing on the Vegas strip while Steve Buscemi sings “He’s got the Whole World in his Hands”. Oh, and there’s also a shoot-out in a Nevada junkyard. What is there not to like here?
Let us not in fact beat around the bush here. I like shoot-outs, car chases, violence, explosions and fit birds getting their kit off. Am I the only one here who will admit to renting The Adventures of Baron Munchausen purely to frame-by-frame Ms Thurman’s debut role? Am I the only one here who Bit torrented 300 just so that I could watch big fellas beating the living shit out of each other (and it had some quality nipple shots too*)?
Is anyone anywhere going to honestly say they prefer some piece of French existential angst “I cannot afford a Ciroen DS! Zut alors!” to a real proper film like The Outlaw Josey Wales or Alien? You know, proper films where Mr Eastwood kills people with a Colt and then delivers a witty line or Sigourney strips to her pristine panties and leaves a surprising amount to the imagination.
The worst film I ever paid full dollar to go to the cinema to see (apart from Hannibal, obviously – memo to directors: never again pair Hopkins and Oldman) was oddly enough a war film. It was the Thin Red Line and it was utterly bloody awful. Frustratingly so because it had good bits but it was stupidly, pointlessly improvised and made no goddamn sense. Now I liked the hand-to-hand stuff in the long grass but that musing on a sub-Gauguin tropical isle – what the hell was that all about?
I say “sub-Gauguin” because the French painter at least had the honesty to admit he was only there for the (grass) skirt. He didn’t claim he was experiencing some kind of epiphany. And no, not even I am crass enough to claim that a hint of Tahaitian minge is an epiphany, pleasant though it may be.
So, RAB, where did you go to the piccies in old Nottingham? I frequented The Savoy on Derby Rd (in Lenton). They allowed smoking well into the nineties and had double seats at the back to allow for groping and a proper bar with a dog and an ancient bar-tender who could never remember orders and everything. They even had an intermission and choc-ices. It was like something from the fities. And in 1995 (my final year) it cost £1.70 to see a top of the line blockbuster.
*Female nipple shots but I appreciate that the ladies and the homosexuals might have got a bit of a thrill from seeing bold Leonides’ bold nipples. I dunno. I was too entranced by the hot phalanx action at that point.
I am racking my brain Nick. I was a long time ago.
For the mainstream films, somewhere off Slab square. Fags and booze of course. Civilised times!
As for the Arthouse stuff, well the friend cattleprodding us along to these films lived in Forest Walk, so it was an institute building or maybe a converted church somewhere near the Arboretum.
Of course I am not crass enough to declare all arthouse movies as pretentious rubbish. Just most of them.
As a rule of thumb, I find that the amount of Art Council money that has been involved in a films production almost always increases the films unwatchability by the same factor.
If we’re going to declare film tastes….
My favorites (besides exotica from countries i don’t know much about) are the highest highs and lowest lows. That is one the one hand I like low budget exploitation movies, the cheaper and cruder the better. On the other hand I like capital-A Arthouse cinemah.
In other words I equally enjoy Cannibal Holocaust (and I’m ready to defend it as film) and My night at Maud’s (and I’m ready to defend it as entertainment).
I don’t like over-test-marketed, over-processed, soulless, explodo-thonic mall movies (or the dregs of what passes for romantic comedies since the ghastly nora ephron started desecrating the genre).
That said, I can watch and even enjoy a limited number of those, the same way I can eat McDonalds every once in a while.
But limiting myself to one kind of movie (whether elite art house, cheap titilattion, lowest common denominator hollywood ‘product’ or anything else) seems unnecessarily inhibiting. It would be too much like eating the exact same meal every single day.
“someone from the F.T.”
Of course the Financial Times is a leftist newspaper (which comes as a shock to people who think in terms of “it is written for people in business so it must be……” thus showing a depressingly Marxist view), but even people in the “culture sections” of conservative newspapers tend to be leftists.
For example, few American newspapers are conservative (about one in ten), but far fewer television reviewers in American newspapers are conservative.
Perhaps (if they bother to have film reviewer at all – and I am not sure they should) the W.S.J. will get a nonleftist film reviewer now it is under new ownership – but I doubt it, after all “Fox News” had a supportive (indeed glowing) on line review of that tissue of lies “Sicko”.
I think of the “art house” films as being a product of the 1950s, at least in the US. At a time when most of Hollywood’s output was at the level of Jerry Lewis (about whom the French are dead wrong), works such as Rashomon, Seventh Seal, Bicycle Thief etc. were much more challenging fare.
In the mid 60s when I was in high school a teacher showed Seventh Seal to his film society, and he screened a few realls in class. I remember the scene set in a country inn where the people discuss the evil portents of the plague with a rising level of hysteria. Then the reel ran out, I looked around, and found myself the only student left in class. I had missed the bell for the end of the day, I was so entranced. It was the first time I had been moved by a work of art. It began a process that led to my career choices in communication, and my appreciation for film, from Hitchcock on up. I changed my life, and I am eternally grateful to Bergman for that.
Come on chaps – de gustibus and so on… what has this got to do with anything important? I like Bergman and recently bought the full five-hour version of Fanny och Alexander on DVD – but who cares?
Whilst agreeing that many ‘art-house’ films are unutterably dreary, there are some gems out there. I can do no better than recommend my personal favourite: Orson Welles’ version of Kafka’s The Trial. An astouning piece of cinema.
In Australia we no longer make engaging films and tv dramas with appealing characters and fascinating storylines. That is because our population is vast enough (22 million) to make considerations of mass audience appeal entirely superfluous.
Some people I know think, because it was made in England, Love Actually was arthouse. But it wasn’t. It was crap.