Renoir was close to music and Rossellini to painting, even though everyone knows that the former loved the stage above all else and the latter loathed pictures. What I mean is that there is a point at which the author of The River rediscovered Mozart, and the author of Europa ’51 Velázquez: one tried to paint moods, the other characters. Our task, then, is to define filmmakers through what is most profound in them.
Jean-Luc Godard
 

 

There are still many directors who go on fighting to retain the maximum of artistic and ethical dignity for their work, notwithstanding the growing (and now huge) loss of importance of the forms of expression they have sought to enrich. They have provided a significant stimulus, and one which has prompted us to resume our work right from the point where Venice 2008 left off. Steering clear of effects of novelty and topicality, we wanted to consider the cinema as culture of the contemporary: we had to make the attempt. Behind the program of the 66th Venice Festival, therefore, has been the desire to view culture as a series of aesthetic and moral battles, to see moral problems as things which profoundly affect the world of personal choices and the imagination, and the imagination as a universe in touch with style. Focusing on the issues of the relevance and the boundaries of contemporary cinema may, perhaps, not be enough. Under that name are lumped practices which share a cultural and social space, but which are different to the extent that their “contemporaneity” must continually be brought into question: it is not a question of category or periodization, nor even of a style that can coexist alongside the modern. (Modernity, even “necessary modernity,” can only, by definition, be ephemeral and transitory. It leads toward something different—for example, another modernity. This year too, one of the provisional results of our work is that the “end of modernity,” the end of the grand narratives and the reflective approach, should be sought above all among the filmmakers who come from countries where modernity, at least as we understand it, has taken decades to penetrate).

The cinema is by now something more than just the cinema: a set of ideas, forces, properties, capacities, myths and stories that marks virtually all movies (the ones produced by the industry as well as the ones made outside it) and that marks our history, within movies and beyond them. To the cinema as culture of the contemporary correspond situations that differ from one another: the tip, the cutting edge of the present (although it is a present that is continually slipping though our fingers); the freedom with respect to a past to which it is no longer necessary to refer back and which we no longer even need to criticize; a new start, from a certain event (but which?) that is fundamental and yet outside the links with tradition; the desire to speak in a specific, competent, technical and scientific way. Situations that have never come together in a common practice because, ever since the end of the postmodern episode, filmmakers have found it difficult to recover from the unavowed trauma that is represented, despite everything, by the renunciation of the desire to seek an origin, to hark back to a tradition. And yet there is something healthy about every fantasy of revival and reinvention of a past seen as a casket of unexpected jewels, at least in so far as it thumbs the nose at the permanent state of gloom in which languish all those nostalgic observers who have been mourning the death of the cinema since the end of the eighties. (One proof that the cinema is not dead? The fact that it is always possible, and often fun too, to try to do yet again what has already been done.

The result will not in any case be the same). Changes in the cinema have often been less abrupt than elsewhere, both within the machinery of the industry and outside it (even in experimental cinema or the “Cinema of Poetry”). It has to be asked why there is no other sector of cultural production in which general audiences are so ready to go to see the works of the past alongside the “novelties” of the present (this is why, at the festival, we remain committed to our retrospective programming, to the “rediscoveries” that can still be made in the corpus of yesterday’s Italian cinema, and that will be made possible again this year by the continuation of the section called These Phantoms). One possible answer: because there is something, in the cinema, that does not change, because on the same day we can go and see a film by Jacques Tourneur and another by Abbas Kiarostami, one by Elia Kazan and another by Johnnie To, without ever having the clear sensation that the journey which has taken us such a long way is one through styles, rather than time. It is for this reason that the program of the 2009 Festival sets out to bear witness to the vitality of the use of different pedals, of the mixture of high and low, of the union between the rigorous exercise of reason and the total abandon of the senses, of the deployment of irony while retaining a deep sense of pietas.

Cinema can become art by taking its inspiration, for good or ill, from the other arts, and still more by being completely true to its own photorealistic nature, or by reviving the contract by which it once promised the moviegoer a spectacle of mass entertainment with engaging effects. The only way, however, to escape the legay of painting, photography and art in general is to make the cinema a medium of expression capable of rivaling all the others and often surpassing them, by crossing the borders between them and refusing to accept that the specificity of the materials is an insurmountable obstacle. The cinema did not come to a stop in 2000, nor in the following years. It has not even ground to a halt in the face of the financial crisis of fall 2008: many movies have come out in the last few months that continue to offer lively ideas of what the cinema has become. They are films made by author-directors (who do still exist, although in smaller numbers than we try to tell ourselves; what is missing in the end is a renewed policy on the part of authors, to sweep away the fakes and the daubs).

Besides, never have the program of the Festival and its juries born witness to a revival of the movement of creative individuals between the cinema and other expressive languages to as great an extent as they do this year. In the movies we love, the awareness of objectives and tasks coincides with the method best suited to utilizing the (economic and industrial) powers of the cinema, squeezing the last cent out of them. The films that we look for do not have to have to fly any other flags than those of beauty, the pleasure of creation (the kind with a signature, that does not “expire” with the changing of fashions), the project that appears concrete and circumscribable on paper but that can turn back into abstract thought at the moment of shooting, become elusive when it is realized. Films that are synonymous with invention, peace, freedom—that emerge from the daily practice of constructing freedom, whether individual or shared.

Films capable of giving viewers pleasure, integrity, love of the particular and a push toward the other, capable of charging themselves with a tension toward the absolute. A “cinema of the total awareness of the world in the light of beings” (a definition offered by Jean-André Fieschi, who left us, all too soon, two months ago). A cinema, therefore, of the sum of emotion and knowledge, redeemed by the way it is continually seizing things from the world of information-communication. However critical the situation in which contemporary cinema finds itself, in Italy and elsewhere, the prospect provided by the Festival allows us to bet on the fact that it will long retain the energy necessary to foster a permanent critical reflection on the world and on those fragments of the world that are closest to us, challenging current systems of representation and helping us to find our way around the images of the present. And that from this test the cinema will, once again, emerge reinforced and more mature.