Biennale Cinema
65th Venice Film Festival
Introduction by the Director of the 65th Mostra, Marco Müller
What is new is unforgettable
Gilles Deleuze
We resolved, for this new-four years mandate of the Cinema Section of La Biennale (for this 65th Venice Mostra), to stop, once and for all, looking at the cinema as if it were an infallible compass. No longer did we want to ask the cinema to rescue us from a problematic, ambivalent, ambiguous present: it was up to us, instead, to stay in there, not to pass over the new problems (artistic and beyond) that are being posed by the age in which we have to live. An age characterized by an evershifting profusion of images, but also without, when all is said and done, there being all that much to see.
If the cinema is no longer (or almost) the cinema, this may also bring to light aspects whose positive nature is not immediately discernible. The cinema has become a whole series of ideas, forces, properties, capacities, myths and stories. And, above all, it has turned into a new way of thinking, and an original and powerful one. So that, fortunately, when we set out to track down what, in the cinema, has come after the modern, we are always exposed to the danger of contagion, from the risk of hybridization.
For over a century the cinema has been the most fertile and relevant medium, and the most inventive; one of the constituent elements of modernity (it has never been a spare part, replaceable, interchangeable). The part of modern cinema that we have experienced as necessary, almost definitive, has had a fine set of progeny. A progeny which, in its turn, has claimed the right to persist, not to disappear gracefully once its own time has passed (as so many movements in the visual arts, architecture and literature have done); it has even claimed, instead, to be the absolute reading of the cinema, its profundity, its essence. But the idea of a modern cinema that has lasted for over half a century is a true oxymoron.
While it did last, the historical modernity of the cinema soaked up everything that was contemporary, so that the contemporary ended up aspiring to be able to coincide with an ideal of the “modern.” Now that modernity is ready to find its place in genealogy and in history, the very notion of “modern cinema” daunts us – so hard have we squeezed it, ground it up, in order to extract what might still be of use to us. And the new classifications? “Contemporary” cinema: contemporary with what? The term, in any case, designates nothing permanent or stable.
The cinema is entertainment too, and it is undoubtedly industry that organizes entertainment (Malraux’s old aphorism remains valid: the first art to have been invented from scratch is in any case an industry). Yet it is no longer the mass spectacle with enchanting effects that it once was, capable of continually renewing its own mythology and, more rarely, its own works of reference. Many of the movies that are being made, in fact, bore people rather than entertain them. They promise moviegoers the latest in aesthetic techniques (special effects: of screenplay, performance, direction, visual wizardry), but then leave them frustrated, hungry for that stimulation of the imagination and for those illusions which the cinema had been able, in other times, to guarantee them, and of which it now offers them frozen shadows (perhaps someone left the air-conditioning on, and turned up too high...).
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