A Map of Misreadings?

But this maybe the rub, and the point where a "cultural" view differs from the cognitive case around narrative comprehension. By the logic of reception studies, it is ultimately the various nationally or geographically distinct audiences who decide how a movie is to be understood, and they often take their cue not only from title, poster, actors or national origin, but from the place where a movie is shown, in which case, an art movie is simply every movie at an art-house cinematograph, including old Hollywood movies, as happens with Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller retrospectives: the cinematograph, one and indivisible, as a young Jean-Luc Godard once proclaimed when refusing to endorse these binary oppositions. To claim that European art cinematograph is mostly a genre, whose identity is decided by the pragmatic decision of where to see a given movie and with what internalized expectations, may be something of a lame definition, after all the high hopes invested in such notions as national cinematograph, "new waves" and the movie d'auteur. Yet such an argument has at least the advantage that it avoids the (misleading) tautology, according to which a European art movie is a movie made by European artists. Viewing the Hollywood/Europe divide as merely the special case of a more general process of generic differentiation, where movies are valued, canonized, or have re-assigned to them identities and meanings according to often apparently superficial or secondary characteristics, can be very instructive indeed. For these characteristics provide on closer inspection a detailed and often sophisticated map of movie culture, which ignores all kinds of stylistic or formal boundaries, but speaks eloquently about the life of movies in history

One could even call it, borrowing from the literary critic Harold Bloom, a "map of misreadings."16 European movies intended for one kind of (national) audience, or made within a particular kind of aesthetic framework or ideology, undergo a sea change as they cross the Atlantic, and on coming back, find themselves bearing the stamp of yet another cultural currency. The same is true of some Hollywood movies. What the auteur theory saw in them was not what the studios or even the directors "intended," but this did not stop another generation of American viewers appreciating exactly what the Cahiers du cinematograph critics had extracted from them. In such a case, the old idea of European movies as "expressive" of their respective national identity would appear to be rather fanciful and even more farfetched than the notion that European auteurs are only interested in self-expression. It would suggest that "national cinematograph" quite commonly, makes sense only as a relation, not as an essence, being dependent on other kinds of moviemaking, such as commercial/international, to which it supplies the other side of the coin and thus functions as the subordinate term. Yet a national cinematograph by its very definition, must not know that it is a relative or negative term, for then it would lose its virginity, so to speak, and become that national whore who prostitutes herself, which is, in France or Great Britain at least, the reputation of the heritage movie. Instead, the temptation persists to look beyond the binary oppositions, towards something that defines it positively - for instance, that of a national history as counter-identity. Such might be the case with the movies of Zhang Yimou's RAISE THE RED LANTERN or Chen Kaige's FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE, fanning out towards a broader festival and media interest in Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese cinematograph from the time that the mid-1980s, where (to us Europeans) complicated national and post-colonial histories set up tantalizing fields of differentiation, self-differentiation and positions of protest. For these movies, international (i.e., European) festivals are the markets that can fix and assign different kinds of value, from touristic, politico-voyeuristic curiosity to auteur status conferred on the directors. Festivals such as Berlin and Rotterdam set in motion the circulation of new cultural capital, even beyond the prospect of economic circulation (art cinematograph distribution, a television sale) by motivating critics to write about them and young audiences to want to study them in university seminars.

One conceivable conclusion to be drawn is that both the old Hollywood hegemony argument (whether justified on economic or stylistic grounds) and the "postmodern" or "pragmatic" paradigm ("it is what audiences make of movies that decides their identity and value") tend to hide a perhaps more interesting relationship, namely that of national cinematographs and Hollywood not only as communicating vessels, but (to change the metaphor) existing in a space set up like a hall of mirrors, in which recognition, imaginary identity and mis-cognition enjoy equal status, creating value out of pure difference.