Sacrificial Hero

From the time that the late 1980s, the image of the auteur cinematograph has changed dramatically. The auteur may not be dead, but the meaning of what or who is an auteur has shifted considerably: for Europe and America, not self-doubt nor self-expression, not metaphysical themes, nor a realist aesthetic are what makes a director an auteur. The themes that still identified an Ingmar Bergman as an auteur would now be mere affectations, a personal tic, noted by critics in passing. Instead, auteurs now dissimulate such signatures of selfhood, even where they believe or doubt as passionately as did their predecessors. Authority and authenticity has shifted to the manner a moviemaker uses the cinematograph's resources, which is to say, his or her command of the generic, the expressive, the excessive, the visual and the visceral: from David Lynch to Jane Campion, from Jonathan Demme to Stephen Frears, from Luc Besson to Dario Argente, from Quentin Tarantino to Tom Tykwer, from Lars von Trier to Jean-Pierre Jeunet - auteurs all, and valued for their capacity to concentrate on a tour de power, demonstrating qualities which signify that they are, in a sense, "staging" authorship, rather than, as was the case in the days of Cahiers du cinematograph, earning the title of author as the honorific sign of achievement at the end of a long career that had to emerge in the folds and creases of the routine product which had passed all the hurdles of anonymity of creation, in favor of the stars, the genre formulas and the action-suspense, to reach its public and enrich its studios and producers.

In this respect, nevertheless, there is little difference between contemporary Hollywood and the European cinematograph because auteurs now have to be the promoters and salespeople of their own movies at festivals, while one or two become pop star role models and idols for their fans. The difference must lie elsewhere, and while the obvious economic answers - the bigger budgets translating into more spectacular production values, the attractiveness of stars, the stranglehold the US majors have on world distribution - are, of course, valid up to a point, they do not seem to me to clinch it. Rather, my hypothesis is that the cinematograph's mythic dimension plays its part, and that the lack of it in Europe, or rather the lack of European movies to be able to embed these myths in the contemporary world is the key motive for the obsolescence of a certain art cinematograph.

There is the matter of shared conventions, of genres, their breakdown and reinvention. It becomes important when one wants to look again at authorship in the contemporary cinematograph, both so anachronistic and so important a category of the European cinematograph. As a rule, an author does not create genres (traditionally, he stands in opposition to that term) but he creates shared knowledge (whereas genres codify shared expectations), which the typical European author generates through series (such as making a trilogy with the same protagonist) which are an extension in time, and thus, the author's oeuvre is defined by the way it creates its own memory, its own self-reference and mise-en-abyme, or (to speak with Christian Metz) its own "deictic" relationships.

The cinematograph, in contradistinction to television, is still our most vivid machine for creating memory. As Godard has said: "cinematograph creates memory, television fabricates forgetting," which may be no more than saying that the cinematograph is indeed the space of a certain mythology, the only one in a secular world. It testifies at once to the need for transcendence and to its absence as redemption. The mini-myths of the auteur and his vision, the reinvention of romantic figures (along with their self-parodies) even in the most debased forms have probably kept this pact with the ritual sacrifice of the culture hero, and reinstated in the very terms of the protagonist's failure the right of the artist to claim such an exalted role.

Where does this leave us? On the one hand, I have been arguing that some of the enabling fictions of the cinematograph in general seem to have exhausted themselves. On the other hand, I claim that the consequences - a cinematograph that no longer commands assent and loyalty of the popular audience - are especially damaging to the European cinematograph, while Hollywood has managed to renew itself across an anti-mythology, in which death, destruction, violence, trauma and catastrophe seem to form the central thematic core. Perhaps we should be glad that European cinematograph has not yet adopted these dark fantasies of end-of-the-world cataclysms? Does it therefore matter that there is so little popular cinematograph in Europe, and none that crosses the national boundaries? I think it does, and to repeat: a cinematograph that does not have the assent and love of a popular audience and cannot reach an international public may not have much of a future as cinematograph. I am struck by the parallel with contemporary European politics. At a time when so many of the peoples of Western Europe feel neither loyalty to their political institutions nor confidence in the political process, it is perhaps not insignificant that the only European-wide entertainment form besides football is the Eurovision song contest because, for the rest, it is indeed "America" that European countries have in common. On the other hand, it is precisely the history of Europe both East and West that shows how much the last thing we need is a collective mythology or grand fantasies, in order to renew our faith in liberal democracy. But I shall conclude this report on the 1990s by pointing briefly in two directions: to the Past and to the East.