Ray Carney on The State of Independent Film, Part II

by Ray Carney | Published January 4, 1998

Ray Carney is a professor of film studies at Boston University and writes extensively on independent film. His razor-sharp observations and insight were featured in a two-part article in MM # 13-14 and had our readers buzzing for months. The following talk was recently delivered at the re-opening of Seattle's Grand Illusion Theater as an introduction to a screening of John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, followed by a weekend festival of independent works by Caveh Zahedi, Su Friedrich, Rick Schmidt, and others. This is the second part of a two-part article. The first half appeared in MM #26. -Ed.

Surely I'm not the only person in America weary of stylistic games and jokes. I can't be the only one who wants a movie to teach me something, to change me-not merely to spin around chasing its own tail, no matter how stylistically virtuosic it may be. Narrative jokes, tricks, and surprises are too easy, too superficial ways of holding interest. This worship of empty stylistic virtuosity is Hitchcock's cinematic and Pauline Kael's lamentable critical legacy. Is that what art is about-thrills and chills? Surprises and winks at the viewer? Most of my production undergrads can do that before they arrive on campus-because it doesn't take knowledge, thought, insight, maturity. These movies whip up a frothy soufflé of zippy effects, but leave you hungry in the end. They don't nourish our souls-just titillate our feelings. It seems like such a revelation at the time, but there's really nothing to it. It's all fake feelings.

Fake feelings are manufactured all the time outside of the movies. Look at the craziness that parents are persuaded to flip into, chasing after Beannie Babies or Nintendo games for their kids, or at what happens at a political rally, or the Gulf War patriotic frenzy that had all of America by the throat a few years back, or at what goes on at sporting events. You'd think civilization hinged on who won the Superbowl or the World Series. You'd think whether the O.J. verdict was correct really mattered to the future of the world. These emotions are not real; they are synthetic, made-to-order.

For an illustration of how films can whip up and exploit what I am calling pseudo-emotions, look at the whole thriller genre. There's not a real feeling in it. The emotions are plastic. The only reason we fall for it is that it taps into some aspect of our evolutionary past, some section of our reptilian brain stems connected with fight or flight responses. I dare you to try to turn off a suspenseful thriller after you have watched 10 minutes. I can't do it, either. But what does that prove? Suspense is the cheapest trick in the book, and it means nothing-no matter how gripping it may feel. Just because you feel an emotion doesn't mean anything valuable is happening to your heart and mind. The emotions in most movies are about as deep as an experience at the circus or an amusement park (though a friend who read this told me that I am being much too hard on amusement parks and circuses).

Romance movies just use another set of tricks. Watching them, I get a lump in my throat; I get goosebumps and the hair stands up on my arms; sometimes I even cry; but it's not deep learning, just gimmicks. My students always say that a particular movie "is so moving." So what? If you want to feel emotions, go to a hospital emergency room on a Saturday night. Simply feeling an emotion about a scene in Shine or The English Patient proves absolutely nothing. You can get emotional hearing a baby cry, but that's not art. It's biology. It's something programmed in us. Shine and The English Patient are cartoons for adults-no different from Schindler's List, Forrest Gump, or Bambi. They're as simple-minded as a children's storybook. To put it more bluntly, they're a pack of lies. There's not an original or truthful shot, scene, or line of dialogue in all of Shine. It's a sign of how even our film festivals have been dumbed down to the level of the melodramatic mainstream that it played at Sundance last year. I think it even won some kind of award. Unbelievable. Thank you, Robert Redford, for bringing us works like Shine and Four Weddings and a Funeral. It's nice to know that someone is out there fighting for the future of cinematic art-making sure that 19th-century melodramatic hokum will live on into the 21st century.

These films-Shine, The English Patient, Schindler's List-offer lite experiences-not learning, but simulations of learning, with none of the trouble and pain and growth of the real thing. We go in not to be tested and grow but to have our prejudices confirmed. These movies are machines for mass-producing feelings, which roll off their assembly lines in one-size-fits-all form. The characters are generic; the dialogue is generic; the acting is generic; the ideas are generic; the emotions are generic. Shine is a series of emotional clichés-Rainman meets Mr. Holland's Opus-one little heart-throbbing manipulation after the other: Feel this, feel that-click, click, click. Get it? Got it. It's not real experience, but button-pushing-like the joke about the comedians' convention: "Number 23, number 18, number 3. Ha, ha, ha." These movies provide low-impact emotional workouts and knowledge on the cheap. If this is art, Norman Rockwell should be in the Louvre. It's cooked up from a recipe-about the level of an afterschool special on TV. As with Schindler's List, when it works, the goal is to make us feel good about feeling bad. We can congratulate ourselves on the nobility of our emotions.

Are we that desperate to feel something? Are our lives that out of control that we need this degree of emotional reassurance and predictability in our works of art? Are we this addicted to emotional formulas that we need a fix of these fake feelings every Saturday night? Do viewers actually enjoy having their buttons pushed in this cynical way? I hope things are not that bad. Yet I have to admit that when I eavesdrop on the conversations of the couples streaming up the aisles as the credits roll, it seems that most of them absolutely adore being passive and manipulated like this. They like being put on intellectual autopilot. They enjoy turning on the cruise control, sitting back, and being taken on a mindless, impersonal, emotional ride.

How different a film like A Woman Under the Influence is. As a viewer of that movie, you have to work. Cassavetes tests your powers of response. You have to come to grips with difficult, unclassifiable experiences. You have to figure things out. It's not clichés. It's not a cartoon version of experience. It's not cruise control, but an Indianapolis 500 of feelings, demanding continuous emotional lane-changing and gear-shifting every few seconds as you navigate hairraising, hairpin emotional turns. It's not high school understandings of life. You have to know a lot about men and women and children and marriage and life in general just to understand what is going on, and you learn new things as you watch the film. The film makes demands on you. You have to think about what you see. You have to work through it emotionally. It deliberately challenges you. It defeats your expectations-all those formulas we try to impose on experience. It doesn't scream its meanings at you. It doesn't simplify everything. It shows you things that are subtle and slippery and elusive. You have to really rise to the occasion, just as you do in the subtlest and most delicate moments of life. Cassavetes makes adult movies-not in the degenerate, pornographic sense of the term-but movies you have to have experienced a lot to understand, movies that take emotional maturity and subtlety to keep up with.

Everything about A Woman Under the Influence challenges us. Nothing is formulaic. Consider the main character, Mabel Longhetti. She's impossible to pin down. We can't bring her into focus. She won't fit any of our stereotypes. She has so many different facets to her personality. So many different selves. She reminds us how boring and predictable the characters in mainstream movies are. She reminds us that there are no characters in real life. No one in this room is a character like someone in a mainstream movie. Mabel is a chameleon who becomes different things with different people. That's also why she stirred up critical debate. Each critic tried to catch her in one net or another-she was a victim, she was a feminist, she was oppressed, she was free-but she slipped through each one's grasp. It's a wonderful place to get a character to-beyond reductive categories. But it's also confusing and dangerous-especially if you want good reviews. Cassavetes gets his film to a place beyond the bumper- sticker ideological slogans that pass as a substitute for thinking-a place a lot like life.

While there are only five or 10 generic Hollywood movies, there is no one kind of independent film. They come in as many flavors, sizes, and shapes as there are artists. That's why it is easier to say what independent films are not than what they are. I can tell you some things they aren't: They aren't about fancy camerawork and razzle-dazzle visuals. They leave that to TV commercials. They aren't about pretty photography and gorgeous shots. They leave that to the manufacturers of calendars and postcards. They aren't necessarily about telling a suspenseful, gripping story. They leave that to writers of murder mysteries. You don't read Shakespeare for the story. You don't go to Chekhov to find out how it ends.

These films aren't about grand sociological generalizations and clanging symbols either. They leave that to Time magazine think pieces about 2001, Apocalypse Now, and Thelma and Louise. Independent films may even violate conventional notions of morality-the infantile punishment of villains and rewarding of heroes that you find in most mainstream movies, because they call us to a higher morality, where what matters is not rewards and punishments, but subtleties of sensitivity and kindness and love.

The best way to describe these films positively is to say that they give us new powers. They give us the ability to see and feel in new ways. Watching A Woman Under the Influence is like seeing family life through a microscope, suddenly being able to see things that we live most of our lives not noticing; suddenly being able to feel in new ways. We see butterfly flickers of emotion in characters' faces; we hear verbal flutterings with super-sensitive ears; we see and feel emotions we never realized existed.

People think that great works of art give us big ideas, but that is not correct. We can leave that to Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Star Wars and 2001. Really great films give us experiences which ideas are entirely too coarse and rigid to take in. As T.S. Eliot said of Henry James, these artists have minds too fine to be violated by an idea. Ideas are an easy way of knowing. These films don't tell you what to know, where to look, what to feel, or what to conclude about what you see. They make you work. Rather than giving you thoughts, they make you think. They give you experiences too mobile and slippery to be boxed up in an idea.

The films you are about to see this weekend are parasol-slashers, but that does not mean that they are negative. In fact, most of them offer euphoric experiences, because they are liberating. As Emerson said, the poet is free and makes free. These artists show us ways out of the clichés, the fakery, the synthetic feelings, the canned identities that our culture overflows with. That is the real reason this gathering is an occasion for celebration.

The preceding should suggest why the real nature of cinematic independence is not bureaucratic, but emotional and intellectual. It matters less how and where these films were made than that they break the chains that bind us (as Horace said was the function of all art). They break us free from the fabric of lies, simplifications, and half-truths that our culture is woven of.

What is it to be an independent filmmaker? I want to propose a series of definitions in the hope that at least one may be meaningful. Cassavetes once said to me that he thought of himself simply as a reporter, and that is not a bad definition. Of course, being this kind of reporter means that you file reports from the emotional front that avoid the intellectual clichés and emotional formulas that most professional reporters employ. Ezra Pound said that the only difference between an artist and a journalist is that the artist reported news that didn't become obsolete. News that stayed news.

Another way to think of independent filmmakers is as anthropologists-anthropologists who don't go off to Borneo or New Guinea to study mating rituals and family customs, but who stay at home and study their own culture.

Another way to think of real art is as endless question asking. These filmmakers are little Socrateses who are never satisfied with a pat answer. They keep asking 'Did you notice this? This? This?' They dare to ask questions to which they really, truly don't have answers. And they ask the hardest possible questions: Questions about our uncertainties, fears, and insecurities. Questions about our ability to give love and to receive it. Questions about our loneliness or our alienation from our emotions. Questions about why we may not be happy even when we have everything we want. Questions about what ultimately matters in life.

Another way to think of artists is as explorers who travel and map unknown inner worlds. While the Hollywood filmmaker knows where he or she is going every step of the way, storyboarding scenes days or weeks in advance of the shooting, and going in each day with a set of predetermined points to make in each shot, real artists set off down a road they can't see to the end of. They work in the dark, feeling their way step by step, learning new things as they go along. In our smug, know-it-all era, it is clear that artists are almost the only the real explorers left, and that they come back with the only news that really matters. But we might as well accept the fact that Ted Koppel will never devote a panel discussion to Mark Rappaport's or Robert Kramer's explorations. Barbara Walters will never interview Caveh Zahedi or Su Friedrich and ask them where they have been traveling emotionally. It's so easy to deal with factual discoveries, and so hard to deal with emotional ones, that it's not surprising that the more important kind of exploration is almost completely ignored. We know so much about facts and events, and so precious little about ourselves. Sometimes I think we're downright scared of looking ourselves in the eye. We'd always rather look outside ourselves-cruise the Internet, travel the world-than sit still and listen to our own hearts.

But my favorite metaphor for thinking about artists is as students and teachers. (Since I'm a teacher, I admit that my occupation probably biases me.) Like students and teachers, above everything else, real artists must be humble and willing to learn. They must open themselves up and make themselves vulnerable. That's not a very fashionable stance. We live in a culture that's devoted to being "cool," in control, and above-it-all. The goal is to be wised-up and "in" and smart. That's another source of Tarantino's cachet. His movies are so hip and knowing. Well I have news for him. Real art is about not knowing. It's about being humble. It's about admitting how little we understand about who we are and what we need or want. The greatest films are made by artists who dare to plunge into their uncertainties, their places of fear and doubt.

Again, Cassavetes can stand as a model of this kind of artist. He went into his films genuinely willing to learn from the process of making them. He used them to explore parts of his life he didn't understand. He had a sense of wonder at all they taught him about life. Let me tell you a little story about one of his greatest works that will make clear what that means. This is the first time I've ever told it. I'm not sure how many of you know about the early part of his career, so I'll briefly summarize it. John made his first film, Shadows, as a no-budget indie production, more or less entirely on his own in New York. The film didn't do that well commercially, but John managed to get some attention by giving interviews. When all was said and done, he was offered a studio contract to make two low-budget features on the West Coast. He was young and naive, and jumped at the chance, and moved to Los Angeles actually believing he could do the same thing he had done as an independent, only this time with a decent budget, a professional crew, and a whole studio support system. He thought it was a dream come true.

Well, I probably don't have to tell you what happened. The predictable result was two mediocre movies and a total, unmitigated, career disaster. The studios had talked a good line, but when final cut time came around, they wanted their kind of picture, not his, and on both films John got into incredible fights with his producer, and eventually got thrown off the set of the second picture and blackballed from working in the studios. He went back to his big, new house in the Hollywood Hills and sat at home licking his wounds, unemployed and unemployable. He could hardly believe the way he had been treated and what had happened to him. He was young and idealistic and inexperienced, and had never had a run-in with the kind of men he had had to work with on these two pictures-high-powered studio producers and executives whose only interest was power, money, and the bottom line. Art was a dirty word to these guys. John was treated pretty badly, but he was so different from these men that even when it was over he still couldn't really understand why they'd done to him what they had.

So what did he do? He decided to make a movie about them. The result was Faces-the film I walked out on. John made the movie to try to figure out what made these guys tick-how they could be so entertaining, and so much fun to be with, in some ways, and so awful in others. He wanted to understand what they were like when they were home with their wives eating supper. He wanted to understand what their sex lives were like. He told me he was puzzled all the way through the movie: he wrote the script to try to come to grips with them; he shot scenes in dozens of different ways to try to figure out how they might have acted in different situations; he played and replayed the footage on an editing table to try to figure out what it was like to be them.

But Cassavetes also told me that a strange thing happened as he made the movie. As he wrote, directed, and edited it, his bitterness and rage dissipated, and he began to feel a deep compassion for these men. He started to realize things that he hadn't before. He let his film teach him, and he gradually changed his mind about these men. He still saw how awful they were, but where he had begun by despising them, he began to feel sorry for them. He saw how they tortured themselves even more than they tortured other people. He saw how unhappy they were, how emotionally needy they were, how insecure, how desperate for love and approval. In short, John eventually came not only to understand the men who had ruined his life, but almost to love them. He came to see them with kindness and sensitivity.

That's what it means to use film not to tell a canned story in the Hollywood way, not to make a set of points you've already arrived at, but as a means of understanding life. That's what it means to humble yourself before your material, and genuinely let yourself learn from it. Is it clear how different this is from the way films are usually made-not only by mainstream directors, but even by many independents? It's obvious to me that Robert Altman, for example, whatever his other considerable gifts, is incapable of this sort of openness to his material. He has clearly figured almost everything out before he steps onto the set. His goal is to score points-not to look, think, and actually learn or change his mind in the process of making the movie.

To open yourself as completely as Cassavetes did in front of a set of experiences you don't understand and use film to work through them is to grapple with deep mysteries of human personality. By mysteries I mean something entirely different from the acts of mystification in Hitchcock, DePalma, Lynch, the Coens, or their clones, of course. There's a lot of mystification in contemporary film-the deliberate withholding of information to thrill or titillate an audience, but no real mystery. The mysteries in thrillers can always be cleared up by the final scene, which is to say that they aren't mysteries at all in the sense in which I mean. Cassavetes explores mysteries of who and what we are that won't be resolved. His mysteries have the profundity of life.

All of the filmmakers being shown this weekend ask us to become explorers along with them-to enter into a different kind of viewing experience, not to sit back and register a series of predetermined points and meanings, but to open ourselves to any and all possibilities, and genuinely go on an adventure of discovery.

I do a lot of interviews, and I frequently get asked the question of where is independent film heading? What trends are there? I always answer the same way by saying that it is an illegitimate question. It treats art as if it were like advertising or politics or Wall Street, as if it were a matter of demographics or trends or business cycles. The truth is the opposite. True artistic creation is solitary in its essence. It is not done by a group but an individual. It is one heart speaking to one heart. And it doesn't ultimately depend on funding or support groups or government grants. (Though those things certainly don't hurt!)

There's a lot of talk about how technology will make it better for filmmakers of the future, but I don't think the future of independent film depends on technology either. Real artists can use anything. If 35mm film is not available, they will use 16, and if 16 is not available they will use 8; if 8 is not available they will use video or even a still camera. In Another Girl, Another Planet, Michael Almereyda made a feature film with a 69-dollar child's pixel-cam. It's terrific. Todd Haynes used Barbie dolls when he couldn't afford actors. Superstar is pretty amazing too. A real artist can use finger paints-like my friend Stan Brakhage-or finger puppets-like Paul Zaloom. The best student film I ever saw in my life was a series of still slides projected on a screen with a desynchronized voice-over narration. One of the best artists I know uses his hands to make shadows puppets on a sheet hung on a rope. Talk about low-budget production! It doesn't matter. Where there are men and women devoted to telling the truth about life, great art will continue to be made. MM

Ray Carney is Professor of Film and American Studies at Boston University and the author of more than fifteen books on film and other art, including the critically acclaimed Cassavetes on Cassavetes and The Films of Mike Leigh. He runs a web site devoted to independent film and other art at http://www.Cassavetes.com.