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Images of the World (After the Death of Cinema)
Apocalypse in the Tropics (courtesy of Netflix) “Things happen with David differently than you’d expect them to,” director Micah Magee wrote about writer and editor David Barker in a 2017 article on Filmmaker’s website. “You walk an entirely other route than you wanted and end up right where you need to be but not knowing quite how you got there.” Spending time with Barker on his trips to New York and sharing cuts of films I’ve produced with him, I’ve come to realize the wisdom of Magee’s words. Barker thinks not just about what makes a film “work”—exist as a coherent and effective artistic object—but how it connects to the broader culture. — Scott Macaulay
At a recent screening of Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics in Los Angeles, a Brazilian woman came up to thank me for my part in the film. “Thank you for saving my country,” she said. But, as the film makes abundantly clear, Brazil is far from saved—and when it is, it won’t be by a film. And yet, something in what she said points to the reemergence of a role for film in Western society after many proclamations of cinema’s death over the past decades, with Susan Sontag’s in The New York Times almost 30 years ago the most well-known example.
I think of a clip of Jean-Luc Godard on The Dick Cavett Show circa 1980 that makes the rounds on film social media every year. It’s become a kind of guiding star in my work. He talks about film as an X-ray that allows you to see yourself, so you can diagnose your own illness. If Hollywood was not making great films at that time, it’s because the people in the studios were not interested in looking at themselves that closely. Jean-Pierre Gorin says something similar—he calls it “looking at yourself from across the street”—in a conversation with Rachel Kushner for the Criterion Collection. As they note, filmmaking is also a way of creating in the world an image of a particular society in time and space.
In my teens, my image of Eastern Europe came through the films of the New Waves of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, but it was not the official image of these countries. In the case of Czechoslovakia, it was a national identity created by filmmakers like Jan Němec, Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer—an identity that created community in opposition to a prevailing official discourse. Film was a serious business, with responsibilities (and possibilities) in a world where everything was at stake. As Chytilová said, “Freedom is a discipline of responsibility. And art must take responsibility in a world where truth is manipulated.”
Some Czech New Wave filmmakers later felt that their most daring and original work had been made during the time of oppression, when art had a civic function and struggle gave their films urgency and seriousness. Later, life under capitalism (and for some, like Forman or Passer, working in the Hollywood system) felt like a more insidious form of censorship than authoritarianism had been because it pacified the public and made the creation of images seem less vital.
In my work as a writer and editor, my strongest experiences have been working in societies where this image-building served a vital need: post-civil war Nepal (the films of Deepak Rauniyar), Brazil on the verge of a potential coup (The Edge of Democracy by Petra Costa) or Aboriginal Australia (the films of the Karrabing Film Collective). Reviews of Rauniyar’s White Sun in Nepal, for example, were not about the film as much as they were re-evaluations of the war, looking again at what had been at stake and what had changed for good and bad as a result—a conversation engendered by the film.
Working on films in the United States, it often felt harder to make cinema feel vital. Many stories seemed to fall into the neoliberal trap of telling private stories as though society didn’t play a key role in creating and reproducing them. There were always great exceptions, of course, such as the new images of the history of the African American civil rights fight that have been created through films over the past decade or so.
What strikes me now is how there may be an opportunity in the United States for the kind of work film has done in other places during my lifetime. Perhaps for the first time since the 1970s and the upheaval around the Vietnam War, there is an important social function ahead for film in the United States. Sometime in the future, maybe I will come up to a U.S. filmmaker—perhaps one not even born yet—to say, “Thank you for saving my country.”
