On July 30th of this year, the cinematic community mourned the passing of two of its most revered figures when Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni passed away within hours of each other. Both men had lived to a grand old age, and neither had made a film for a couple of years, but the coincidence of two great directors dying on the same day prompted a number of articles to be written about the end of cinema's great age. They were seen as two of the last bastions of challenging, existential, spiritual and searching filmmaking, and with their passing, many wondered if we had any such directors from the modern era who were willing or capable of living up to this benchmark. So if we were to take the pulse of contemporary cinema based on what we've seen over the past twelve months, what conclusions would we come to regarding the medium's current health?
If today's generation of filmmakers does possess an heir apparent to the likes Bergman, Antonioni or Tarkovsky, then perhaps it is Carlos Reygadas, the Mexican director who made his most accomplished film this year with Silent Light. Reygadas' long takes, intelligent mise en scène, and his embracing of the film's spiritual elements, recalled the work of the great directors mentioned above, and one suspects that there is more interesting work to come from this preciously inconsistent auteur, as he continues to refine his gifts. Reygadas' use of the Mennonite community in his film also shed light on a society which had previously been unexplored in cinema, and Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes was a similarly enlightening experience, being the first Australian film to feature an all-aboriginal cast and to be made solely in their language. In fact, most of the great foreign-language films to be released over the past few years have come from newer filmmaking territories – Romania's renaissance continued this year when the outstanding 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (released here in January) won the Palme D'Or at Cannes – and these pictures are currently putting offerings from the more traditional cinematic powerhouses in the shade.
This year's batch of French cinema was particularly disappointing. La Vie en rose contained an top-notch central performance from Marion Cotillard as the tragic Edith Piaf, but the film itself was a clumsy biopic; Pascale Ferran's new version of Lady Chatterley was overlong and passionless; and the acclaimed Gallic adaptation of Harlan Coben's Tell No One was little more than a bog-standard thriller. It took an American to make the best French movie of the year – Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Feb 2008) is a beautiful and deeply moving account of Jean-Dominique Bauby's near-total paralysis. For much of the year, German cinema was riding high on the back of one film in particular. The Lives of Others won an Oscar in February and has received incredible critical acclaim wherever it has played. It has appeared on most critics' top ten lists and everyone who sees the film seems to be amazed by it. Have a look at this quote from Mark Cousins, who selected the film for Sight and Sound's 2007 top ten:
"I looked in vain for the names of Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond on The Lives of Others, which I saw later than most critics, but I could not find them. They must have, modestly and posthumously, refused the credit. Could any living filmmaker have written a scene of such dramatic and ironic complexity as the one in which Christa-Maria goes into a bar and is approached by her secret fan and observer? Surely not. Surely those precise skills are gone".
Apart from the sheer craziness of Cousins' quote, the overwhelming adulation heaped upon The Lives of Others throughout 2007 left me wondering if I saw a different film to everyone else. As far as I could see, The Lives of Others was a polished, well-made, fitfully intriguing drama which wasn't worth getting particularly excited about. It certainly pales in comparison with The Counterfeiters, a rougher but far more compelling German film about Jewish prisoners forced to collaborate with their Nazi captors; and it has nothing on Edge of Heaven (Feb 2008), the new film from Head-On director Fatih Akin whose story crosses between Turkey and Germany, bringing the strands together for an unexpectedly touching finale.
Much of 2007, as ever, was dominated by American cinema, though, and unfortunately it seems that the only thing worse than Hollywood not tackling major issues is, well, Hollywood tackling major issues. The war on terror was a central theme among many films this year, with unsatisfying results all-round. I was expecting more from Robert Redford's Lions for LambsRendition was a simple-minded attempt to bring the issue of extraordinary rendition to the public's consciousness, but the public wisely steered clear. Paul Haggis tried to make a film which functions both as an anti-war polemic and a straight-ahead thriller, but despite sterling work from Tommy Lee Jones, than a 90-minute lecture set in a couple of small rooms, and Gavin Hood's In The Valley of Elah (Jan 2008) fails on both counts. The only worthwhile dramatic feature on the subject so far has been Brian De Palma's Redacted (March 2008), an anguished howl of a film which is far from a perfect picture, but at least it has more to it than empty, heavy-handed speechifying. In any case, the failure of every one of these films at the box-office poses the question of whether people actually want to see these films? Perhaps the cinema-going public is suffering from a bad dose of war fatigue as this endless conflict drags on, and there doesn't seem to be a receptive audience for films that place the subject front and centre. The first wave of great Vietnam films started to appear in the late 70's, years after that war had ended, so perhaps we'll only get some cinematic perspectives on this issue when the dust finally settles on the conflict, if it ever does.
