It's always fashionable to trash contemporary American cinema--these days, all it takes to seem high brow is to tsk tsk at the mere mention of "Dude, Where's My Car?" (which is now soooo 2000...)--but only the seasoned elitist prig knows that in order to truly earn his/her PBS tote bag one must proclaim that American movies were-and-are inferior from their very inception.Yessir, to a particularly odious breed of swaggering a-hole, Maya Deren and Brett Ratner are cut from pretty much the same (cheese) cloth...
The insufferable jack-ass pictured here is one Ronald Bergan, a film instructor, author, and reviewer (and I would offer, possibly a virgin, impotent, and suffering from IBS, so sources tell me) who must've broken a snaggled-tooth on a popcorn kernel from his "Surf's Up" Happy Meal this week in order to pen this doozie the Britain's Guardian Unlimited:
"By the highest standards of cinema, American films fall short. There are no living American directors who can compete in innovation and depth with the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard(the list goes on)...It has always been thus, but to a far lesser extent. The only American-born film directors that truly belong in the Film Pantheon are John Ford, Howard Hawks and Orson Welles..."
Ah, but what about the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, the discriminating and well-versed cineastes/TCM subscribers amongst you have countered? The era in which such acknowledged visionaries such as Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder and of course, Alfred Hitchcock, produced their greatest critically-lauded and audience-friendly works?
Sorry, but Bergan's got that covered, too: those artists--he proclaims with laughable authority (presumably having been with them as they stepped off the boat at Ellis Island)--"brought what they had learnt in Europe with them to America".
And true to form, the article is illustrated by a still from the Jim Carrey vehicle "Dumb And Dumber", another dated and woefully obvious reference that's about as representative of American cinema as "Carry On Up The Khyber" is of the U.K. film industry(Lesson number 1 in being a fatuous armchair intellectual: always define your object of scorn by its worst possible example)...
Bergan never informs us at to what those "highest artistic standards" actually are, then again, I'm exactly the kind of sci-fi loving, sequel-going, comic-book-reading moron the Evil Empire caters to and am thus too hopelessly infantile to figure it out. And as a part-time, semi-professional reviewer, I've been known to give positive notices to Eli Roth and Rob Zombie thrillers and would rather cough up a lung before sitting through five minutes of any Godard wank-fest, so it's likely I'll never be invited into the Pundit's Inner Circle unless I trade in my Ray Harryhausen boxed set for the annotated works of Marguerite Duras.
If I seem to be taking all of this a bit too personally, it's because Bergan's tirade distills four years of the kind of blithe, anti-Hollywood, artsy-fartsy dogma crap I was force-fed daily by most of my instructors while studying Fine Arts and Film at York University in the 1980s. In short, for me, it's the equivalent of a 'Nam flashback. You've seen "The Deer Hunter"? Try watching "Battleship Potemkin" frame-by-frame with a hand-coloured Russian flag throughout the 80-minute black & white film and you'll plead for the sweet relief a round of Russian Roulette could bring!
Honestly, I thought we'd moved past this easy anti-populist nonsense: we survived breakdancing movies and "Missing In Action" sequels and other lamentable trends that were supposed to have already killed off film as an art form and here in the 21st century, Spielberg and "Blade Runner" now show up on the AFI list, animated cartoons are no longer considered purely kiddie fare, and films about caped superheroes have elicited stronger critical kudos than the last four Meryl Streep weepies. Hell, the Hobbits even cleaned up at the Oscars, beating the usual "important" disease-of-the-week melodrama...
No doubt tomorrow, there will be those out there quoting liberally from Bergan's article, hoping to impress...well, someone. Just in time to dismiss the new Robin Williams wedding comedy and the expanded opening of "Transformers". Kindred spirits, thankfully, seem to be in short reply, judging from the readers' responses that follow the essay. "Pointless, snobby", "you were being ironic, weren't you?", "banal observations", "xenophobic intellectualism", are some of the kinder remarks...
As for Bergan's influence on my movie-going habits--I don't think I've ever looked more forward to a glorified toy commercial featuring giant robots so much in my life...
©Robert J. Lewis 2007
