I think you’ve raised some important points here.
I also believe that despite the influx of political themed films in these past few years (Captain Phillips, A Long Walk To Freedom, The Butler, etc.), the viewers aren’t being asked to be active spectators, but passive observers. I don’t think the lack of active spectatorship is because they are Hollywood or mainstream films in particular, after all look at films like Paradise Now and Do The Right Thing. They lack of active spectatorship happens because these films are part of a trend rather than a movement. That is, after the success of Django Unchained, a whole new market opened for slavery films and Hollywood capitalized on it. It is one thing to talk about the political for the sake of opening a dialogue, and another to talk about the political to win an Oscar, which is what most of these Hollywood films are written for…critical acclaim. These films are “fetishizing”, as Mulvey puts it, the sensationalism behind those stories and histories (i.e. slavery, aparthetid etc) and not necessarily putting the issues first. They lull us into a false sense of awareness and open discourse, but the representation of reality here is not the reality of representation. The films aren’t raising questions; they are answering them from a selected point of view, and so we automatically become passive spectators. I have given this example in our class forum before but I want to reiterate it here. Look at Captain Phillips, a film that is made into an America hero tale of overcoming all obstacles against all odds while neglecting the larger questions surrounding the hijacking.
In the film, no one is asking why it is that Somali citizens have guns and weapons when none of these are manufactured in their own country or what Western powers stand to gain through the piracy act. It definitely allows us to sympathize with the Somalis but it is mainly supposed to show the bravery of an American in times of adversity. And so we are not being asked to question, we are being asked to comprehend. That is of course not to say that narrative/mainstream film can’t raise questions.
From the tone of the manifesto, I got the feeling that mainstream cinema is being blamed for the lack of political films. Do mainstream/Hollywood films and political films have to be mutually exclusive in terms of effectively communicating the message? Look at Paradise Now. That was a typical mainstream Hollywood distributed by Time Warner. It had very little to no avant-garde shots or counter-narrative sequences. It didn’t sacrifice the suspense and entertainment factor for its message. And it still effectively communicated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that we were not used to hearing, especially being in the US. Are new images and subtle metaphors the only way to create an active spectator? Why does entertainment have to be sacrificed for the message? Look at Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. That is also a mainstream film. Granted, as Sarah Bailin noted in her response to my post on narrative vs. art film, Spike Lee’s cinematography did have very New Wave elements, but it is still a mainstream film. I think what we need to focus on is how to create better films in general rather than going against the mainstream. Of course I am biased because I want to work in Hollywood and make big budget movies one day. But I think it is possible to do that and have political meaning. What do you think?
We must also remember that the film making process is also political. It is a capitalist industry and making money is a priority. Until the recycled images of Hollywood are no longer guaranteed to bring in revenue, there is no real incentive to change them. It is up to the new CAMS generation to do what Welles, Boyle and even Nolan did with new images and ways of seeing.
A large part of film making now is the marketing of it. Trailers need to go viral to help movies get noticed and non-confrontational or “weird’ images don’t make the YouTube Most popular page. So that is also something for us to think about as the nouveau film generation when negotiating what kind of images we want to put forward. How do we create something new, political, and meaningful without being overly sensationalist for the sake of getting YouTube hits?