Sarah Bailin: In Response To “A Dialogue Between Two Aspiring Filmmakers”

Your blog brings up some valuable points that I believe have been lacking in our discussions thus far. Why are mainstream films considered inferior? More importantly, why do we as academics feel the need to debate the issue of mainstream versus art cinema anyway?

The fact of the matter is, the line between “mainstream” and “art” is becoming increasingly blurred. While on the one hand, Spike Lee’s “mainstream” (as in released by a big Hollywood studio) film, Do the Right Thing, does mostly follow traditional continuity conventions (eyeline matching, shot-reverse-shot structures, graphic continuity, etc.) à la a good mainstream movie should, it would be impossible to deny its obvious Godardian tangents and despite its ostensible cause-and-effect narrative, its characters are notoriously unpredictable and the ending is ambiguous enough to make any New Wave director of the past proud. This is no coincidence. Spike Lee is one of the poster-boys of the New Hollywood.

As the old silver-screeners started to die out, a new population of film directors moved in, and unlike many of their predecessors, they had studied film history. Not only did these “film brats” have the technical and historical know-how to make use of the cinematic trends both on and off the mainstream, but as many of them started off as independent filmmakers (Spike Lee being one of them), they also had a chance to develop their own styles without excessive oversight that they were then able to fold into the mainstream market. I say mainstream market because like everything else in the past 60-odd years, the cinema industry has not been immune to globalization. Even Hollywood as a physical location is no longer a sure definition of mainstream. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, In the Mood for Love, Todo Sobre Mi Madre, Slumdog Millionaire—all films produced outside the United States by non-Americans (with the exception of Ang Lee who is a naturalized American) and yet ones that have been received with critical and commercial success in the states precisely because of their combination of mainstream narrative appeal and acquisition of formally art film techniques. If the postmodern age has killed auteur theory, it has only produced more auteurs (perhaps the antithesis of the original vertically integrated Hollywood system of production) both at home and abroad.

It is tempting—particularly among academics—to equate mainstream with bad and art film with good, but in this postmodern age of cinema and the world, labels are redundant. The viewer decides the value of what they see. They define art. And my definition is this: every film, yes, EVERY film—mainstream, “experimental”, mindless drivel you turn on as background noise when you should be studying, all of it—is art because it exists for ME. For all of us. For all its other purposes—to change society, to influence politics, etc.—first and foremost, it exists to be seen. What distinguishes good art from bad art to me is not the genre or other arbitrary categorization assigned to it, but those pieces that make me think because someone has thought about them. Is Godard a great filmmaker because he is a pioneer of art cinema? No. He is a great filmmaker because he put in the effort to make films that in turn make me re-consider the world and the role I play in shaping it. Just like Do the Right Thing made me or Paradise Now or Citizen Kane or any of the other “mainstream” films that shocked me out of my complacency.

So before we—the next generation of filmmakers and film theorists, the film brats of the future—resign ourselves to the binary categories of mainstream or art cinema, or, worse yet, find ourselves “condemned” to working within the mainstream, let me make one final point. How many of us have stories similar to the ones expressed by Ximena and Ama? How many of us took our first film class because we loved the films we had grown up watching? And how many of those films were anything but our country’s mainstream? So if today’s mainstream is yesterday’s art, what does our “conforming” matter if, in the end, we can inspire the next generation of film brats to push the bar even further? We don’t need to cause a revolution; we just have to acknowledge our part in the one that is already occurring.

In answer to your question, Ama, this is how we change the perception of Hollywood films: we change OUR definition of them.

REFERENCES:

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York:    McGraw-Hill, 2013.