I would like to propose here that art house audiences are drawn to their conception of the cinema in much the same way that those who flock to see Doctor Nawariyan are drawn to theirs: on both counts, it’s an act of self-congratulation. I am aware that I am generalising here but such generalisations are meant (in this series of essays) to be more suggestive than definitive. So here’s what my suggestion leads me to: the theory, validated by personal experiences on my part, that the cinema is far, far away from redeeming reality. Those who believe that movies can thrive on theories about reality and the redemption thereof through the art house sector are, frankly, deluding themselves. They have their coterie and they have a loyal following. But they are mostly purveyors of a minority art. They survive on patronage. Not popularity.
Pre-bourgeois civilisations did not operate on a rift between art and non-art like this because in those societies, art was a product of human labour, not intellectualisation. Modernism was a consequence of industrial capitalism, in that art more or less became an experience withdrawn from the majority. But even in the modernist era – as one can infer in the writings of such critics as Walter Benjamin – we didn’t witness a separation of academia from general audiences. There were writers and critics and intellectuals who communicated what they felt to be art (with or without a capital A) to the consumers of that art. Modernism thrived on a linear conception of culture. What postmodernism achieved was the separation of academics and critics from their readers. Culture was no longer seen as linear. Consequently, the search for order, for any form of meaning, no longer seemed necessary for these new critics.
Of all art forms it was probably the novel that had to bear an undue burden with respect to this paradigm shift, since the novel, more than even the movies or the theatre, was a text, an inheritance from the same 19th century bourgeois civilisation that postmodernism sought to combat, and in this age of postmodernist polemics, texts no longer depended on a definitive author: their meanings were dependent on what the reader wanted them to be. Extrapolating from this, Barthes’s assertion of the death of the author gave way to a culture of criticism whereby singularity, and coherence, no longer was deemed necessary. That is why most of those postmodernist polemics – be it the notion of “intertextuality” or the “distancing” of the author from his own text – were absorbed in other art forms quickly: because they were so pervasive as to intrude on everyone’s individual perceptions of those art forms. Especially the cinema, where talked of the death of the auteur, or the death of the director as a film’s author.
The result was an implosion of intellectualisations and a diminishment of sincerity. The preoccupation of the director in this new era was to do away with a need for any narrative (the postmodernist’s lack of regard for what are commonly referred to as “grand narratives”, which are buttressed by cultural or other hegemonies in a given society, is his most distinctive quality), and although it took a long, long time after Dharmasena Pathiraja brought about a New Wave and succeeded Lester James Peries, it nevertheless made inroads in Sri Lanka. But for this postmodern revolution to materialise and be disseminated more effectively throughout the country, it had to be conveyed to the masses, a largely Sinhala and Tamil speaking population. That’s when the X-Group came in: they took it upon themselves to fulfil the role they were evidently ordained for, at a time when Barthes and Derrida didn’t make sense to the lay Sri Lankan reader. That they succeeded in part speaks volumes about whether we actually wanted to make sense of the writers and academics they translated for us.
In pre-bourgeois societies art was for the most self-referential. It depended on the standards that it had created for itself. Even when those standards – one can think of perspective in drawing, or tonality in music – were supposedly demolished, they depended for the most on the assumption that those demolishing them, like Picasso in drawing and Jean-Luc Godard in the cinema, were aware of these foundational standards. Postmodernism did away with any need to know the latter, because of which it became a withdrawn experience that was easy to purvey: all you needed to do was fill your objet d’art with vast obfuscations which, if you didn’t understand them, were supposed to test your intelligence and your creativity. From the richness of the paintings that the Modernists and the Pre-Raphaelites came up with, we have now entered an age in which a solitary orange dot on the centre of a white canvas can compel aahs and oohs and positive comments from “discerning” spectators.
Simply put, therefore, art was no longer considered as self-referential. It’s easy for it not to be, harder for it to be. And why exactly? Because there was no need for objectivity. “There are no facts, only interpretation,” Nietzsche quipped: it would be in this postmodern era that the truth of its validity would be tested. With one important caveat: it wasn’t just facts that postmodernism sought to do away with, but also the cultural values, or any unifying factor, that would validate such facts. It’s hence probably no cause for wonderment that along with Nietzsche, postmodernist philosophers and academics were heavily influenced by Althusser (his notion of the ideological state apparatus) and Gramsci (his notion of hegemony): these were the backdrop figures for a whole new critical culture, and they eventually found their way to art forms that had not experienced this kind of critical polemics. Even the cinema.
It seems to me that what we initially went through in the postmodern culture was a period of critical democratisation, in which values were free, for all, to be demolished. But as with Marxism, it bred its own gurus and students, the latter rather adulatory with respect to the former. It had substituted one kind of ideological dominance for another. To be sure, Derrida and Barthes, particularly the latter with his notion of “readerly” and “writerly” texts (which assumed that no one could be an “authority”), would not have known that their death would be followed by the usual bantering and bickering which would breed a culture of slavish disciples, but this was anyway the case with all other intellectual figures before them: from religious leaders to Karl Marx. The sad footnote this compels is that when the generation of Barthes and Derrida died, they left virtually nothing for those disciples to improve on. What was the outcome? A sensibility in which everything was rationalised by theories.
Perhaps that’s why this rift between art house movies and mainstream movies worries me so much. Not because I oppose that art house, but because no culture can survive on it alone if there isn’t an alternative, majoritarian, mainstream sector operating elsewhere. Films like Konsthapal Punyasoma make sense not because they are artistically fulfilling (whatever that means), but because we NEED them. They don’t rely, for one thing, on brochures that elaborate on their own workings. (I had to wade through one such brochure to make sense of some of the sequences in Handagama’s Age Asa Aga, a brochure which the director had distributed on the night of the premiere.) Those workings need to be left to be discerned by the audiences. When they aren’t, when there is no proper centre to hold them, and when even the majoritarian movies theatres screen are also devoted to their own workings (like the Ranjan Ramanayake, Bandu Samarasinghe, and Tennyson Cooray vehicles), audiences eventually get tired and decide to shirk those theatres. The postmodern culture is wonderful, but it has left us, or rather our cinema, in a crevice.
Written for: Daily Mirror, January 19 2017
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