Had an interesting experience at MoMA last night. My religion-and-film friend S and I went to see Carlos Reygadas' new film, "Silent Light." (Religion-and-film guru Jeff Stout was there too!) It's a film about Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonites in northern Mexico - I'm sure I'm not the only person who never knew there were Mennonites in Chihuahua, let alone that they speak an old East Prussian version of low German (but updated to include words like spark plug, dentist and milking machine). So as the film opened in a gorgeous and amazingly slow pan across the stars of the night sky (to the songs of crickets and other night sounds) eventually leading into dawn, it seemed like our world - but really was another.But this was also a familiar world because, as S whispered to me a bit farther into the film, Leygadas' use of sound, character development, and static camera/framing were like Bresson, Dreyer and Ozu, respectively - three of the stars of her course "Myth and Religion in Film." "Stellet Licht" (its title in Plautdietsch) evokes these great masters in many ways, including its ambition. So while in one way a profound exploration of a foreign form of human life, it was also very much planet cinéma (at one point, we see little blonde Mennonite kids enthralled by an old TV film of Jacques Brel, on show in an American's sinister black-windowed van), and it took me back to the year I spent in Paris going to the movies. This film is at once an extravagantly cinematic expression of a particular director's eye, and a consumately cosmopolitan product - Mexico/Netherlands/France/Germany - like much of what I saw there, and particularly like what I saw at the Cinémas d'Art et Essai, where two categories of films we rarely see around here are front and center: films d'auteur, and films about worlds you don't know. These categories often overlap, as they did last night - it need not be at the expense of ordinary people and their lives that the artist exemplifies the value of unique human experiences.
I'm not going to comment on the movie - it's not perfect, but many of its component parts are nearly so - but let me say that it reminded me of the civic contribution a culture of this kind of cinema achieves. In Paris a few years ago I happened on a booklet published by the Association Française des Cinémas d’Art et Essai in which a Patrick Brouiller explains the - dare I say world-historical - importance of this art form and the institutions which make it possible:
Un engagement fort des collectivités territoriales est indispensable pour défendre et développer un cinéma pluraliste de proximité, en maintenant un tissu vivant de salles indépendentes qui n’acceptent pas le seule loi du marché. Cette action doit perdurer car elle dépasse le seul aspect économique et festif, elle concourt à la formation citoyenne et démocratique des spectateurs. En leur proposant des oeuvres souvent venues d’ailleurs, le cinema reste “la fenêtre ouverte sur le monde” comme l’a dit le critique André Bazin.
What would that kind of "citizen education" do for this country! (You could take a step toward it by simply making Arte available here.)
