DVD of the Week: LOL

The American independent cinema is now better than ever; one of its key filmmakers is Joe Swanberg, whose 2006 film “LOL” I discuss in the clip above. Swanberg (who does his own cinematography) has a keen, discerning eye; he has an incisive way of developing and parsing stories as they gradually crystallize from the moments he captures, sometimes with a recessive contemplation, sometimes with an aggressive assertiveness, sometimes with raucous good humor. His original approach to performance, where his sincere human curiosity gravitates toward intelligence, energy, inventiveness, and authentic emotion rather than toward a theatrical declamation, makes him something of a crucial talent scout—and also leads him to ever more probing dramatic investigations of the moral implications of performance. He has a distinctive, original approach to cinematic time, to the cinematic event, which connects his work, in some ways, to such European modernists as Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat, and Philippe Garrel, as well as to the analytical documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. (I had a good, albeit quick, chat with the critic Dan Sallitt about this before Sunday’s screening at Anthology Film Archives of Eustache’s “Numéro Zéro.”) He’s remarkably prolific—and he’s not yet thirty.

In short, he’s one of the heroes of the contemporary cinema; weirdly, he’s also, in certain cinephile circles, vilified. Here’s what I think is happening; I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating, inasmuch as, on reflection, the phenomenon is both widespread and historically significant. The ease of access to the classic cinema—via DVD, streaming video, TCM, and, here in New York, the revival houses—has caused some critics’ enthusiasm for it to harden into a fetishizing of the styles and manners of golden-age Hollywood and, for that matter, golden-age international movies—and to use that enthusiasm as a club against some of the best of the contemporary, when it departs significantly from those well-established pathways.

It’s worth recalling that cinematic historicism is a relatively recent phenomenon. When, in the late forties and early fifties, the future filmmakers of the French New Wave, then critics, were steeping themselves in the tradition at the Cinémathèque Française and at ciné-clubs, it was a rather unusual thing to be doing. The current cinema was still at the forefront of their thinking, and they made use of their historical understanding to celebrate the new films of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Max Ophüls, Otto Preminger, and other works that they were in the forefront of recognizing as art. They themselves took their period to be a new Golden Age, a radical idea that cast them against the old guard who continued to fetishize the silent cinema—which they, too, knew and loved, and yet understood, rightly, to be continuous with the masterworks of their own day. Their profound view of the cinematic past gave them the perspective to understand and to celebrate the best of their own time—and, for that matter, to see the future, the one that, as filmmakers, they themselves would shape.

Here’s François Truffaut, from an interview published in France; the interviewer asks whether cinephilia risks being a sort of disease.

But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies. When you consider the tastes of the most cinephilic cinephiles, you often see that they have a “conformist” taste, they like traditional things. In the Hollywood cinema they will like melodramas where the question of good and evil are very cleanly divided. They like characters who are fairly exemplary or heroic or edifying. Their neurosis probably comes from a disturbed childhood, from a family milieu that was troubled or broken, and they need at the same time exoticism and reassuring things. They all like very, very specific films, in France they all love Lang’s “Moonfleet,” the story of a little boy with brigands.

As budding directors, the Parisian cinephiles of the fifties could channel their neuroses and disturbances into their work. But critics mired in the winter of their discontent take it out on young filmmakers who dare to look ahead with constructive energy. In October, at the New Yorker Festival, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion with Swanberg, Andrew Bujalski, and Greta Gerwig. All of them had much of interest to say about their art; Swanberg in particular discussed his working method in great detail. Suffice it to say that, when his actors improvise, he is actively involved in shaping and guiding the results, keeping up with the shifting substance and tone with a precise attention and a decisive eye and ear—qualities readily apparent in the clip above. To vilify Joe Swanberg is to reject the future of cinema, the better to guard the treasures of its past against those who can make use of them.