News
'Unspeakably Awful' Arthouse Fest Films
By Robert Marich
Aug 21, 2008 -- Child abuse, intolerable social injustice, the emptiness of city landscapes and the desperation of mundane modern existence are all up on the silver screen at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland. It’s the standard downbeat fare of European arty cinema, and a blog on the website of UK newspaper the Guardian questions “Why most arthouse films are so unspeakably awful?”
It’s interesting that this discussion comes up at the Guardian, because it is a champion of progressive and liberal thinking. In general, Europe’s liberal-oriented media is a defender of radical cinema with an agreeable political slant.
“How could these abominations ever have got past their creator's first two seconds of deliberation, let alone won funding from a regional film board, a festival invitation and respectful applause from an audience of supposed cinephiles?” asks blogger David Cox. “Such forlorn masterpieces (of)… Euro-arthouse endeavour were grotesquely, unbelievably bad.
The blogger notes bad arthouse cinema gets financed by “the self-perpetuating incumbent art-movie clique and its fawning bureaucratic and political paymasters.”
This addresses a theme I’ve witnessed while based in Europe (I'm now in NYC area) and is fascinating. Various forms of government funding (public financing) have been hi-jacked by an incestuous group that doles out money based on personal and political connections, despite pretensions to the contrary.
Filmmakers that make “grotesque” films have no worries. Their films willl receive (faint) praise from the clique. Then, they will get funding for their next mediocre project by virtue of being “in the clique.” In one example of this tight merry-go-round of connections, journalists often serve on European fest juries selecting/praising films. These journalists are selling screenplays to the same pool of filmmakers (this is not a common practice in U.S. journalism). This doesn't get a lot of attention because most of the screenplays are unproduced, and thus the transaction is little known.
“The incomprehensible can't be evaluated by any except its authors and their fellow-initiates,” notes blogger Cox. “Art has therefore become whatever they say it is… the idiots have taken over the asylum. So how come everyone else is showering them in cash?”
For full text, click link below:
blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/08/why_most_arthouse_films_are_so_unspeakably_awful.html