Two thousand and seventeen was the year in which we felt the intensifying presence of many hierarchies in what we do, and we reacted to these hierarchies the best way possible. There is something else that still conditions the work of film journalists, critics, researchers, writers all over the world, though, a power relationship we willingly succumbed to but now must address as a matter of survival.
Back at the time when artworks and art practices became accessible to people from the rapidly forming middle class, printed media was gaining speed, so naturally all reflections on the experience related to the arts took a form of text in order to reach a maximum audience. There was something else, too – by using words, thinkers allowed themselves a "critical distance" from the object of their reflection. This distance was considered healthy and productive, it also formed a new type of prose.
At the end of the XIX century, the arrival of camera liberated painters from realism. After a brief flirt with naturalism, theatre and literature followed suit. Critical prose, however, stayed very textual. Being aimed at a wider and wider audience, art criticism was doomed to an internal state of explaining the work and its meaning, thus mediating between the realm of arts and its consumers.
This malaise was picked by cinema. Lumieres' train entering the station turned out to be an omen and narrative model for many decades to come. Frame by frame, sentence by sentence, the silver screen obliged critics to read it, then convey the story and its connotation to the working class flooding big cities, the original cinephiles and users of immersive content. Film was this new syncretic, seemingly democratic reality: part art, part industry, part verité, part beautiful lie. Yet the hierarchy was already there – the screen, the viewers, the reviewers... The mechanism was neatly ticking, and the money came soon after. Big money, money you can't argue with.
Sure, there were the dreamers, the underdogs, the avant-gardists, the boundary-pushers – always in the periphery, always broke. But when the Young Turks aka the French New Wave came on the scene, first as cinephiles and critics, then as filmmakers, they wanted it all. Truffaut stayed loyal to literature and storytelling even with images. Godard stayed loyal to art criticism by moving onto another level – by seizing the means of film production, he picked ready-made objects, from Russian montage to Jean-Pierre Léaud, and called this auteurism. Never the fair-play type, this guy. Isn't his opus magnum, HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA, just old-fashioned dada didacticism? Wasn't Godard just the first writer to move to audiovisual essays without ever admitting so?
Now we are here to seize not only the means of production but also the very production and its meanings. Enough with the ego pollution, enough with the audiovisual dominance for the sake of prestige. We can be all auteurs. Yes, even you, non-native English speakers from different art and cinema traditions whose stories have never been told. Stop trying to persuade, to equalize, to feed a discourse that is not really yours. Get rid of words in exchange for poetry. Join us!
