Compromising Positions

Your movie reviewer has been reading Colin MacCabe's excellent book on Jean-Luc Godard and pondering its discussion of France after World War II. As MacCabe describes it, this was a time when a loose, intergenerational group of writers, teachers, artists and bohos could decide that political change lay down the road of cultural criticism--in particular, criticism of the popular art of film.

The contemporary American mind recoils in disbelief. In a society that is now thoroughly dominated by political niche-marketing and teledigitized mendacity, we strain to hope, like the old Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, that film might still be made to seize the world and change it. Granted, Godard carries on, despite everything. His later films and videos are both a meditation on the ultimate failure of the Cahiers project and an audacious continuation of the struggle. Yet the idiosyncrasy of his work, which once made it a model for younger artists and critics, today serves only to mark how far we've been pushed from the goal.

I lay these thoughts before you not to call down gloom but to introduce three current films that do try to change the world, or at least incite the kind of discussion that promises change. One is a pretty good example of the liberal exposé à la mode. (Why not a left-wing exposé? We'll get to that.) The second is a version of the now ubiquitous my-personal-journey video, though distinguished by a superior level of intelligence, honesty and political sophistication. The third is an ostentatiously whacked-out, button-pushing fiction, which some viewers will see as a counsel of despair. To me, it represents one possible way forward.

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