I'm on the Paris-Cannes. This rail-line which Antoine and I took one year ago with two accreditations for the Revue and a website in our baggage. A website? A logo traced via trackpad, and a blank webpage full of empty slots.
A few things. Everything powered-on. Furthermore, activational and, for the first time, this provided a good reason for being at Cannes. Not for the films. Not for the meetings, which are necessary but inadequate. For launching a revue. That is, to give us the means to do cinema-criticism, which isn't a solely practical activity (journalism), nor a theoretical activity (the history of cinema), but a theoretical practice capable of allowing the urgency of the one to live beside the speculation of the other. Obviously this is a necessity for the films, the meetings, the interviews, the writing. But its preliminary and incontrovertible condition is unique: independence.
It might seem paradoxical to affirm independence at Cannes — a place where the prose and the poetry of cinema go hand in hand, where the class differences between films are on display in the spatial arrangements of the theaters and the selections: the Official Competition and Un Certain Regard side by side; the Directors' Fortnight, further down the Croisette; and the rest (demonstrations, voluntary screenings, more or less confidential private projections) scattered about here and there. Nothing is left to chance. Here, the Nouvelle Vague has won its economic battle — art-house cinema has seceded from the middlebrow movies.
More than any other festival (including Venice where, oftentimes, one is able to see much more important films), Cannes crystallizes the economy of the cinema within an aesthetic bubble. It's on the inside, and not outside, of this aesthetic bubble that a revue might make a play for its own independence.
The rest, as they say, is history. In the sense that it might be reconstructed: the webpage with empty boxes transformed into a sheet of vignettes where the festival was recounted at the same time as the genesis of a revue. One year has passed and all the energy, powered-on, has crossed over to full-on activation. Which, as with any mechanism, means that one portion has transformed into power, work, things (texts, videos, images...) — and another portion has gotten lost in the process. Much of what we'd hoped to do hasn't been realized. This is neither dramatic, nor fundamental, neither here nor there.
It's important, on the other hand, to find once again a real reason for being here — beyond the chronicling of the event, the sun, the films, and the fun. It's not (to take down) Assayas. Nor (to hail) Godard or Apichatpong. No film is important in and of itself. Everyone knows it. Those with an interest in criticism know it. You don't approach a film without having an idea of what comes before it and renders it intelligible. It's the most important lesson from Daney: to have said that there's an image (an idea in the literal sense) which came before all others and allowed understanding the cinema of its epoch (a geopolitical image, the global map of Yalta).
Independence is not an image like the one Yalta made possible. One might have the impression of having said everything, and simply cry out: land! It has to do not with the end, but with the beginning.
This passage must not be taken lightly. Start back out from scratch. Rediscover the image. Watch it attentively.
The evening of our departure, a couple of Greek filmmakers answered our request to take part in a reflection upon the situation in their country. In their response, they spoke of having reflected upon this at length. And having attempted several times, at their own initiative, to film the demonstrations and the conflicts between the police and the demonstrators. Images which they found false, heavy-handed, abstract.
I reproduce the end of their email:
"In December 2008 when the police murdered the 16-year old boy (about 300 meters from where we live), we did not film at all. One day, we tried to film some burnt cars, but suddenly, we felt uncomfortable, we shot only half meter, so we went back home and we filmed what we usually film: eggs, a window, shoes, my bed: common things.
And how could it happen differently?
Otherwise, we would be fake, phony.
These are some first thoughts.
Besides all that, it would be a pleasure for us to do something for INDEPENDENCIA, we appreciate much your work
From a dependent country,
Yours,
KINE / Constantinos & Phaedra (Athens, Greece)"
Useless saying that the proximity between "do something for INDEPENDENCIA" and "From a dependent country" gives pause. At first, it's the striking opposition. And then, it's the opposite. As the real question of independence is always that of the dependence upon things. From its aesthetic form to its narrative, Raya Martin's film never stops saying so.
So our work this year will be to look at dependence. Not to think about films as a simple outcome. But as a future. As animals in an environment, with a history that precedes them and a society around them. To take the measure of this society. To look at it closely.
Of course, this will be easy at the Fortnight or at the Critics' Week, where we'll be able to meet with the filmmakers in surroundings more placid than the other places. But it's still for the sake of understanding dependence, the pool in which we all swim, the conditions that might come along for the production of things — films, critical works... — and this includes Independencia. Independencia especially. Whose freedom, if it has any, consists not of being a Robinson on an island, but of recounting its story in the History of the Cinema.
Eugenio Renzi
english translation by Craig Keller
