Positioning Art Cinema

Film and Cultural Value

Geoff King

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350260061
• eBook ISBN: 9781786725561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Art cinema occupies a space in the film landscape that is accorded a particular kind of value. From films that claim the status of harsh realism to others which embody aspects of the tradition of modernism or the poetic, art cinema encompasses a variety of work from across the globe. But how is art cinema positioned in the film marketplace, or by critics and in academic analysis? Exactly what kinds of cultural value are attributed to films of this type and how can this be explained? This book offers a unique analysis of how such processes work, including the broader cultural basis of the appeal of art cinema to particular audiences. Geoff King argues that there is no single definition of art cinema, but a number of distinct and recurrent tendencies are identified. At one end of the spectrum are films accorded the most 'heavyweight' status, offering the greatest challenges to viewers. Others mix aspects of art cinema with more accessible dimensions such as uses of popular genre frameworks and 'exploitation' elements involving explicit sex and violence. Including case studies of key figures such as Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodóvar and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, this is a crucial contribution to understanding both art cinema itself and the discourses through which its value is established.

1

Situating the Art Cinema Field of Cultural
Production and Consumption

How should we understand the sphere of art cinema more broadly; the way it is positioned and typically ascribed particular forms of cultural value? A number of social, cultural and historical frameworks are outlined in this chapter, to provide an analytical basis drawn upon in the rest of the book. These include issues relating to the location of art cinema within the wider field of cultural production and the likely social constitution of its core audiences. This chapter also examines some of the key discursive frameworks through which differential hierarchies of value are established and maintained in this region of cultural production, situating the particular case of this kind of cinema within a longer history of western conceptions of art. Approaches of this kind appear to be treated with distrust by some who come to topics such as art cinema from more arts-specific backgrounds, perhaps on the basis that they might be seen as threatening to reduce matters of artistic production to elements of their social basis, such as class or other social or institutional contexts. Far from reducing art cinema to something else, the aim of this book is to use such perspectives as part of the process of more closely examining both its specific textual features (or, at least, some of these) and the manner in which they are typically accorded particular forms of cultural value. This might be seen as constituting a threat to certain kinds of investments in art cinema (academic or otherwise), the bases of which are often unacknowledged, but I seek to do this in the interest of a broader understanding rather than reduction of what is constituted by art cinema as an established and institutionalised arena of production and consumption.

A useful starting point is Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production, one that helps to articulate the range of positions found in cases such as art or indie film. The field of cultural production, for Bourdieu, the location within which any particular form is rooted, has two poles, functioning according to what he terms the autonomous and heteronomous principles.¹ The autonomous principle is separate from any pressures from the commercial market, a realm in which the only measure of value is artistic prestige in its own right. As far as film is concerned, this would be confined primarily to marginal areas such as the activities of various forms of avant-garde or experimental production. At the other extreme is work governed by the heteronomous principal, in which creative production is subject to exactly the same constraints as those faced by any other commodities. In this arena, we might customarily locate most of the productions of the Hollywood studios, with some exceptions that might also partly be motivated by prestige concerns. In between the autonomous and the heteronomous are many potential points at which such imperatives might be mixed to various degrees. It is here that we can locate the territories of art and indie film. Commercial imperatives remain important in most such cases, but on a smaller scale than is usually the case for more mainstream forms of production in Hollywood and elsewhere, and mixed with varying degrees of investment in the importance of artistic prestige and/or socio-cultural imperatives in their own right.

If Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production is a useful one, so too are his arguments about the extent to which the pleasures offered by different cultural forms are best understood in the context of the particular social groups to which they are designed to appeal. Taste preferences, including those central to the prevailing valorisation of particular types of film, are profoundly social in nature, as Bourdieu suggests. They are rooted in upbringing and education and in the resultant possession of differential resources of cultural capital; that is, the acquired ability to take pleasure from the consumption of one form of culture or another. The pleasurable consumption of art film usually requires a requisite stock of cultural capital, variable in extent depending on the nature of any particular variety. The expenditure of such capital, in this much-cited account, produces a pleasurable sense of distinction marking on the part of the consumer/viewer, an implicit sense of superiority to those who might lack such resources and be limited (or, perceived to be limited) to the consumption of more mainstream-conventional fare. If such a marking of distinctions might occur generally and implicitly in the consumption of art films, it can also include a more specific sense of belonging to a particular kind of community; literally so in the case of attendance at arthouse cinemas, as is suggested by Barbara Wilinsky and Elizabeth Jane Evans, the latter on the basis of an empirical study of arthouse audiences in the UK.² Evans uses the term ‘indirect community’ to characterise the degree of communal belonging she identifies in her study of audiences at three independent art-oriented cinemas in the East Midlands, one that involves a broadly shared cultural identity – defined in dimensions such as demographics and attitudes towards both films and the viewing experience – but that lacks any more than fleeting intra-community interaction.

This approach leads us directly to the association of particular forms of consumption with specific social groups, in work that has generally tended to focus on class as a primary determinant. For Bourdieu, cultural capital is closely tied to social class location. A focus on the importance of formal qualities, for example, is associated mainly with certain middle-class fractions (especially intellectuals and artists) while the lower classes are generally viewed as more strongly invested in the substantive material of content.³ If the one entails a position of relative distance from matters such as plot and character, as might be found in some instances of art cinema, the other is based on a strong sense of emotional participation in the material. Emotional engagement is also entailed to varying degrees in many works of art cinema, however, as suggested above; one of numerous factors that complicate any overly binary statement of such distinctions. Many art or indie films alternatively mark their difference from notions of the mainstream through an emphasis on certain conceptions of realism, particularly those which offer a harsher picture of the world than is usually found in, or associated with, the popular end of the spectrum.

Another classic example of this approach is found in the work of Herbert Gans, whose five ‘taste publics’ are similarly linked to positions in a class hierarchy.⁴ Formal experiment is again seen here as a marker of ‘high’ culture, consumed primarily by highly educated members of the upper and upper-middle classes, with an increasing preference for plot and melodramatic modes associated with the lower end of the scale. Much high cultural fiction, for Gans, deals with issues such as individual alienation and conflict between the individual and society, qualities strongly shared by many canonised works of art cinema. Low-culture fiction, in this account, (which would include much of Hollywood and its equivalents elsewhere) is ‘often melodramatic’, offering a clearer division between heroes and villains, ‘with the former always winning out eventually over the latter.’⁵

If qualities associated with melodrama are attributed to lower cultural tastes in the accounts of Bourdieu and Gans, this is not best seen a critique of either such texts or their most likely constituencies, but as a question of the particular kinds of materials broadly likely to be most suited to the life situations of the occupants of lower class positions. This includes a negative dimension, in their lack of the resources of cultural capital required for the enjoyment of the products of the ‘higher’ arts, and a positive dimension, provided by the kinds of satisfactions considered more likely to appeal to those who might use such experiences as a source of relief from constrained circumstances (qualifications such as ‘broadly’ and ‘more likely’ are important if we are to avoid oversimplifying such issues). In the discourses through which notions of art cinema are articulated, however, or certain notions of ‘art’ more generally, a notion of the melodramatic is often employed as a negative other against which certain qualities are valorised, even if this is frequently an oversimplification. The role of melodrama within art cinema is considered at several points in this book, including in Chapter 3 and at greater length in relation to the films of Pedro Almodóvar in Chapter 7. What seeks to be an analytical association of particular types of qualities broadly with particular constituencies can be distinguished here from a more pernicious evaluative framework, in which that which is associated with those of lesser means is assumed to be intrinsically of lesser worth. The latter is a key part of the dynamic through which prevailing notions of ‘higher’ art were historically created, an issue addressed below.

Class location might also be combined with other forms of status grouping in accounts such as these, in the sense in which the term is used in the earlier sociological tradition of Max Weber. While class is defined in relation to the production and acquisition of goods, Weber suggests, ‘status groups are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special “styles of life”’.⁶ If this can be seen as one element in the inheritance on which Bourdieu draws, another is the work of Georg Simmel, particularly his notion of the distinction-marking function of the fashions and tastes of the middle and higher classes.⁷

Another variant on the exploration of the social bases of different preferences is suggested by Sheila J. Nayar, who argues that the ability to take pleasure from the qualities associated with art cinema can be linked to a broader literary episteme: a socio-historical formation that permits or encourages textual qualities such as individual introspection and experimentation, not usually found in more affirmative and communal oral storytelling traditions of the kind strongly drawn upon by commercial cinemas such as Hollywood and Bollywood.⁸ This raises further questions, not really addressed in Nayar’s account, relating to the particular social basis of different preferences that might be found within broadly literate culture. Literacy in general, as defined here, might be a necessary but less than sufficient requirement for the appreciation of art cinema.

If links of various kinds can be made between social position and taste preferences, these need not be understood as crude and one-dimensional processes. Scope exists for nuances, including the possibility for consumers to mix and match to some extent in their personal preferences, as a result of what might be complex combinations of environmental factors or relatively more flexible taste patterns rooted in particular social conjunctures (although we should also beware of any naïve celebration of supposed cultural freedom of the kind promoted by some advocates of so-called ‘market’ capitalism). Recent studies of the middlebrow in film, for example, tend to see it as designed to appeal to middle-class audiences but often within a context of dynamic change and aspiration as much as any fixed relations.⁹

If Bourdieu’s work has a strong focus on the unity of tastes and their relation to class, a substantial application of his approach to more recent British cultural consumption by Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright suggests a more complex and multi-dimensional picture.¹⁰ Rather than just class, Bennett et al find distinct forms of cultural capital relating also to gender, age and ethnicity, in potentially complex interaction with one another and class. They also find differences in the extent to which particular dimensions come into play in different fields of culture (along with some areas of overlap), another major qualification of Bourdieu’s emphasis on unity across fields. If the central axis in Bourdieu’s work includes a higher-class emphasis on supposedly Kantian disinterestedness and an ‘aesthetic’ orientation towards form, Bennett et al suggest that this is only one of numerous possible orientations. Something akin to this seems resonant with the basis on which certain forms of art cinema are critically valorised, as is argued in the chapters that follow. In this case, the emphasis is on a requirement for a more general active engagement on the part of the viewer, which might include an awareness of the dimension of form. But this is a basis of distinction not found to figure greatly in the broader cultural patterns examined by Bennett et al.

The work of Bennett and his collaborators is part of a substantial body of literature that has followed up and sometimes questioned Bourdieu, with various arguments about the extent to which his findings might translate beyond the geographical and historical context of the French society of the 1960s on which his major work, Distinction, was based. For Richard Peterson, in a much-cited account, the highest status position in the US is claimed by what he terms ‘the inclusive yet discriminating omnivore’ rather than a favouring only of the higher reaches of culture.¹¹ Subsequent studies have either questioned or supported this argument in various national settings and in the more recent/contemporary context of an era of proliferating media, including those accessed via the internet and/or which make various kinds of culture at least potentially more accessible to a wider range of people.

Several studies based on empirical consumption data agree with Peterson, suggesting that boundaries have been blurred to some significant extent in a process of cultural democratisation. Peterson and Roger Kern argue for an historical shift in the consumption patterns of those of high status from a position of snobbery (based on the rejection of lower-cultural material) to one of omnivorousness. This is based on a study of musical taste that identifies a broad change towards omnivorous consumption, but more so for those who consume highbrow materials than for other social groups.¹² This is attributed to a range of potential factors including broad changes in social structure (rising incomes, broader education, the availability of arts via media); shifts towards a greater tolerance of those holding different values; changes in art-worlds themselves as a result of the impact of market forces that undermine any notion of a single standard of artistic inclusion; generational shifts in which the preferences of younger people have become established as viable alternatives rather than a stage on the way to traditional elite culture; and a change in status-group politics in which dominant groups have tended to ‘gentrify’ and incorporate rather than reject elements of popular culture. These seem generally to be plausible arguments, although this account does not suggest anything like the wholesale disappearance of cultural boundaries or the capacity for artistic consumption to act as a source of social distinction marking.

The omnivore approach is supported to some extent by respondents to the UK arthouse audience study by Evans. While they express a preference for films from beyond the Hollywood mainstream, some also indicate an ability to take pleasure from studio blockbusters, although broadly similar measurements of ‘discernment’ are also in play here, such as favouring those deemed to be ‘well made’.¹³ This is in keeping with the suggestion by Peterson and Kern that omnivorousness does not entail an indifference to the making of distinctions but can itself be seen as a discriminating process; an application of distinction marking to a wider range of territories.¹⁴ A similar general conclusion is reached by Bennett et al, for whom the principal divide in British cultural consumption is between those who engage in a wide range of activities, at the higher end, and those in the lower classes who are less engaged overall and have a more limited range of interests. Boundary-spanning tastes are found in this study to be ‘particularly prevalent among higher status individuals, implying that an omnivorous disposition itself might be a mark of distinction.’¹⁵

The basic mechanism of distinction identified by Bourdieu still appears to be in play here, even if sometimes in a more nuanced form than can be implied by a one-dimensional understanding of the link between cultural taste and factors such as class or other forms of status, or by the dominant opposition established by Bourdieu between the aesthetic and other modes of engagement (there is also scope for some considerable variatio...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Positioning Art Cinema
• 1 Situating the Art Cinema Field of Cultural Production and Consumption
• 2 Art Film and American Indie Cinema: Points of Distinction and Overlap
• 3 The Hard-Core Art Film and Heavyweight Modality
• 4 Celebrating ‘Slow’ Cinema
• 5 Positioning The Turin Horse and Hidden
• 6 Serious Restrained Drama and Realism
• 7 Art Cinema and Genre: Uses and Departures
• 8 Art Cinema and Exploitation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright