At work, we argued over the ideas of the critic André Bazin and a writer in California called Pauline Kael who was cutting swaths through the gospel according to Hollywood. In the evenings, Jean-Luc Godard showed us that we could pack almost anything into a movie, while Robert Bresson demonstrated that the deepest film experience could be built on nothing more than the absence of God. During the weekends, we took our borrowed equipment out into the streets and tried to copy the camera moves of Sam Fuller and Akira Kurosawa. We were like adolescent poets growing up in the shadows of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Change was in the air. As I walked south on Broadway to Soho young painters were reinventing abstract art, while uptown in the Bronx equally creative artists were being liberated by graffiti and the sounds of early rap. Great gaps had been ripped in the fabric of tradition. It was a time of innovation and revolution, and we could hardly wait to grow up and become part of it.
That year Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution came to Manhattan, quickly followed by Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and Masculin/Féminin. In Greenwich Village I attended a festival of Antonioni films, and at the Museum of Modern Art watched movies from Quebec by young filmmakers living the dream so many of us had—of making films that would change society. By the time letters began to arrive from my parents demanding to know what I was going to do with my life, I already knew. I was going to make films. The 1960s might not have seen the dawn of film, but to be young and in love with cinema was very heaven.
Were we any different than other generations of film buffs—the star-struck audiences of the 1930s, the young filmmakers in the 1990s who adored all things Tarantino, or my most recent film students, who look obsessively to video games for inspiration? I think those of us who passed so much of the 1960s in the darkness of New York’s Thalia Cinema, the Paris Pullman in London, the Cinemathèque in Paris, and the seconda visione houses in Rome were just lucky. We had been brought up to believe that cinema was important. In Japan, Italy, and across the whole Soviet empire, movies had spoken up for what was most liberal during the tumultuous years after the war. We just assumed that we had inherited this mantle, even if we had done little to deserve it. We had been moved by the ideas as well as the images and took it for granted that one day our own lives would become as cosmopolitan and passionate.
Truthfully, it was more a lucky coincidence that new lightweight cameras and sync-sound had made filmmaking more democratic at the same time as the supremacy of Hollywood was dented by television. Fearful of the new medium, the studios and distributors looked around for any gimmick to hold their audiences—even creativity. Not only could we put our small Aeton camera on a shopping cart to film life in a downtown bar, but we could go to our local cinema and pay to see films that had taken brilliant advantage of the same freedoms.
Each time the theatre lights dimmed, we felt we might see something inspired and original. It took decades for us to lose these expectations, to settle instead for the well-made and somewhat surprising. Later, the studios would regroup and suffocate the film world with their vast budgets and mindless remakes, but, for a tiny window of time, films that were new and poetic were allowed on Main Street and we could believe that art and cinema were one and the same. To grow up in such an era can mark a young dreamer forever.
Of course, we were not alone in our conviction that a new era had dawned. The film company where I worked was on Union Square, and at the end of the day we would cross the square to Max’s Kansas City, a new bar that had become an artists’ hangout. Here we would listen to Robert Rauschenberg harangue Carl Andre on the future of painting, pay attention to Robert Smithson as he explained his latest earth project, or gawk at Andy Warhol and his painted posse in the back room. Even in this brilliant company we felt no need to apologize for our love of movies. Film had been dubbed by many “the art of the twentieth century,” and future stars of the New York art scene were happy to agree. For a short time film led the creative charge.
Since then, decades have passed. Like many of my old friends, I still make movies, still write about movies, still love movies. And yet, is it my generation’s fault that even the idea of commercial film as a dynamic art form seems absurdly self-indulgent? After all, it was my friends, or their friends, who invented the blockbuster, the importance of opening-weekend grosses, and the tent-pole franchise where a movie sells everything but imagination. Are we to blame for the death of movie magic, or are my students right that, like pop songs and poetry, the most wonderful films are always those you adored when you were young?
Festival season best captures this youthful fervour. Ironically, it is the main reason these events attracts a demographic long fled from regular movie houses. For two weeks this autumn we will all be young again, swapping movie gossip in theatre lineups, pretending we are still able to go without sleep as we are dragged to endless film parties, and falling in love with the stranger seated beside us in the theatre who speaks so eloquently of the films of Wong Kar-Wai. With rekindled passion we will count our passes and hold our breath as the lights dim, and, for a moment, we can dream that perhaps, even at this late date, our lives might be changed by a movie.
