Nihil ex Cinema

As Fernando is the owner of a video store, he makes it a vague priority to be reasonably informed on most aspects of the film world by keeping up to date on film reviews, box office earnings, and film trailers in order to maximize his profit potential. As a side effect of this research, it exposes Fernando to some of the most vile and twisted things ever to spring forth from the human imagination, and he says this as a person who has been around the internet a time or two.

Fernando is not a person one might call “prudish.” He has his idiosyncratic likes and dislikes but generally does not care about other peoples' likes and dislikes as long as they are not harmful to bystanders. As an examaple, customers regularly ask Fernando to recommend horror films for them and he is frank in informing them that he does not watch a lot of horror, but he will do the best that he can with the information he has available to him. Fernando can see the appeal to others in a movie with Freddy Kreuger, because sometimes people just want to enjoy a film in which an affably evil, fedora-wearing nightmare eviscerates hot young teenagers in their sleep.

Fernando does only a little trade in what one might call “arthouse” films largely for financial reasons; he picks up a few indie films now and then if he finds them personally interesting, but they are by and large comedies or satires and are by no means large renters. The trouble, as Fernando sees it, with “artsy” films (even in the genre of comedy on occasion) is that they face the challenge of degrading into the territory usually reserved for exploitation films. A lot of the so-called “art” films made today are nothing of the sort; their directors claim to be spreading some sort of political or social message, but end up failing at that task amidst the offensive elements included to perhaps make it more appealing to the “general” consumer or because one simply can. The aesthetic distinction between movies which evoke controversial imagery for meritorious reasons and those that have them simply to have them and to draw viewers (like the Saw series or Pink Flamingos) is continually blurred in the eyes of the potential consumer.

Take A Serbian Film, for example. (DISCLAIMER: I have not watched this movie. I never will watch this movie. All the information on this movie I have gathered from reviewing the plot on the internet, and reading the reviews of those brave souls who have watched the movie. If that makes my opinion on the topic in question in some way less valid so be it. I don't feel I should have to stick my tongue into a septic tank to hold the belief that it will taste bad. That being said, the curious can head here for an objective plot synopsis; and here, here, and here for a smattering of reviews. They are not safe for sanity) . This movie has incredibly violent and graphic scenes of rape, pedophilia, necrophilia, and incest, to say nothing of regular ol' murder and torture and coarse language, speckling its narrative. The film's creators claim that the movie is “a diary” of the horrendous things that took place in the Balkans over the past few decades and that it is the way it is in order to raise audience empathy for what happened there.

I wager here's what actually happened with the film's potential audience: people like me who are...we'll say “peckish” in regards to visceral imagery, will never watch the film, regardless of what we do or do not know about what transpired in the Balkans. People unaware of what they're getting into when watching the movie will just see a long string of abuses, and they'll come out of it feeling bereft of a soul and wondering what on earth just happened to them. People who actively enjoy watching particularly sadist bits of cinema could give less of a damn about the underlying message in what they're watching anyhow.

Some might point at me and say, “But Fernando, you're just letting your biases cloud your judgment! And you yourself said that people can be emotionally moved by it, so there's a point behind it after all!” To this I respond: someone can be filled by raw emotion by being provoked in exactly the same way as in this and other films. Sure, viewers are emotionally moved, but they're not moved in any way to give them cause for action. It's about as close to nihilism in art as one can conceivably get; it is an unveiling and interpretation (though not necessarily celebration) of hopelessness inherent in humanity without prompting a solution, and it is a silly thing to perpetuate when there is, in fact, a great great deal to celebrate in even the direst of existential straits.

Perhaps that viewpoint makes me an uncultured, close-minded philistine and precisely the sort of person who most should be viewing these artistic efforts in an attempt to broaden my artistic horizons. And I am not saying that A Serbian Film or Salo or Gummo or its boundary-pushing ilk wholly lack artistic merit. Art is self-expression, and the filmmakers of these movies certainly have a right to that; to paraphrase one of the reviews of A Serbian Film, it's a gigantic angry exclamation mark of what Serbia's people have had to suffer. But the other half is having an audience interpret that work, and if doing the cinematic equivalent of pooping on a paper plate and sticking it in a microwave is what is needed to be considered “trendsetting” and “deep” and a “true artist,” I would rather stick with the equivalent of kitsch watercolors.