During those rare moments of reflection when I’m not doing what film critics are supposed to be doing — watching and evaluating movies that propose various escapes from modern life — I wonder what a different kind of cinema might be, a cinema that would lead us back into the modern world and teach us something about it. To imagine such a cinema requires traveling some distance from where we are, spiritually as well as geographically; it means rediscovering versions of the past and future along with the present, and rediscovering the state of the planet not in terms of Americans but in terms of others who see both it and us with a kind of clarity we don’t have. For the past decade I’ve been discovering clues about this new kind of cinema in two very different places, chiefly through the films of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf in Iran and Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang in Taiwan: all four have been redefining modernity in the world as well as in cinema. With the help of other filmmakers from the same countries (and I’m not counting the Taiwanese and Iranian directors who are interested in making Hollywood movies, the most successful of whom is Ang Lee), each pair has been charting a new field of inquiry and exploration between them.
JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Exiles in Modernity
Posted 1 year ago
