What did you watch in 2020?
What did you watch in 2020?
But actually, what I’m asking is — what is the point of art?
It feels untimely and frankly asinine to be sending out a question like this into your inboxes on such a week, with a whole ass coup attempt past us and the crumbling deterioration of a nation on the horizon. At times like this, I wonder what good are movies, or why I should keep writing at all. Cinema can’t feed people, and my writing will never be able to protect anyone from white supremacist violence. I don’t want to submit to the whole cloyingly upbeat notion of, “well, art is necessary in times like this — it’s books, movies, TV, and music that got us through 2020, after all —” because while that’s a very nice and positive sentiment, Frederico García Lorca was murdered by fascists during the Spanish Civil War, and Yukio Mishima was a far-right Japanese nationalist who similarly tried to spark a coup by breaking into a federal building and taking its occupants hostage and then, when it failed, committed ritual suicide. Both were gay. Both remain celebrated writers in their respective countries long after their deaths. We like to think of art as revolutionary and transformative, but art did not save Lorca’s life, nor did it preclude Mishima from becoming a terrorist. Art is a reflection of ourselves as people, and I am starting to think those reflections stay trapped like ghosts in the mirror.
I am being pessimistic, I know. It’s hard not to be, at such a time, especially when your skills and ambitions seem out of sync with their environment. Back in November, I wrote a short musing on the inherent tragedy of being an artist during fascism. I don’t know how others do it, or if they do at all. But it just doesn’t feel compatible to me. All I can foresee at this point is loss, loss, loss — all of the brilliant, necessary minds we might lose in the coming months or years, because of the selfish cabal of whiteness who needs the centuries-old myth of race to feel alive.
What is the point of art? A tweet crossed my timeline the other day, an excerpt from Tarkosvky about the purpose of art. I loved it enough that I both retweeted it and took a screenshot of it on my phone, to return to in future days for inspiration.
But reading it again now, these words only empty me. Tarkovsky also said, “It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.” This is the quote that I keep coming back to today.
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What did I watch in 2020? Quite a lot, in fact. Prior to 2020, I was watching, at most, 3 films a month, which seems average for your typical moviegoer, but as a self-proclaimed cinephile, it was a source of shame. My time was mainly being eaten up by my full-time job, and there is something about the daily stress and anxieties of this dystopian modern life that renders you unable to engage deeply with more difficult art, say a Tarkovsky film. Such art requires attention. Capitalism seems to be adept at robbing said attention and replacing it with box mix Marvel movies.
I was lucky to be able to work from home this past year, and against the backdrop of a worsening economy exacerbated by various levels of government maliciously mishandling a pandemic and the people’s protests against a racist police state, I watched some truly remarkable films. Bacurau stands out to me as a textbook on both community mutual aid and the perils of white supremacy. Despite my reluctance to watch horror (I am sensitive to nightmares and refuse to fuel my batshit brain with any more ideas), I loved His House, a horror movie by British director Remi Weekes about the traumas refugees endure in their home countries, and the traumas they must continue to experience once they’ve relocated to a white-majority country. In the last breaths of 2020, I became a Hong Sang-soo megafan, and before that, a Tsai Ming-Liang aficionado, whose characters struggle with the emptiness of a society one decade removed from martial law. Like these movies themselves, I also oscillated between them with pain and joy, fear and celebration, questions and more questions, and the inherent bitterness of being alive.
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What is the point of film? I have long preached to anyone who will listen that it is not just to entertain. Cinema is art, and art — as previously posited by Tarkovsky — has very serious purpose indeed. Now I am not so sure of its noble intent; now I am more convinced that film, whether it wants to or not, shows our collective nightmare. We weary of superhero films, but don’t talk nearly enough about how they are a strongarm of the capitalistic and nationalist machine, drawing lines around the institutions their investors want to protect. (You think I exaggerate, but Wonder Woman 1984, anyone?) More and more of these films appear on the slate every year. We are reaching terminal velocity. Someone defends superheros because they comprise our “modern mythology” — well, then, mythology informs a society of its values and morals. A story, too, needs to be named for what it is.
If cinema is our reflection of a collective nightmare, then I can think of no better film than Peter Watkins’ harrowing Punishment Park. Made during the Nixon era, it’s still a terribly relevant film for today. A group of activists are arrested, put through a mock trial, and then sentenced to run through an arid desert as the National Guard are sent to hunt them down. It’s fiction, yes, but Watkins conducted it like a social experiment. The actors immersed themselves in their roles so completely that some ended up throwing rocks at the others. I’ve also read that the tribunal that passes the sentencing onto the activists actually believed the things they were saying.
What is the point of film? I have long spoken about the need to decolonize film. And this doesn’t mean, like many white Hollywood executives believe to be, simply replacing white faces with Black actors. If how we tell stories is what reflects us as a people, then we need to change our storytelling for the mirror’s image to match. Friends will know I’ve gone on at length about how the three-act structure or the Hero’s Journey are largely Western inventions. If you look at a lot of East Asian mythos or classical tales, for example, they would be better described as “things happened, and various characters coped in their individual ways with the aftermath.” Or even, “a series of extraordinary events occurred between beginning and end.” Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber and Ozu’s Late Spring could be roughly categorized as the former, and Journey to the West, Water Margin, and the tales of Chang’e or Kaguya-hime could fit the latter. Visual art plays by different rules, too. There’s this misconception rife in Western art that realism is the “height” of art, and yet you might be surprised to know that traditional Chinese artists not only knew about the concept of perspective, but that they eschewed it for a symbolic and narrative purpose. All this meaning that so few mainstream Western audiences have the capacity to sit through or even understand something like Cemetery of Splendour, which has no three-act structure but runs on its own internal clock, starting when it must be started, and ending when the story itself decides it must be concluded. “There is no plot,” they might complain. All this meaning movies like Kubo and the Two Strings and Mulan (2020) are made in cookie-cutter Western story conventions but with a little Orientalist makeup, and white executives call us ungrateful when we dare to point out the pitifulness of their attempts to tell our stories.
Listen, I know you think this may not matter. You might even call me out for equating slow cinema with decolonization, which I assure you I’m not. Or that I’m making a mountain out of molehill because at the end of the day, they’re just movies. Most people watch them for entertainment, despite what I want to think, and most people just want to watch giant robot beat-em-ups, examinations of a deeper life be damned. If we want to talk about what we accept as modern mythos, then, let’s do it. Roland Barthes wrote a whole book about it. Semiology is a whole field about how we assign meaning and value to images or language that inherently have no value, and why that’s important.
I won’t bore you with post-structuralism. Let’s talk about Sky Hopinka, then, probably my favorite filmmaker I’ve watched in 2020, who’s made a number of experimental shorts now available on the Criterion Channel. As someone who worked in teaching and reviving chinuk wawa, one of the Indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest, his cinematic storytelling is inherently rooted in decolonization. Usually it’s through language itself — such as in “wawa,” entirely in chinuk wawa and about Hopinka’s experience with language revival. Or “Jáaji Approx.,” which represents its spoken English on the screen in phonemes and impresses on the viewer that English, like any other language, is just a series of sounds that we’ve chosen to dominate others. This is all while he weaves singing, oral storytelling and powwow into how he tells the story as well. Let’s talk about visuals, which is of course the fundamental function of cinema, image in motion, and how Hopinka rattles your sight with multiple exposure that convey ideas, histories, and memories stacked on top of each other. This present inextricable from our past and all the actions we’ve taken in between. And of course, let’s talk about story structure, which get transformed in “Fainting Spells” into a cyclical origin tale about the Indian Pipe Plant, again compressing time and making his viewers feel all too aware of what came before, what might come to pass.
Even his most straightforward film, “Dislocation Blues,” a short documentary about Standing Rock, is a commentary on the nature of storytelling itself. Two different participants with two very different stories, one whose face is never seen, and the other whose face is only seen on a Skype call in a dark room, calls to mind both the construct of filmmaking and the necessary action of reclaiming our stories, despite what white mainstream sources may want to say about us. Hopinka’s work, in sum total, can be seen as this — at once peeling back the artifice of film and showing us where our deeply held beliefs about story start to crumble, while preserving the stories of his people, the ones that most require record precisely because of others’ efforts to destroy them.
His are the films I remember most over the past year. When I watched them, I felt that I was on the verge of grasping at some truth that I might’ve known to be there all along, but still needed to be revealed to me. I don’t know much about anything, but I know this much to be true, at least: that the experience of watching them, however fleeting, meant something to me. It felt important that I got to see them at all.
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What is the point of art during a time of fascism? I, certainly, cannot tell you. I’m asking the question myself. I’m afraid, really, that the answer is that “there is none.” I’m pessimistic enough to believe that right now. But that isn’t why I wrote all this. Like an act of conscious semiology, I want to assign meaning to art, however shallow, however brief, because stories have always meant something to me. I cannot eat cinema, nor can my writing protect anyone from a fascist coup, but maybe if I plant a seed, an idea will grow. Maybe I won’t live to see it through, but someone else will. And maybe that idea, along with many other ideas, will one day be enough to combat the ideology that was made to destroy us.
But it also might not.
I will leave you with this. Andrei Tarkovsky grew up in the Soviet Union through the Second World War, and much of his artistic career was hampered by Soviet censorship, prompting him to leave his home country for good in 1982 and direct his last two films elsewhere. His films are powerful, I think, because they are filled with characters who suffer quiet devastation in the face of immutable and sometimes cruel circumstances. Art cannot teach anyone anything, he said, nor can it make you a good person. But, at the same time, “art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”