Stuttering Cinema, Stuttering Democracy, Stuttering Globalism

As the year 2021 crept along, it became increasingly schizophrenic. Emerging from pandemic lockdowns was euphoric—until news of the redubbed Delta variant began to dash hope and cause doubt or panic. Still, theaters announced their reopenings and cinephiles flocked, some nervously, some exuberantly. The Pacific Film Archive, profiled in this issue, set September 1 as its indoor reopening date. Cannes took place, as promised, with glazed looks of believe-it-or-not excitement on every face on the red carpet and Spike Lee presiding as jury president at last; it concluded just as France began a new round of restrictions. Venice, the last festival to take place before lockdowns, said it would throw open its doors again. Telluride revealed that its 2021 edition would take place, following last year’s cancellation. And, inevitably, as the summer wore on, folks abandoned Zooms to dip their toes in the literal waters. In some places, drive-ins began to close as movie theaters opened back up, while in others, festivals instituted outdoor screenings to jump-start audiences again. Some rushed to mingle and toss away masks; others rushed to remask and headed out of interiors again.

One friend compared the world’s current status to that moment at the end of a horror movie when, just as the credits are rolling and everyone’s feeling safe at last, a hand shoots up out of the muck and, boom, the monster’s back, a sequel is on the way, and as the screams in the theater announce, nobody is safe any longer. I hope the screamers are wrong; I fear they’re not. As always, I dream that perhaps some film in production now, some book in press, some exhibition in the planning will offer, if not answers, at least hints or maps to a way forward.

In the meantime, the reappearance of boundaries and borders is notable: not only the divide between the masked and unmasked, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, on the global stage, but also a renewed guarding of national borders and an escalated resurgence of nationalism amid lockdowns and the promise/threat of vaccine “passports.” These moves are not incidental to cinema. In April 2021, Konstanty Kuzma and Moritz Pfeifer wrote in the newsletter of the East European Film Bulletin that there was a global openness and collaboration early in the twentieth century that was extinguished by the first flu epidemic, citing a key US law that “curtailed migration from Southern and Eastern Europe, introduced in 1924, [and] was in part motivated by fear of disease transmission. The global cooperation and migration that could be observed prior to 1914 wasn’t reached again until the 1970s.”¹ It’s a chilling history. Kuzma and Pfeifer are clearly aware of its proximate relevance, adding that already “it will require a concerted effort to (re)build international partnerships and a more inclusive form of mobility.”

These are concepts that were echoed in a more specific and geographically precise manner on the official website of the Berlinale’s Forum & Forum Expanded website: “At a time when withdrawing into one’s own country, city, neighbourhood, flat or family is what’s being suggested, there’s a considerable risk that our realms of perception will shrink accordingly.”² The theme was further elaborated by Berlinale Forum director Cristina Nord in her essay on resurgent racism and its cultural artifacts, also published on the Forum & Forum Expanded website: “Anyone seeking their fortune in universalism in the face of all these dilemmas also won’t get very far: as this position takes a utopia as reality, it tends to forget real existing misery. Yet this implies that some must wrestle far more violently than others in gaining entry to the paradise of a discourse without dominance. Their limbs are thus already heavy, and they’ve already lost a few teeth before they get to stroll among those who are all free and equal.”³ Nord rejects the defense of cultural autonomy, opting instead for “the open expanse” that does not require guarding the entry door. I, too, opt for that open expanse (though I worry that the thugs are indeed making it necessary, for quite opposite reasons, to begin guarding doors).

With the cultural sector currently engaged in a bit of long-overdue soul-searching, post-BLM and post-#MeToo, it’s a good moment for an assessment. Also, there’s a generational turnover in film in general, as members of the “Great Generation”—the one that steered film culture post-’68 and founded the first film study departments—move into retirement or off the mortal stage entirely. There is an unprecedented opportunity to reconfigure systems of cinematic meaning, to readjust expectations for streaming, festivals, and exhibition sites, and to make a determination that the groundswell of political will must be directed toward reestablishing a society with meaningful representation, justice, and governance for all.

The rise in fascism and authoritarianism worldwide must be met, immediately, with a refusal to continue, and in fact to reverse, the film/television/streaming industry’s long-standing and increased emphasis on the individual. It is an individualism that has colonized the imagination in the years since Ronald Reagan ascended to the US presidency, one that has withstood any number of events and emergencies (floods, fires, COVID-19) that ought to have diminished its power of blindered singularity. OK, perhaps the individual today is Frances McDormand rather than the John Wayne of yore. But without social entities represented on-screen, without any representations of social action, modes of organizing, cooperation, or collaboration, there’s little hope of a robust challenge to the dark forces trying to take over completely. It’s time for film and television, streaming and episodics, to remind the public of the joy of organizing, the libidinal energy of collective action, the giddiness of feeling that the future of the planet, or at least the neighborhood, is at stake.

I worried that perhaps my pinning the blame on the film world’s addiction to individualism as an essential scripted trope might be excessive. But within hours of my drafting these lines, no less an authority than historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose analyses had kept me and thousands of others sane throughout the 2020-21 election season and pandemic, wrote in response to a Roxanne Gay column about why people seem so angry with one another. Dissenting from Gay’s explanation (powerlessness in the face of larger forces), she tries out a few other options and then seems to shrug: “Maybe instead it’s all the movies celebrating individualism?”⁴

So allow me to hope, for one more FQ issue at least, that somewhere, today, there is a screenwriter hard at work at imagining and picturing a new world that is more than a Marvel comic or a galactic charade, that revels in the power of the many and the sexiness of revolution as it once existed. The Stonewall commemorations of 2021 can point the way to how massive social change, sparked by libidinal grace and kick-ass responses, can be carried out in community and fellowship. The long reign of Ayn Rand surely deserves to be over and done with.⁵ If, for every “Q” there is an “A,” as any festival attendee can attest, perhaps it’s time to open up the alphabet a bit and turn to “S.” Solidarity is the great-grandparent of allyship, waiting in the wings to be rediscovered as a force with the means to carry the interpersonal into the social/political zone and to break the bonds of nationalisms in favor of cross-border action. Here’s hoping.