Cinenews Archive

Yuri Shevchuk in conversation with Paul Schrader

October 24, 2005

 

Paul SchraderY.S. What, in your opinion, is the principal task of a film critic and film criticism?

P.S. There are several tasks. Film reviewers are in the business of consumer guidance. That’s one level. The second level is film criticism – it seeks to evaluate the film, the context of the times, earlier films, and the arts in general. The third level is film theory and studies, which seek to study and evaluate films in their broadest terms.

Y.S. During your career as a film critic, did you have a set of criteria, or guidelines, that you followed, and if so, how have they changed over time?

P.S. To a large degree the guidelines are set by the publication you are writing for. Certain publications require certain things. Certain publications require a synopsis of a movie, other publications are past that. In terms of general guidelines the idea is to try to find what is either valuable or interesting about the film, discuss that, and stay away, whenever possible, from purely personal reactions.

Y.S. Do you think a critic’s integrity and honesty are now challenged by the demands of selling films and by the general commercialization of the movies?

P.S. Starting with Entertainment Tonight (a TV program about the show business industry) the film industry has fully co-opted the film reviewing business, so that most film reviewing at this juncture is an adjunct of the industry itself. There are still a number of independent and sound critics. In the same way that politics reached in and started co-opting television news, the entertainment industry reached in and started co-opting what we call reviews.

Y.S. Can you share your most memorable experience as a film critic?

P.S. In the same two-week period I saw The Wild Bunch (1969, Dir: Sam Peckinpah) and Easy Rider (1969, Dir: Dennis Hopper) and it struck me that one film was very much in the moment but would not have any weight later on, while the other would always be an important film. And I wrote about those two films one week after the other, and in many ways it ended my weekly reviewing career, because the Easy Rider review got me fired. So I moved on to doing more long-range critical pieces rather than weekly pieces.  So that was interesting.

            I was also a reviewer when I first saw Pickpocket (France, 1959, Dir: Robert Bresson) which had just opened my eyes to a different way that films could work.

Y.S. What was the most memorable critical review of your own work?

P.S. I am not the one who says I don’t read reviews, and I don’t want to say I don’t learn from them. On the other hand, I don’t take them too seriously either – you can’t.

Y.S. Why not?

P.S. Because there is a fundamental difference between the process of creating and criticizing. I often compare it to the difference between being pregnant and being a medical examiner. All that medical examiners want to do is to get the body in there and cut it up to see why it lived and how it lived. All a pregnant woman wants to do is make sure that the child survives. And you have to be careful not to let the medical examiner into a delivery room because he will kill that baby. So when you are trying to create, you have to be careful not to let the film critic get too close to the process.

Y.S. Do you agree with Susan Sontag’s opinion that the cinema has become a decadent art and is dead, compared to the way they used to be?

P.S. The movies are over. Movies as the art of the twentieth century are now in the process of becoming another art form. We don’t know what it is yet. One of the reasons movies are so confusing right now is that they are totally in flux and artists are totally in flux, methods of distribution, and earning revenues are in flux. The whole concept of narrative is changing. It’s all changing right now. I don’t think it will settle down until we have a new technology, because all the arts are driven by technology. Film was created by technology. Now a new technology is going to recreate it. What it will become, we are not sure yet. The old technology – people getting together, sitting in a dark room and watching images thrown across the room – that’s over now. There is a new technology coming and like all new technologies, it will change the outcome itself.

Y.S. Do you think cinema is also over as art and that it exists only as a form of pure entertainment?

P.S. No, I think there will be audio-visual art, but what we call cinema is not only over as an art; it is also over as commerce. I think it’s over, period.  We are still making movies, we are still going to them but we are at the end of the cycle.

Y.S. Sounds like a rather pessimistic view.

P.S. No, no. It would be pessimistic to pretend that this is not happening. Art forms continually remake themselves. A pessimistic view would be a painter at the end of the nineteenth century saying, “Visual art is dead because of photography.” You’ve got to embrace the changes that technology brings.

Y.S. Do you see films in other countries developing beyond the framework set by Hollywood production? Do you see a future for national cinemas?

P.S. Less and less. I see a merging. When films first began, there was a lot of animation and then they became realistic. One of the things that is happening right now is that animation and films are merging again, and we are creating a new kind of digital cinema. We don’t quite know where it will take us, but we are on our way. Another thing that’s happening is that the concept of narrative is collapsing, the nineteenth-century concept of narrative. Plot is starting to feel rather old all of a sudden. Where all this will bring us, we don’t know. But I know that technology will be the defining factor.

Y.S. Do you think the viewer will turn less and less to films in search of something s/he can identify with in terms of his own culture or national psychology?

P.S. Oh yes, there will always be that. I think that just like clothes become globalized, music becomes globalized, so does film.

Y.S. How important, in your opinion, is language for film? Would Taxi Driver be different if its original language were German or Chinese?

P.S. It would be set in Germany then. And then it would be a different film. It would not be a New York film any more. I’d still imagine it would be an international film. In the Mood for Love (Hong Kong, 2000, Dir: Kar Wai Wong) or Run Lola Run (Germany, 1998, Dir: Tom Tykwer) are as international as they are Chinese and German.

Y.S. For a film to be international, does it have to eschew the specificity of a particular culture?

P.S. No, the big problem is, of course, that English is the lingua franca of film. If you really want to recoup economically, you have to do it in English, which is unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. It is hard to have a universal film economy without having a universal film language, and more and more right now the universal film language is English. That’s the way it is, essentially because of World War One, which knocked the center of the film business out of Europe and into the United States because the entire film industry was decimated in Europe for a critical period after WWI. That’s when the US took over and has been in charge ever since.

Y.S. Do you see any signs that American viewers are becoming more interested in films other than those that are made in Hollywood?

P.S. I think the revival is much deeper than that. I don’t think that reality TV is a mere trend, I mean a fad. I think there are changes in what we want from movies, period. At this point these are bigger changes than national changes.

Y.S. What do you think is wanted from movies?

P.S. Like I say, it’s changing, it’s in flux. What they don’t want any more is what we’ve been giving them for decades, which is essentially nineteenth-century drama. I don’t think they want that any more. Those movies suddenly feel old. They don’t quite want video games either, but they want something like video games, which allow them to participate.

Y.S. Something lighter?

P.S. No, no, more participatory.

Y.S. Even if it’s heavy, highbrow stuff as long as it’s participatory?

P.S. I think the old model is broken. You keep talking about high and low, entertainment and commerce. I am talking about a change that is much, much deeper than that, a change in the definition of what a movie is, period, whether it’s commercial or non-commercial. It’s happening all around us – in the theater, on the Internet, on television, everywhere you turn you see it.

Y.S. I’d like to ask you a question that may be a bit off-base but which could connect this interview to Ukraine-related subjects. What’s your opinion of Ukrainian filmmaking? Directors like Oleksander Dovzhenko, Sergey Paradzhanov, Yuri Illienko, Kira Muratova. Have you heard these names?

P.S. I’ve heard these names, but it’s not something that I can really speak directly to. I am just not there. In terms of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Russia, we are all way behind, I don’t quite know who the young voices are.

Edited by Marta Olynyk

Copyright: Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University, 2005. Reproduction of the text is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of the copyright holders.

Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University© 2015. For more information please contact Yuri Shevchuk