One cannot object by pointing to the vast proportion of rubbish in cinematographic production — it is no worse than anywhere else, although it does have unparalleled economic and industrial consequences. The great cinema directors are hence merely more vulnerable — it is infinitely easier to prevent them from doing their work. The history of the cinema is a long martyrology.
— Preface to the French Edition, Cinema I, Gilles Deleuze, 1983
Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation is sucked up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood. Caligula wished a single neck for all his subjects that he could behead a kingdom with one blow. Cinema is this transforming agent. The body exists for the sake of the eyes; it becomes a dry stalk to support these two soft insatiable jewels. … Each film depends upon all the others and drives you on to others. Cinema was a novelty, a scientific toy, until a sufficient body of works had been amassed, enough to create an intermittent other world, a powerful, infinite mythology to be dipped into at will.
— The Lords and the New Creatures, Jim Morrison, 1971
Among all art forms of human civilization, cinema is the youngest, existing for 100 odd years. In such a short span of time, cinema has pervaded all of life itself that, apart from becoming an industry worth billions of dollars, academics even write books of how cinema as narrative may lead to notions of identity and the self. With the ever-increasing use of technology in cinematographic production, especially with digital technology, cinema has been widely produced, distributed, and viewed as never before insofar as cinema can be called the most democratic (and probably the anarchic) of all art forms.
Gilles Deleuze, one of the most influential of all twentieth-century thinkers, in his Cinema I and Cinema II applies Bergsonian theories of movement and time to create a taxonomic classification of cinema into the movement-image — movement as physical reality in the external world and image as psychic reality in the consciousness — and the time-image, the signs of the order of time, of its internal relations, and signs of time as series. Although we need not delve deep into these two types of cinema-images, it is sufficient to toe Deleuze’s line that the great cinema directors cannot just be merely compared with painters, architects, and musicians but with thinkers and also agree with him regarding the cinema directors he considers great: D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein from the silent era, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Bresson, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, and Ingmar Bergman. Deleuze probably did not see the works of the Indian geniuses — Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray — to have included them in his list, and many others including his contemporaries the world over.
What education can one receive watching the cinema of these great directors? Or rather the question should be “what education one cannot receive from watching these great directors?” Cinema cannot be restricted to these great directors because cinema from all over the world is easily accessible now to be offered as education — culture, history, people, film as an anthropological document, a journey of “becoming,” the meaning of being human and awareness of the human condition. What answers can one attempt at the questions Bergman posed, shining his cinematic artistry, peering into the human soul to probe its depths? How can one not be astounded at the breadth and range of Herzog’s works? What does one call the experiences one undergoes when watching Ray? The magnificent Kurosawa writes in his Something Like an Autobiography that cinema resembles so many other arts: “If cinema has very literary characteristics, it also has theatrical qualities, a philosophical side, attributes of painting and sculpture and musical elements. But cinema is, in the final analysis, cinema.”
Cinema from Latin America, independent cinema from North America and Canada, the cinema of the European arthouse masters, the Iranian masters, Russian cinema working under severe censorship of the Soviet Union, the rich tradition of Japanese cinema especially the Japanese New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary Korean cinema, emerging cinema from the Philippines and Thailand, and the parallel cinema of the 1960s and 1970s India along with the contemporary Malayalam New Wave have created an “infinite mythology to be dipped at will” as Jim Morrison wrote in his The Lords and the New Creatures. What happens when one sees a lot of movies from different directors across the world? The lovable and famous film critic Roger Ebert writes in his Introduction to his The Great Movies: “Directors become like friends. Buñuel is delighted by the shamelessness of human nature. Scorsese is charged with the lurid possibilities of Catholic guilt. Kurosawa celebrates individuals in a country that suspects them. Wilder is astonished by the things some people will do to be happy. Keaton is about the struggle of man’s spirit against the physical facts of the world. Hitchcock creates images that have the quality of human dreams. Sooner or later every lover of the film arrives at Ozu, and understands that the movies are not about moving, but about whether to move.”
Cinema is no longer crass entertainment, nor even art — it has assumed mythic proportions, a tangible and purposeful myth, powerful than other mythologies and essential for our generation and for the coming ones.
