New Writing
Tucked away amidst the proud proclamations on the University website that chairs in Indian Studies and Contemporary China have been appointed, and beneath a call for donors to a Chair in - of all things Korean Studies, comes the news that Oxford University is appealing for the endowment of a Chair in Film Studies. I happened to be in the English Faculty (which teaches Oxford's current film option), so I asked the librarian about their current film holdings. "If you ask me," said the librarian, who hadn't been asked, "it's just an excuse for grown men to watch Westerns." Such an astounding display of ignorance might seem surprising from a university that purports to be a world leader, but I can now reveal that such backward looking attitudes were present from pretty much the beginning. When Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian library, reached an agreement in 1610 with the Stationers' Company to receive a copy of every book, he dismissed plays (including the works of Shakespeare) as "baggage-books". I couldn't help recalling the contrast to my first visit to the theatre at the age of sixteen: upon entering the bookshop, I was confronted with a ghastly old hag (and her hen-pecked husband) at the front of a very long queue, who dumped down an enormous pile of books. "Theatre people," she declared with histrionic abandon to her involuntary audience, "are special people, and deserve to be pampered", her husband then meekly proffering his credit card. Far be it from me to annoy Oxford's community of Thesps (I'll leave that to the drama page) but I am writing an article that is going to examine the various merits of film against theatre. I have what is probably an insane belief that film is not an art form of the twentieth century, but the art form of the twentieth century, and will certainly be the art form of the next one too.
The root of this academic disdain lies in the overwhelming reliance on the written word. Even plays, for Christ's sake, are studied as 'literature'! Today's educational curricula rely on the written word to a degree that seems exaggerated at secondary level and nearly obsessive at universities. A Martian landing on Earth, who judged contemporary culture on the basis of academic credence might consider that movies were chiefly for the lower classes, the nearly-illiterate, the vulgar, the naïve, and even the deviant. In other words: Townies. All, of course, belied by the fact that film, not theatre and certainly not 'literature', is at the dynamic, living and (take a deep-breath here, a dirty word is coming) commercial heart of twenty-first century culture. If you examine any period of cultural acceleration (take for example the English Renaissance) the conditions there are not ones of stultifying academic approval and Government subsidy, but of a collision of 'high' and 'low' culture through a technically advancing art form in a world of commercial realities. Similarly, film feeds off 'higher' culture (see, for example, the literary references to Dante, Chaucer and Milton in Se7en) and mixes it with popular genres (pulp fiction, the detective novel and film noir). The theatre, by contrast, remains a commercially insulated bastion, where the bourgeoisie go to see revivals of the 'classics', and which rarely produces any interesting work. It is perhaps no coincidence that the two greatest playwrights of the twentieth century were deeply influenced by 'popular' culture: Brecht incorporating popular song into his plays, and Beckett steeped in the vaudeville tradition of music halls and the silent films of Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Beckett only succeeded by reducing the theatre down to a thirty second play called Breath: a title that prefigured the exhaustion of the theatre's vocabulary. Unless more theatre starts to take advantage of the one thing it has over film - the physical presence of actors and audience in the same space - it will go the way of Bulgarian folk dancing and Bolivian basket weaving: not quite dead; some sympathetic souls will take pity on it, stuff it with subsidy and exhibit it like a museum piece as 'our cultural legacy'.
Films such as Memento, Vanilla Sky, Mulholland Drive and Being John Malkovich are, actually, far more intelligent, entertaining and diverse in method then Tom Stoppard peddling his latest serial on the middle-classes trying to find their feelings, however wittily and sycophantically he plays to his audience. Shakespeare's theatre lay culturally and geographically somewhere between the court masque and bear-baiting and in the same way film will one day be acknowledged as having cultural superiority over the tat produced by Stoppard, Pinter and Ravenhill. But by that time, academia will have found a new bug-bear to exclude from its noble quadrangles and pompous stonemasonry.
21st Feb 2002