Parallel cinemas
Over the last fifteen years Hollywood has been derided for its formulaic films, deliberate political naivety and inability to challenge audiences. Hollywood has traditionally treated cinema like candy, giving people whatever will make them warm, comfortable and happy. It has also treated cinema like state proscribed medicine, using films to reinforce dominant cultural and political ideas such as consumerism, the commodification of sex and women, and an overemphasis on American affairs. Furthermore, like all corporations, Hollywood is prone to political collaboration, rejecting ideas and pulling films whenever the dominant political classes express distaste with what they have to offer.
Hollywood comes under so much criticism because it is at the 'centre' of the cinematic industry. It has a global distribution network, which works to exclude all other forms of cinema, and to maximise profit. Most importantly, it has developed a dedicated global following, which has allowed it to become the monster it is today. Most of us are implicated in the success of Hollywood.
During the rise of Hollywood there have been attempts to offer the public something different, but corporations hell-bent on reducing cinematic innovation to a profit-maximising formula are not interested in the risky business of offering something different. Film as art or film as a vehicle through which political thinking can be developed and tested is sacrificed. Under Hollywood, film has become a tool for the absolute destruction of resistance.
Fortunately, resistance cannot be squashed forever. Resistance often regains its strength when oppression passes through a certain unbearable threshold. In France, cinematic resistance took a large leap forward in the 1970s when film director Marin Karmitz abandoned his career in directing to develop a cinematic industry that would strengthen the periphery and offer a compliment to the mainstream. Karmitz believes that producing films that correspond to viewers' expectations is diametrically opposed to true cinematic creativity (Rapin, 1998). He regards the mainstream to be producing, in the main, what he calls films 'de distraction'. In French the word distraction has two meanings. The first is amusement or entertainment. The second is absent-mindedness. Perhaps these two meanings describe the function and effect of mainstream cinema. The function is to entertain and dazzle us with lights. The effect is to cause our minds to be come absent from the reality in which we live and the problematic social relations which comprise that reality.
The new cinema established by Karmitz, which continues today, is an attempt to breathe new life into cinema as art, and comprises an ongoing search for equilibrium between profit-making, political resistance and innovation. Karmitz's work is important because it shows that it is possible to work within the market to create a human environment in which we can be provoked and challenged, and where we can criticise and debate without being shunned. Most importantly it shows that the evolution of post-modern culture needn't be a race to the bottom, but that local areas can be revitalised, and that working class people, if offered the choice of a challenging and vibrant cultural environment will often choose such an environment.
Beginnings: fear, violence and hatred
Today Marin Karmitz owns a distribution network, has produced over eighty films and is the owner of fifty-eight salons in Paris, which he regards as the cinematic capital of the world. For the most part, the driving force behind these achievements is a response to the hatred and violence Karmitz witnessed as a Romanian born Jew in 1930s Eastern Europe:
I was born into a moment of history when one was scared. When one was a Jew in 1938 and then during the war. These times were not peaceful, and especially in Eastern Europe. And so I was born into fear and when one is bought up in a climate of fear, only one thing remains. One is destroyed by fear, I know many people destroyed by that fear, or on the contrary, one becomes what we would call courageous, only it is not courage, it's survival. One says no to this fear and one tries to do otherwise and to confront this fear.
For Karmitz, cinema always represented an opportunity to use creation to confront and resist fear.
Later on cinema became a way of confronting fear. The cinema, the images, the sounds form part of a system which is more and more at the heart of politics, or which should be at the heart of politics. And it's a way of confronting fear.
I think it's worth explaining a little about creation. Creation inscribes itself in a resistance movement designed in a certain way to say no to the received wisdom of a time, to say no to academicism, to say no to the received wisdom of the past. It's to have the past used to make the present and to create the future. And together the creative movement, the arts form a part of something which can change the world. It's an element of change.
Resistance and rejection: death or survival?
Marin Karmitz moved to France in 1947 at the age of 9. After having being involved in politics he entered film school, and went on to be an assistant to several directors before becoming a director himself. However his spell as a director was short lived, as he found it difficult for his films to be distributed. By the late 1960s Karmitz was convinced that the cinematic industry was generally opposed to his influences (Barbier, 1997).
When I made 'Coup pour Coup' I had problems with the distribution of the film. It created a real disturbance in France. There were cinemas that showed the film, but pressure was put on them and they had to remove the film. It was therefore necessary to find a parallel set of systems for diffusion.
Whilst his childhood experience gave him the driving force to use creation as a form of survival, his later experiences as a director pushed him into production, distribution and the ownership of salons. During the 1970s he founded the MK2 production group (Brennan, 2005) and by 1998 had secured fifteen per cent of the market share of Parisian cinemas (Rapin, 1998). By 2005 he had 58 screens in Paris (RFI, 2005).
Life projects: achieving the impossible
Whilst Karmitz rarely uses the word totalitarianism in interview, his sense of resistance seems to be focussed against totalitarian tendencies. When people in the west use the world totalitarianism they often hark bark to wartime Europe or beyond European borders, to pre-invasion Iraq for example. However there are totalitarian tendencies and movements in all societies. Totalitarianism crushes all resistance and convinces its people that any alternative is impossible. Karmitz views an essential part of his work to be a fight against impossibility. He calls his cinema chain a counter power:
To be a counter power is to say that one could do things otherwise, to pose questions differently. This means you have to resolve them differently. To be a counter power is to fight against fatality, which is to say no that's not possible. To be a counter power is to say yes it is possible, lets try! Its to establish cinemas in areas where they told me it would be impossible, it would be unthinkable.
The hardest thing is the extraordinary force of 'no'. It's very difficult to say 'yes'. To say 'yes' is to find the world. It's to find others and to find life. It's to like what's happening. It's to like others. To say no is easy. It's very easy. It's an extraordinary way of withdrawing into yourself, to live an ego-centred life..
Its about making films which more or less do not correspond to financial norms and the norms of profit-making, but rather to say, if the film is good people are going to go and see it. Its an unrealistic way of posing problems.
Cinema as a dialogic space
Cinema is able to inscribe itself into an area, and it can change that area.
To what extent do we currently possess freedoms to choose and to criticise? Karmitz seems opposed to the commmodification of cinema, where the film industry plays the role of drug dealer and nurse all wrapped up in one, administering the hit to the patient. He sees cinemas as places through which people flow - through which people congregate and share - the director with the audience - the audience with each other - so a cinema becomes a dialogic space rather than a passive experience. Furthermore it is a place where people come to learn the joys of creating, co-constructing, disputing, of being challenged and to challenge. Karmitz has established a chain of cinemas in Paris, which show films designed to challenge, not just to soothe. He chooses to install libraries rather than popcorn emporium, restaurants selling high quality but affordable food rather than burger bars. His mission is not just to cater for the bohemian tastes of the upper classes but to get into working-class areas and transform the choices on offer to the people who live in them.
Karmitz started establishing cinemas in 1974. One of his first cinemas was located in La Bastille, a working class area of Paris. There he converted a restaurant into a cinema to allow for three salons, the exhibition of other forms of art, a library, and a place to hold debates (Barbier, 1997).
I opened my first cinema in La Bastille in 1974, a move which already then went against the general trend since it was a very working-class area. Indeed, it had been abandoned by classic cinema, and the object, after all, was to screen a different kind of film, in the original language, which, I was told, simply did not appeal to mass audiences. At the time, there were only two places in Paris where you could go and watch this type of film, namely the Quartier Latin and the Champs-Elysées…. I set up a venue referred to at the time as a counter-culture venue…The venue was very quickly adopted by audiences. (Rapin, 1998)
Over five years ago Karmitz turned an unused boat hangar based near a canal into six cinemas and two restaurants. According to Karmitz, the cinema attracted 400,000 people in its first year and served to revitalize a no-go area, synonymous with drugs and insecurity into an area where people felt happy to go out. (Rapin, 1998).
The drugs have gone, people have started going out again in the evening, they have new confidence in the area and are proud to live there. A certain approach, mindful of people and creative output, can very well transform life -- for me, that's a very strong symbol.(Rapin, 1998)
Financial self-dependence
The director cannot escape the material reality of filmmaking or the material reality of existence. At one extreme, absolute financial dependency requires filmmakers to submit to a formula, to a set of rules and values. Karmitz has commented on the constraints of making multi-million pound films:
Taking a budget of one hundred million dollars wouldn't objectively interest me. That's to say, I know the constraints behind it. You have to accept a lot of humiliation, which means that one cannot work in conditions like that, and there is a moment when creation is impossible. With one hundred million dollars, you have to ensure that the film takes back 110, 120, 130 million dollars, because if not you wont get the finance. And for that there are formulas and systems.
At the other extreme, the filmmaker makes films to make a point with the resources at his or her disposal, and without condition. Artistic cinema is cinema without constraint. Karmitz makes a big point about financial independence. He is proud of the fact that he does not have to rely on financing from industry or banking when deciding whether to make a film (Rapin, 1998).
Once a film is cheap you are much freer than when a film is expensive. When a film is expensive you depend on people who generally say no, so for example, the TV companies, French and European institutions etc. And so there is a time when you have to make do with what you've got. So I try and I do make cheap films because I make them freely. It's my money, I don't need any more. Beyond certain amounts, I would have to become involved in processes which are constraining and banal.
To be or not to be: totalitarian against totalitarianism
Karmitz has not chosen to exclude mainstream cinema from his parallel industry. He seems to be aware of the totalitarian tendencies of all empires, even anti-totalitarian ones. For this reason he chooses to embrace both the centre, and sees his peripheral cinema as complimenting the centre:
As I was saying before, I hate exclusion. I'm not going to say that we should exclude the cinema of distraction because I like artistic cinema. To the contrary, I think the cinema of distraction is good too. It's well made. For example, I liked Star Wars and I like The Matrix. What is concerning, is that the people who make those films want to exclude artistic cinema.
Karmitz is not afraid to ban films that celebrate violence, although he seems to put severe limits on what he decides to censor.
I think violence is constantly at the heart of all human beings. Its what I'm constantly fighting against. But there are different ways of using violence. And one kind of violence that I don't like, which I hate and against which I fight, is violence as a show. It's what one does when one uses violence to make people participate in a show, to make them the actors and witnesses of the violence. For example, The Passion of Christ, which I refused in my cinemas because I think this type of film is propaganda, they're films of hate, and are contrary to all the values that I've been trying to defend since I understood the world was hard. Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction on other hand, they're different. They show a more complex relation, a particular relation. One can criticise those films. Another way of looking at it is that one should stop oneself from banning films. I don't want to turn myself into a censor if I don't have precise reasons.
Likewise Karmitz believes in a co-existence of multiplexes with local cinemas. This is despite the alienating effects of the economic centralization embodied by multiplexes, and their attempts at using economies of scale to muscle local venues out of the market (Rapin, 1998). Karmitz is dedicated to preserving local venues because he believes local cinema contributes to the quality of life, to happiness and the possibility of living together as a community (Rapin, 1998). Ultimately, it is we as the individual consumers who will decide which monsters live on and which fall to the ground.
Conclusion
Marin Karmtiz's achievements are an example of how a person can strive to achieve equilibrium between economic success and work dedicated towards art, resistance, and the enlightenment of mankind. The innovative design of his cinemas, and their location in working class areas, challenge the pejorative assumptions of what working class people should aspire to.
Karmitz conceptualises his life's work as an attempt to fight against prevailing ideas, established values and fashion. Karmitz does not make himself clear on the nature of the prevailing ideas, values and fashions, and rarely provides an explanation of what is wrong with being dominant, established or fashionable. For example, he occasionally talks about helping Third World cinema, but is 'third world' not a dominant idea? Is going to see third world film not a fashion? Karmitz seems to be fighting against totalitarianism in general. But aren't some forms of totalitarianism good, e.g. the banning of child pornography? And who should decide on where to be totalitarian and where not to be? As head of a cinematic industry Karmitz is as all owners of the media can be, a self-appointed censor.
Furthermore, if cinema is to be challenging, then what in the precise age that we are living, should we be challenging? Shouldn't cinema be showing us new ways of living, and constructing new communities? But what are those new communities? Karmitz gives us no answers here. Isn't a critique of the mainstream, without a plausible alternative, the worst kind of conservatism?
Filmmakers should not compromise their basic reasons for making films to gain more money. However very few film makers are going to make films if they have good reason to believe that their film will not be accepted, distributed and ultimately watched. In France, Karmitz runs a parallel distribution network, but such networks are not so well developed elsewhere. The internet offers opportunities for new communities to develop. Yet the global distribution network vets and filters ad infinitum until the challenge is taken out of film.
The global cinema industry is an expression of mankind's values and desires. Cinema as art can only survive if communities adhere to, congregate around and relate to the values of art. In France, Karmitz has achieved such a community.
Mike Williams (November 2005)
Note
All quotes provided in this article, unless otherwise stated, are translations of quotes taken from an interview given by Karmitz to Radio France Inter in the summer of 2005.
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