I'd like to sit with a girl and discuss Last Year at Marienbad... over coffee and cigarettes... or indeed any other vice of their preference. That's not my peculiar idea of a date, it might be an entirely innocent and platonic encounter - although needless to say I'd not preclude the possibility that fervent discussion might lead to a wild compulsion to tear one another's clothes off. Still, when I confess that I've never actually watched Alain Resnais' 1961 film some clarification is probably in order.
It's something like this: about a year or so back there was an article in The Guardian by Matthew Sweet, generally interesting writer who penned one of the best recent books about British cinema of recent years, Shepperton Babylon. Sweet was lamenting the decline of tv scheduling for more unusual, or foreign language films since the 1970's, and how our modern multi-channel culture age has ironically diminished the opprtunities for many people to discover the wealth of alternatives to the homogenised banality of the mainstream. There was a time dear reader, believe it or not, when at nine or ten o' clock on a Sunday evening BBC2 thought nothing of showing work by the likes of Resnais, Bunuel, Bergman etc. It was a part of our televisual culture, and whilst not everyone's cup of tea in an age of only three channels they provided talking points the following day. Ergo, it wasn't inconceivable that the girl in your local chip shop might have been watching an arthouse classic on telly the night before.
Flash forward to the present and the notion seems absurd. On the rare occasions such films are screened at all then it's in the small hours for the benefit of insomniacs. Television executives would probably argue that if people want to watch these films it's easy enough to procure them on dvd. But the point if you're denying people the opprtunity to make those chance discoveries which make life more diverse and interesting, opening up new worlds to explore.
Because, let's be honest, in general the masses are a fairly indolent and narrow-minded collective, and most won't commit the time and effort to broaden their horizons. Nor for that matter in a liberal democracy can you compell them to do so, so this isn't a campaign for intellectual fascism. No, what I resent is the absence of an actively promoted alternative; that art and culture can be provacative and challenging, rather than some ersatz 'product'.
Marshall McLuhan's axiom that the medium is the message is much bastardised, but I interpret what he meant is the modern media exists principally to promote the materialist lifestyle/culture upon which it subsists.
It's something like this: about a year or so back there was an article in The Guardian by Matthew Sweet, generally interesting writer who penned one of the best recent books about British cinema of recent years, Shepperton Babylon. Sweet was lamenting the decline of tv scheduling for more unusual, or foreign language films since the 1970's, and how our modern multi-channel culture age has ironically diminished the opprtunities for many people to discover the wealth of alternatives to the homogenised banality of the mainstream. There was a time dear reader, believe it or not, when at nine or ten o' clock on a Sunday evening BBC2 thought nothing of showing work by the likes of Resnais, Bunuel, Bergman etc. It was a part of our televisual culture, and whilst not everyone's cup of tea in an age of only three channels they provided talking points the following day. Ergo, it wasn't inconceivable that the girl in your local chip shop might have been watching an arthouse classic on telly the night before.
Flash forward to the present and the notion seems absurd. On the rare occasions such films are screened at all then it's in the small hours for the benefit of insomniacs. Television executives would probably argue that if people want to watch these films it's easy enough to procure them on dvd. But the point if you're denying people the opprtunity to make those chance discoveries which make life more diverse and interesting, opening up new worlds to explore.
Because, let's be honest, in general the masses are a fairly indolent and narrow-minded collective, and most won't commit the time and effort to broaden their horizons. Nor for that matter in a liberal democracy can you compell them to do so, so this isn't a campaign for intellectual fascism. No, what I resent is the absence of an actively promoted alternative; that art and culture can be provacative and challenging, rather than some ersatz 'product'.
Marshall McLuhan's axiom that the medium is the message is much bastardised, but I interpret what he meant is the modern media exists principally to promote the materialist lifestyle/culture upon which it subsists.