GOING TO THE MOVIES
Jonathan Baumbach
MEDIUM AND MESSAGE
1. State of Siege
We have a large, unsatisfied hunger in our culture for fact,
for the fashionably latest news, and the demand for it extends into
fictional forms. When the food we get doesn't nourish, we tend to
keep eating beyond need and hunger. So the culture keeps us hungry
by feeding us too much of nothing. Pornographic films (the puritan's
revenge on openness), Kung Fu epics, the latest genre exploitation.
What it comes down to is a concern with subject matter as opposed
to the thingness of a work, a concern incidentally with transience and
death. Art engenders hostility, particularly in a mass form like movies,
because it requires the participation of being open to it and because
the news it has to offer has no recognizable urgency.
It is not surprising then that almost all of the discussions of
Constantin Costa-Gavras's new political film,
State of Siege)
deal
with the work's relationship to the thinly-disguised news underlying
its fiction. The main issue of contention seems to be whether the
movie
is
fair or not to Dan A. Mitrione, the real-life counterpart of
the film's protagonist, Phillip Michael Santore (Yves Montand).
Apart from a few breathy references to the director's crosscutting as
if it were equivalent to the invention of the wheel, not much has
been written about the film that acknowledges the medium. The
political high-mindedness of
State of Siege
apparently brings with
it
exemption from aesthetic judgments.
