RAY CARNEY
723
lumping it in with the drivel of Hollywood), because the filmmaker re–
fuses to abrogate the forms of narrative presentation. He damns Michael
Roemer's
Nothing But a Man
and Shirley Clarke's
The Cool World
with
the faint praise that "their formal limits [reproduce] the limits of their
liberal ideology. They strain the industry's narrative and representational
codes, but they cannot pass beyond them." (I'm sure I don't have to
gloss what "liberal" means to James the neo-Marxist. It's even worse
than "narrative.")
In short, James shows himself to be as sophomoric in his under–
standing of artistic form as he is in his understanding of artistic meaning.
He simply cannot appreciate that narrative conventions and realistic forms
of expression are not intrinsically simplifying aspects of a work. He can–
not understand that, as used by Kramer and Roemer in the examples he
cites (and as May, Morrissey, Loden, and others use them in their work),
character and plot are ways of chastening and criticizing otherwise
unchecked imaginative impulses. Narrative modes of presentation are
forms of complication and engagement, not ways of escaping complex–
ity. The use of temporal, causal, and interpersonal forms of presentation
is a way of testing and resisting energies to which many non-narrative
forms too easily yield. That is why, if there are invidious comparisons to
be made, James has the relative complexity of narrative and non-narrative
forms reversed. Many of the non-narrative, non-realistic works James ex–
tols seem imaginatively self-indulgent, emotionally simplistic, and expres–
sively slack in comparison with the complex realism practiced by Cas–
savetes, Kramer, and others.
It's a shame that James couldn't rise to the occasion that presented
itself. America deserves a chance to rediscover one of its supreme bodies
of artistic work. Even more importantly, American independent
filmmakers deserve the opportunity to recover their own history and
identity. Fortunately, it is a history and identity that is still in the mak–
ing. Although James suggests that independent filmmaking as a powerful
alternative to Hollywood modes of production gradually declined and
faded out sometime in the late seventies, a viewer interested in the art of
film can give thanks that the independent movement is still going as
strong in the nineties as it was in the two decades on which James fo–
cuses . There is a whole new generation of independents rewriting our
cinematic heritage. But you won't see clips from their films on "Siskel
and Ebert," or read about them in the
Times,
and you won't find the
movement of which they are a part done justice to in any of the standard
film textbooks or scholarly studies. One of the greatest American artistic
movements of the postwar period still awaits its historian.
