(Guest Curator's Statement)
At this year’s Jeonju International Film Festival I am very honored to be the guest curator of a program of films. I have named this program “Ruptures: Cinema in Breakdown.” This program will trace the fault lines and the lesions that mark the transition from the coherence of classical cinema to the fragmentation of modern cinema. The notion of classical cinema is undoubtedly a myth. Yet in one form or another this myth underpins most histories of cinema. The main features of classical cinema would seem to be a genre system, an invisible cinematic style, the subordination of other elements to an easily readable narrative, and the supposition of a single unified audience. Throughout the world, the stability of this mode of cinema breaks down during the period from around 1962 to around 1973. The breakdown is visible in various ways: in the production of narratives that bifurcate and that fail to come together; in the exploration of split identity; in the presentation of withdrawn, inexpressive, and goalless characters. Another symptom of this breakdown is the widening of the range of stylistic and technical devices acceptable in commercial cinema. Zooms, lenses of extreme focal lengths, jump cuts, and erratic editing strategies proliferate over the surfaces of films, making ever more insistent demands on the ability of the audience to negotiate an increasingly variegated and difficult visual terrain. Leaving behind the studio as the site for reconstructing the world, cinema opens itself more and more to the individuality and the unpredictability of real locations. At the same time, paradoxically, films become ever more obsessed with the rifts between the camera and the world and between consciousness and the world. The breakdown is evident across all the genres of popular cinema, as directors work with new freedoms, as they confront social change, and as cinema becomes increasingly heterogeneous both as a material object and as a commercial entity. The films in the “Ruptures” program are drawn from mainstream commercial cinema from 1962 to 1973, rather than experimental or art films from that period. Yet these films, in various ways, reflect the breakdown of the distinctions between the art film and the commercial film, between the personal film and the studio film, and between the classical and the post-classical film.