Do classics have an expiry date?

Of late I have been wondering whether all the films we used to call ‘classics’ or ‘masterpieces’ are ‘forever’, as they were supposed to be! Do some have earlier expiry dates than others?

My job as a professor of cinema has thrown up certain questions that I am still trying to answer. While teaching at a glitzy film school in Mumbai’s Film City, I have found a strange and challenging phenomenon - most students of filmmaking cannot really connect to many of the standard classics of world cinema. I had rarely encountered this problem to this extent but now that my livelihood depends on this, I intensely speculate on a daily basis whether a certain film, notwithstanding its status as a ‘classic’ would work with my students. May be this is specific to the place where I teach, which is a predominantly up-market institute that happens to attract students who are Bollywood-obsessed and have enough money to pay the high fees. We are aware to what extent in India, economic status determines – to a large extent - one’s cultural orientation, exposure and degree of rootless-ness. This, however, only partly explains the conundrum.

There are also other easy but valid answers: most students are frivolous, they are more enamored with glamour than with cinema per se, some of them are too immature, etc. And yet these also do not satisfy me though all of them carry a grain of truth. Even while teaching a group of ultra-serious IIT students, I have sometimes not found the desired emotional impact.

Is it my personal failure that I cannot excite students about these films? Is it the failure of these ‘classics’ that they have failed to transcend across time and space unlike earlier? After all, La Dolce Vita as a film hasn’t changed inherently. It has only become more accessible in its DVD avatar but its reception may have changed.

Then, is this the impact of Time? Has the world around us changed so much that ideas and emotions that excited us earlier do not move us any more? Has cinema (film language) changed so much that some of the great films do not ‘talk’ to us any more with the same degree of intimacy and instead look ‘slow’ and pretentious?

I guess there must a be a bit of truth in each one these possibilities. I do not intend to say at all that none of the classics work; in fact, several of them still work even with the uninitiated but even my response to certain films is not so enthusiastic any more and several films just fail to impact. The important aspect of this phenomenon is that this does not seem to happen with the traditional arts such as literature, painting or music. Only in the case of cinema, the classics seem to run the risk of being ephemeral.

I was delighted to find that Umberto Eco raised exactly the same question in one of his extraordinary essays titled ‘The Multiplication of the Media’ in his riveting collection of essays titled ‘Travels in Hyperreality’ (Picador, 1987). It happened to him when he was looking forward to a TV viewing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey after several years but was hugely disappointed by the experience.

… That film which had stunned us only a few years ago with its extraordinary technical and figurative invention, its metaphysical breadth, now seemed to repeat wearily things we had seen a thousand times before…. The final images are kitsch, a lot of pseudo-philosophical vagueness in which anyone can put the allegory he wants… (p 145)

He goes on to provide a sophisticated and elaborate explanation for this disenchantment for which neither Kubrick nor the viewer can be blamed:

… every new invention sets off a chain reaction of inventions, produces a sort of common language. They have no memory because, when the chain of imitations has been produced, no one can remember who started it, and the head of the clan is confused with the latest great grandson. …The spaceships of Star Wars, shamelessly descended from Kubrick’s, are more complex and plausible than their ancestor, and now the ancestor seems to be their imitator….(p146)

In other words, if Citizen Kane makes little impact on the audience of today, it may not be so because Orson Welles seems a less dazzling genius in hindsight but simply because all the technical and narrative innovations of the film have been cannibalised to such an extent that the film is reduced to a matter of historical curiosity. If this is a phenomenon unique to cinema, it is because it is a supremely technological form and therefore technology plays a crucial role in its accelerated growth and reception. Imagine watching Sin City ten years from now! We will not even understand why we were at all impressed with the film once upon a time. If Normal Mclaren’s Horizontal/ Parallel Lines do not work at all now, blame Windows MediaPlayer’s randomized visualiser for that which is actually far more sophisticated than what Mclaren could ever do.

Films whose reputation depend on technical or narrative virtuosity are more likely to get jaded earlier but this does not guarantee that films that depend more on the depth of its content are likely to have a longer shelf life. This is where our social atmosphere influences our tastes. When I see a Alain Resnais film with my students, I really wish that the editing was faster though I do not feel the same when I see the same film alone. I saw My Night at Maud’s a few months back and found it impossibly pretentious and boring. I am not sure whether it is so because these films are actually ‘boring’ or ‘slow’ but simply because now there is far lesser appreciation and tolerance for films that aspire to be discursive rather than narrative. So this is the extent to which the world around us changes us, imperceptibly. The supremacy of Hollywood storytelling has no one right now to challenge its aesthetic claim to universality.

May be a more interesting question would be to ask why certain films from the distant past and B&W still ‘work’ with the uninitiated. There are many such examples: Sunset Boulevard, Twelve Angry Men, Taxidriver, High Noon (all American examples) or Uday Shankar’s Kalpana or Shombhu Mitra/Raj Kapoor’s Jaagte Raho. Consider an ultra-avant garde film like Last Year at Marienbad. It was rated as the greatest film of all time ahead of Citizen Kane by the Sight & Sound board of film critics through the 1960s, 70s and 80s and then suddenly thereafter it disappeared from all lists into utter oblivion. Or consider Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism. I have rarely heard any film student or even scholar talking about these films in recent years. Something seems to have happened by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s – a kind of shift in popular consciousness and our collective aesthetic judgment.

Even as I try to disentangle this mystery about so-called ‘classics’ and need to get ready with the films for my class, I choose the ones which are popular among students for all the wrong reasons and then use them to deepen an understanding of cinema. As usual, life also brings surprises: our good old Man with a Movie Camera (1929) works with every batch because our students who are mostly hooked on hardcore computer games think it is a cool MTV-style music video, never mind it was invented in the context of a communist revolution.

And yes, sex is no longer a safe bet. ‘Classics’ that came with liberal doses of sex had viewers glued to the screens, if not for anything else. Last Tango in Paris, Salo or Sweet Movie doesn’t work as it did earlier. Only after the screenings did I realize that most of the students possibly have several GBs of hardcore porn on their laptops, far more potent in their evocative power than the stories with their narrative pretensions. Sex in European art cinema which was the uncredited staple diet of India’s film society movement is now ineffective. So, my films in the next few weeks are going to be City of God, Clockwork Orange, Amores Perros, Havana Blues…

What do I care if they are declared ‘classics’ from some pulpit or not! They ‘work’ better with my students than the most sublime of Bergman’s films.