Cronenberg is instant gratification for me. Regardless of whether we’re talking about his early period or his later efforts, his flicks never fail to entertain me. I really don’t care about underlying rationales for various narrative devices found in Cronenberg’s work, as it is of no importance to me whatsoever. At the end of the day, Cronenberg’s oeuvre predominantly consists of shlocky pulp fiction, but that’s not a bad thing per se, it’s just a conspicuous characteristic of his filmmaking. I think he is regarded as one of the most important filmmakers of all time by virtue of his influence in miscellaneous horror subgenres relating to body mutation and mutilation, but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily one of the best filmmakers out there, he was merely crucial in molding the horror genre in general. Who cares. All in all, it’s just yucky-yucky fun revelling in its own repugnance. Cronenberg’s reasoning behind his plots probably springs from psychoanalysis, which is something I don’t preoccupy myself with at all. All I care about are his dexterity in the technical department and the grimy aesthetics of his filmmaking.
And I love Scanners and other early Cronenberg’s efforts, they’re neat little low-budget flicks with a very distinct atmosphere and flavor that I cherish. Sure, they’re cheap, but they’re fairly well-made, gutsy, raw and edgy garbage, I love it.
I feel a lot of Godard’s filmography hasn’t stood the test of time. While I still enjoy some of his movies such as Vivre sa vie, À bout de souffle, Le petit soldat, Alphaville and Le Mépris, a lot of his stuff is slavishly reliant on the transposition of Brechtian dramatics of Verfremdungseffekt (or whatever) into the language of cinema, which manifests itself in his perplexing montage and theatrical interjections. Once you strip the somewhat confusing exterior, what remains is the usual set of Marxist themes the French intelligentsia of the 1960s would occupy themselves with while sipping coffee in posh cafes. Heck, even Welles laughed about the superficiality of Godard’s worldview and politics. Godard’s editing methods definitely influenced the way subsequent generations of directors would view and craft movies, but his cinema is so inextricably intertwined with the zeitgeist of the 1960s, they feel a lot more dated than other Nouvelle Vague examples and they’re no longer très chic or at least not as chic as they used to be back in the day.
While a movie or any other work of art is an admittedly abstract creation subsequently divorced from its own creator, it is inevitably tinted by its creator’s artistic and intellectual sensibilities, which translate into the final product. No work of art is perfectly balanced and all imbalances are a reflection of director’s attention to different details and aspects of the executed material. If a movie seems obsessively preoccupied with its own meaning and encasing its internal philosophy while having nothing particularly original, interesting or enlightening to say, I guess you could call it pretentious. You can still enjoy some movies in spite of them being pretentious (ehm, ehm… Refn… ehm, ehm…), but if the said pretentiousness overrides all other merits, then I suppose it can debilitate the work in question quite a bit and then you can call it pretentious. I guess you could call pretentiousness a form of creative self-absorption if that makes sense: something intended to stroke one’s ego without conveying anything of worth or anything meaningful, something pompous, internally vacuous and rather meaningless. Well, that’s at least what the word means for me, it’s art criticism though and it can be applied to any example, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it’s just descriptive and not something intrinsic. Just because a characteristic may not be universally agreed upon doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I hope any of this makes sense.
You should see La Chinoise then. I’d rather blow my brains out than re-watch that piece of crap. Alphaville is definitely not the most pretentious Godard, but there is definitely a fairly conspicuous strain of vacuous intellectualism easily detectable in a predominant portion of his body of work, outside of Le Mépris perhaps and a few others.
I like Solaris, but this ^^^^ is still a pretty fair summary.
