Cinema vs. Propaganda

By David Ross.   Avatar is anti-American propaganda on a staggering scale, with who-knows-what geopolitical implications, as well as a monument to the infantile simplicity of the Hollywood world view. Pulitzer prize-winner Stephen Hunter, writing in Commentary, provides what I consider the definitive dismemberment.

All of this, however, states the obvious, or what should be the obvious. Roger Ebert has done his share of shilling for Hollywood, but here takes on the industry, laying out a thorough argument against the 3-D format. Cinéasts should join him on the barricades. Spectacle is not art; the mere titillation of the senses is not art.

The greatest film art, indeed, resists spectacle as a distraction from its own core of intellect and emotion, and tends to grope toward a certain starkness in which the essential thing – whatever it may – stands stripped of the extraneous and revealed in its essence.

Films like Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and Koreeda’s Maborosi (1995) demonstrate James Cameron’s vast and pathetic misunderstanding of his own art form. Sinking into almost complete stillness, they begin to speak the half-veiled symbol language of the world, and, as Yeats says, “call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions.”