Yep, this is what litcritters call the postmodern turn -- modernism, the aesthetic forms of monopoly capitalism, was replaced by postmodernism, the aesthetic forms of multinational capitalism. Monopoly capitalism is still around and kicking, but it's now integrated into a very different system. The Tricoleur is full of references to modernist forms, from Hitchcock's voyeur to Kubrick's symmetrical framing, but its content is state-of-the-art, 1990s stuff.
-- Dennis
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I realize that's what the turn is called, and agree that the dissolving of a predominately national into an international or multinational capitalism occurred roughly at the same time. And that the disappearance or dissolution of nationally based arts into multinational forms also occurred, but in advance of their socio-economic systems (at least in the west)..
What isn't particularly clear to me, is how these events interconnect to dissolve and debase the aesthetic world of forms. It's not that the best of jazz, painting, film dissolved, but that they devolved from a very demanding and sophisticated aesthetic level---in a high classical modernity---into a kind of void triviality, as if in some biomorphic process of history they were transformed from a living organism into its android replicant, identical in all objective measurable qualities, and yet dead in the only sense that counted. At the risk of bourgeois sentimentality, it was as if the arts, all the arts were reborn in a transfiguration with no soul.
In any event, I need to buy a damned VCR so I can rent it---and many others. I only saw Red, and only saw it once, and didn't expect to see anything remotely interesting, since by 1995 I hadn't seen a movie I enjoyed as art since I couldn't actually remember when. Boom there it was. It took probably fifteen or twenty minutes before the rusty old modern art analysis machine was actually pretending to work, and it was barely functional by the time the film ended.
>From what I remember, the love affair between the ad model and the
older judge was the mere trapping or convenience of a plot, while the
process of film-making or the visual world depicted was itself the
more substantial world. The film was alive as a medium in the sense
that the characters were all dead as narratives. In this other visual
realm, a range of emotive registers revolving around remorse, regret,
recrimination, retribution, isolation, alienation, and solitude were
linked in corresponding compositional variations arrayed about reds,
in traffic lights, car lights, sign boards, cloth, lipstick,
fingernail polish. I am imagining it now, because I don't actually
remember if fingernail polish was depicted, except that the woman was
modeling cosmetics, the masks of life and love, while she herself
could barely function within either.
I remember wondering in our conversation afterward about the location guessing Prague, but the woman I was with said it was Geneva. I thought the outdoor dreariness, the autumn or winter light filtering through blinds on claustrophobic interiors was a great medium, thinking, yes this is what its like to live in a completely dead world, populated by pod-people and ruled by android overseers---a world under siege.
Chuck Grimes
PS. Reading your essays on Kieslowski now.