2. Counter-images: Art and Cinema
Thus, a constant of post-war modern and (neo-)avant-garde art appears to be that cinema and art always need to conceive of each other as opposites, in order to identify their internal differences and make them operable. If, in the context of this project, we talk about an other kind of cinema and an other kind of art, you will still most probably wind up believing that the other cinema leads to the same old art and the other art leads to the same old cinema. However, as we talk about an other cinema here, it is more likely that, in most cases, this other cinema sees its own opposite in a single word saturated with fantasies: Hollywood. Hollywood as the site of the industrial production of film; Hollywood as the name for a normative standard of narrative cinema; Hollywood as a place from whence imperial, industrial methods of production destroy divergent art, culture, and politics around the world. In other words: we pit an other cinema against this kind of cinema, and above all, then, an other kind of art, because filmmakers, no matter how opposed to Hollywood, always had to acknowledge the existence of the Hollywood model as a model of filmmaking, whereas it is up to art, to (ignorantly) reject Hollywood as the name for an ideology.
However Hollywood was itself always, if not a part of, then at least the subject of that which opposed it. Indeed, one can not only differentiate between various phases, but also, most likely, different genres of the other cinema by looking at what it, in its difference, wanted from Hollywood, or rather, whether or not it actually wanted nothing at all to do with Hollywood. Of course these kinds of issues touch on the issue of the so-called culture industry and the relationship of the rest of the arts to it. It is often assumed that the terms ‹culture industry‹ and ‹Hollywood› are synonymous, and philologically, this is not unreasonable. After all, nineteen-forties’ Hollywood served as the model for the originators of the term ‹culture industry.› I would even maintain that by taking a closer look at «Dialectic of Enlightenment,» where this term was coined, one can guess which films the two authors had in mind: namely, Frank Capra’s New Deal comedies and Cecil B. De Mille’s megalomaniacal works. These authors encountered the culture industry, either as an ideology (Capra) or a method of production—or rather a production format (De Mille). I would add that, when reacting to Hollywood, the «other cinema» or the
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