“Part of the problem is that the filmmakers look to John Cassavetes as their cinematic father, inheriting his penchant for handheld camera, overlapping dialogue, and jump cuts. But they have failed to develop his depth and humanity. In a Cassavetes film, we had seriously flawed individuals and even if we couldn’t muster affection for them we could always see them as painfully human”
“But mumblecore is proving to be as reliant on conventions as the Hollywood system it claims to be rebelling against. But sometimes they manage to hide their cliches behind the tattered facade of shoe string budgets.”
“So the mumblecore disciplines do not seem to come to filmmaking from a passion for cinema but rather from a desire to document themselves. This narcissism is one reason I’ve found it difficult to warm up to the mumblecore movement.”
She’s generalizing and oversimplifying but I think she’s getting close to something here. I don’t think documenting one’s self necessarily is necessarily bad .After all, art has been about the need for humans to express and document themselves. But what happens when that documentation comes from a generation of people who upload pictures of their food on the internet? Isn’t it navel gazing for its own sake?
Also, I’d add that the singularity of perspective has somewhat bothered me about the movement. And it’s not even so much the singularity (since that is more or less the norm within the western artistic canon) but how weirdly solipsistic it is. For me at least, these films hardly ever manage to transcend their immediate milieu. I’m not even sure if that should be required quality for great art. But can it withstand the test of time otherwise? What do you guys think?
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