Why We Need Art

Mikhail Kononov, who played Foma in Andrei Rublev, has died. Obituaries can be found here and here. Something he said which is reported in the latter of these two articles reminded me of something I've been thinking about in the past few days. To quote:

"I am guided by the precepts with which our generation regarded art. This is why I desperately refuse to act in the TV-serials I am offered. I am terrified by the scripts I read: they are horrible! ... I have no right to allow myself playing in such nonsense. During one role test I even burst into tears. They all thought I was weeping because of growing into my role, while I cried for the horrible state of today’s cinematography and TV. I rejected the role, though it offered big money. One cannot meet the viewer on such a low moral and intellectual level. If we follow the mass public tastes we can lose our way. This is what is happening in cinema today. This is anti-art, anti-aesthetics. We must not support vice and mass psychosis. Otherwise our profession is not needed. Neither artists nor writers are needed."

It occurred to me that one of the reasons why arthouse/world cinema - call it what you will - is needed more than ever is due to the psychotic nature of Western civilisation. The film The Corporation makes that clear: that putting profit about all else has lead us into a state of cultural pyschosis. Money matters more than anything else. Now, I'm not against making money, but it seems fairly clear that we need to value other things as much as, if not more than, making a profit. These other values could include nuturing the imagination, pronoia, fostering the idea that each one of us has repsonsibilities for our own lives and other people, that every decision we make matters, etc.

This is where so-called unprofitable arthouse films come in. The best of them do foster, I think, some of the values mentioned above. In order to make these films more viable for exhibitors, maybe we need to change the whole cinema-going experience. Your average multiplex has perverted the whole idea of a 'House of Culture' that the French were trying to establish in the 50s, where you could go to the same place for films, dance, galleries, theatre and music. The multiplex simply gives you a dozen or twenty choices to choose from, and they're mainly all crap, junk food for the mind and soul. Plus you can't even get anything decent to eat or drink: it's all sugary crap. (Popcorn ought to be illegal at film screenings. If you eat it during a film, you are effectively saying you are a moron.)

We need art and culture (high culture) more than ever to fight against the relentless drivel of our society. Tarkovsky quoted Gurdjieff in The Sacrifice, and it is a quote worth repeating here:

"If sin is that which is inessential, then our civilization is built on sin from beginning to end."

Mikhail Kononov was right to cry: we should all be crying. The inmates have been running the asylum for far too long. It is time to pity them, and begin their re-eduction, otherwise the asylum will turn into a prison, from which there will be no escape.