be kind, rewind

Tonight I saw Michel Gondry's new film 'Be Kind, Rewind.' Going in to the film I was expecting a certain level of artfulness and humor that had been hinted at in the trailers and from what I knew of his previous work. What I didn't expect - what I was happy to find - was a social film with activism and community at its core; a vitality and humanity I've only seen in films close (in both history and ideology) to the events of May 1968, in particular Truffaut's 'Stolen Kisses.'

Stolen Kisses is a special product of a time just after student uprisings in France and all over the world had in some cases come close to toppling whole governments. You can feel a sense of an excited "what's next?" being collectively whispered throughout the film, and particularly represented in the young Antoine Doinel. It's an incredibly optimistic film, just on the edge of an emerging era and culture.

Be Kind Rewind gave me this same impression - but rather than simply attempting to recycle a forced agenda of revolution and optimism, the film seems as though it simply has no choice. It articulates itself essentially in the language and grammar of now: the trailing edge of globalized culture, which is no longer an impending and dreaded model trickling its way through our lives, but a critical and essential matter of the way we live. What is really interesting to me is that the way the film (and I would argue, culture on the whole) reclaims the conditions of globalized culture for the people is by the acute territorialization of culture. It's very important that we're witnessing the interactions of a specific small town in New Jersey, that we're seeing a microculture interacting with itself, but also and I think very critically, that we see it interacting with global culture.

Throughout the film we are constantly aware of a shared media reality - this small community acts it out by staging 'ghostbusters' or 'driving miss daisey' etc. This community takes ownership of the culture that has been disseminated from Empire, and which in this film is represented by the empire state: New York. Gondry does a wonderful and effective job in telling what is a recent story, and what stands to characterize this emerging century: the decentralization of cultural power and ideology. It sounds terribly cliche to speak of the 'youtube generation' for example, but it's worth pointing out that we're at a unique point in cultural history that is putting notions of authorship and authority that are really fairly young into question.

I had a short conversation with someone at the SPARK festival recently about how their students apparently had no qualms about drawing from a 'democratized pool' of sound bits and software tools, with absolutely no regard to authorship. He was lamenting the fact that he'd hear the breakbeat from 'funky drummer' in his student's music, and that they had no knowledge of its origin. My response was that I find this kind of loss of authorship extremely exciting, and I think it's representative of a potential for the creative act to re-emerge as a fundamentally community activity. Rather than looking at art and artwork as a product of individual genius, we are learning to understand it as a cultural communication. Be kind rewind understands this, and I was incredibly happy to see it articulated in such an ecstatic way. The film says "do" - and that's what we're doing.