The Fever Dream of Filmed Cinema

Of all the caustic epithets deployed by Cahiers du cinéma during its many critical disputes, perhaps the most archetypal is a term that emerged in the late 1970s: “filmed cinema”. Its meaning can be almost instinctively divined by the reader. Just as films that are adapted from plays in a pedestrian manner, without any thought given to the specific aesthetic demands of the cinema, are derisively dubbed “filmed theatre”, so too there are films that give this same impression of being recycled and derivative, but with respect to the cinema itself.

The term will forever be associated with Serge Daney, co-editor of Cahiers during the latter part of the 1970s and a critic at Libération in the 1980s. It might therefore come as a surprise that it was, in fact, first coined by his colleague Jean-Claude Biette, who, in a review of Fassbinder’s Wildwechsel (1972), published in June 1979, contrasted the vivifying freshness of the German director’s output with those films that “reap effects from old films, trying to reproduce them, giving them a modern varnish by daubing them with ostentatious brightness”.1 Biette describes this wave of new “old films” as a kind of “cultural corned beef” which has given rise to a new genre: le cinéma filmé. Daney was immediately enchanted by the term, and in the same issue of Cahiers rendered homage to it, with credit to Biette, in a review of Manoel de Oliveira’s Amor de Perdição (1978).2  

As his move to Libération neared, Daney took to probing the general state of the cinema, presciently aware of the metamorphosis it was experiencing at the dawn of the 1980s. Filmed cinema seemed to haunt the art form. Looking back at the 1970s, Daney noted that the “cinema-machine” had begun to malfunction.3 The ever-increasing chatter about a “crisis” in the cinema took on the ring of a “plaintive and bitter, nostalgic and vengeful cry: what have we done to our toy? Have we broken it?” Above all, however, Daney laments what he sees as the “embourgeoisement” of the cinema, and the “inadequacy of the old specialised journals (including Cahiers), which no longer know how to carry out the work that no longer seems needed”. In a final knife to the heart for a critic who was always loyal to the “Cahiers line”, the expurgation from the cinema of films with the potential to disturb or unsettle forces Daney to concede that “it is the Positif-taste that has won out”.4

It was only later in the 1980s, however, that he fully reckoned with the ramifications of this mutation. In the 1982 postface to La Rampe, a collection of Daney’s critical writings from the 1970s, the critic contends that modern cinema, born out of the ashes of classical cinema via the medium’s confrontation with the reality of the concentration camps, has ceded to a new mode of cinematic scenography, influenced by the dominance of television. “It is possible today”, he writes, “to venture this: the ‘modern’ cinema, its flat image and its scenography of the gaze, is receding into the distance”. Having lost the encounter with the real that characterised modern cinema, the art of moving images has become little more than a guided visit through the museum of scenography, where “from now on, the backdrop of the cinema is the cinema”.5

Under these conditions, filmmakers — even those whose work Daney found fascinating — were almost irrevocably caught between the twin ailments of “academicism” and “mannerism”. Few could escape this bind, and one figure who seemed to embody the dilemma was Francis Ford Coppola, whose 1984 big-budget gangster musical The Cotton Club was received by Daney as a quintessential example of filmed cinema. In films such as this, he wrote in Libération, “the real is no longer captured, it is smeared with a supplementary layer of ‘cinema-effects’”.6 But The Cotton Club is not merely a stultifying academic exercise in rehashing the cinema of old — rather it embodies a beguiling vacillation between academicism and mannerism. While “the Americans” might prefer Coppola’s academicist side, what saves the director, in Daney’s eyes, is the continued presence of a mannerist tendency, by which he “starts out from the details, at the risk of losing himself along the way, discouraging everybody and failing with the whole”.7 By attempting too much, mannerists such as Coppola inevitably “exasperate and disappoint”, but in the era of filmed cinema, this at least makes them more stimulating than their formulaic academicist peers.8

The tendency towards filmed cinema seems even more crushingly evident in contemporary audiovisual culture. In the streaming era, filmed cinema has become baked into the algorithm. Images produced by machine-learning engines replicate the same dynamic on an ontological level, reprocessed as they are from vast digital stockpiles of pre-existing visual material. In recent months, scandals surrounding the use of so-called “artificial intelligence” in post-production have arisen,9 but if we wish to seek out a film that truly captures the aesthetics of the AI era, then it comes from an uncannily familiar source. With its parodic mishmash of artistic styles and historical reference points, Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024) is a supreme work of cinema for the era of artificial intelligence. It is true that the now-octogenarian filmmaker did not deploy AI for his new release, but the fever dream he gives us is akin to experiencing an AI-generated world from the inside. Once more, however, the film is redeemed by Coppola’s undiminished relish for mannerist excess. As with the baroque flourishes of Coppola’s 1980s work, it is the sheer madness of Megalopolis — its saturation with too much material, from its plethora of details, to its glut of references and citations, and its surfeit of unresolved plot points — that is, in the end, what saves it from the dire AI-academicism of 2020s filmed cinema.

In a postscript to his Cotton Club review, Daney wryly notes that it is “not a necessity but in any case not a matter of chance” that “every film by Coppola should be an incitement to dwell on the ‘state of cinema’”.10 Forty years after this piece, Megalopolis confirms Daney’s intuition in suitably bombastic fashion.

• 1Jean-Claude Biette, “Gibier de passage (R.W. Fassbinder),” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 301 (June 1979), pp. 50–51. All English translations in this article are the author’s own.
• 2Serge Daney, “Manoel de Oliveira et Amour de perdition,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 301 (June 1979), p. 71.
• 3Serge Daney, “Les films marquants de la décennie (1970–1980),” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 308 (February 1980), p. 45.
• 4Ibid., p. 46.
• 5Serge Daney, “La rampe (bis),” in La Rampe: Cahier critique 1970–1982 (Cahiers du cinéma, 1983), pp. 211–212.
• 6Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde, tome 2: Les années Libé, 1981–1985 (P.O.L., 2002), p. 252. Originally published as “Le chant du coton (Cotton Club),” Libération, January 3, 1985. Daney ascribes this to Coppola’s status as a member of the “New Hollywood” generation, who, having learnt their craft at colleges such as UCLA, are particularly prone to “re-reading” the films they loved rather than re-watching them.
• 7Ibid., p. 255.
• 8The high point for Daney of academicism in 1980s cinema is Michael Radford’s ponderous adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, made the same year. See: Serge Daney, Ciné journal vol. II: 1983–1986 (Cahiers du Cinéma, 1986), pp. 177–181. Originally published as “1984 (Michael Radford),” Libération, November 15, 1984. Given Cahiers’ long-held disdain for English cinema, the fact this film was a UK production was no coincidence.
• 9See, for instance, the controversy around the use of AI to alter the Hungarian dialogue of actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist, as outlined by this article in The Guardian.
• 10Daney, La Maison cinéma, tome 2, p. 256.