Phony art films

A younger generation – there, I’ve said it – is suspicious of the ‘art film’. The category itself is an odd one, implying as it does that other kinds of movies can’t be ‘art’. It was the collapse of the ‘high-low’ distinction that made the problem. What used to be arranged in a hierarchy had to be redistributed into genres, and those declared equal. Over here, Truffaut and Pasolini and that lot; over there, slasher movies. Trouble is, there is a lingering aura around ‘art’ which can’t quite be dispelled by reading Walter Benjamin. So the young are quick to pounce on any movie with arty pretensions. And so they should be.

Is a movie like Stephen Daldry’s The Hours an art film? Looks that way – literary subject, for example. But here’s Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf, on the scene in which Woolf drowns herself.

Lee ? flinched at the portrayal of Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s film of The Hours. Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway in her early 40s and committed suicide at age 59, but Lee argues the film makes it seem she killed herself immediately after completing the novel. Lee was also troubled by Daldry’s romantic recreation of Woolf’s suicide, in which she “drifts into this beautiful green leaf-shaded river with birds singing and wonderful throbbing music and sun playing on the dappled water”.

Lee explains, “Woolf killed herself in great agony of mind, on a bleak day in March, in a river where the water runs so fast that nothing grows on the banks.” When Lee confronted Daldry about his travesty of Woolf’s death, he retorted that Nicole Kidman could only film in July.