Enthroned As Jesus On The Golgotha Of Cinema?
A true artist can maintain the intensity of the revolutionary breath, avoiding accommodation with mediocrity that weakens the creative spirit and innovative energy.
I'm afraid, very afraid. And yet the facts are on my side. It is about the fact that we stop being frondeurs. We become travelers. I have the impression that the great breath of 1917, which launched our cinema, is beginning to disperse... We are becoming classics. Bleeding wounds are healed – there is no more opportunity to utter the shrill cries that tear apart the traditions of the film! Whipped cream torches – symbols of sweet reconciliation – instead of dismantled hate! We lose our teeth. We stop being fighters. We become rentiers. Very cheap and very small! We lose our teeth because we no longer need them: you don't need to chew what comes out of your mouth! And it's very hard not to throw up when the current is taking you to the island of the "fair medium".
This fair average, these "almost" instead of YES and NO. I stir your blood. It turns your insides out... If you tell me that you are enthroned as Jesus on the Golgotha of cinema, I, for my part, feel no less hanged next to you. As a good or bad robber - that I cannot say. (It will be seen: if I succumb, it will mean that I was the bad one.) But, in any case, with a pierced chest!
How can a creative body regain the energy of the original struggle, even as the artistic system becomes more tolerant and less combative?
The great revolutionary breath of cinema goes through phases of aggression and mitigation, like the immune system. In the active phases, the artistic reaction was violent, with shrill cries that tore apart traditions and bleeding wounds that mobilized creative energy. Over time, this reactivity dissipates, the artistic system becoming more tolerant, less combative - we lose the teeth of fighters. As I said earlier, this adaptation to fair media stirs the blood and overturns the creative bowels, indicating a weakening of the capacity for revolt against the agents of conformity.
In the same direction, the pierced chest of the artist becomes a symptom of this excessive tolerance, where succumbing to mediocrity represents the final diagnosis of a creative organism that has lost its ability to reject compromises.
Yes. There is a deep fear in any creative field of reaching a stagnation, where the facts confirm a loss of the original impulse, that breath that gives birth to warriors of the promulgating idea anew. Instead of innovators, we become travelers who indulge in safe habits, losing the intensity and lifeblood of the beginnings. More and more traditions emerge to replace the brave and bleeding roots of creation, and the cries that once tore the boundaries are replaced by conformity. Certainly, this transformation erodes us, leaving us classic, devoid of vigor, almost like rentiers, reconciled to silence and without open wounds.
As the industrial environment turns innovation into routine, the just average becomes a force that absorbs the extreme and loses its sharp edge. Creativity is affected, and although the body remains, the soul seems to be hanging, feeling pierced. Thus, there is a risk of succumbing to these pressures, becoming smaller and more docile, as if the ideals of the past are being swallowed up by a current of conformity. It is an inner struggle between accepting this state of dead equilibrium and remaining true to a living creation, even if the price is to succumb to the attempt.
In leadership, the creative force opposes currents of compromise, joining the dynamic of a continuous struggle for artistic authenticity. In fact, creative leadership maintains its contestatory force by systematically opposing the standardization tendencies that dilute art.
Enthroned as Jesus on the Golgotha of cinema? This is the question that all these artists who have strayed from their original vision must ask themselves, because any artistic compromise is a betrayal of the revolutionary spirit, by diminishing the authenticity of the creation. I say this amid deep concern for the future of art, as mediocrity begins to become the norm – a phenomenon adjacent to a general loss of creative courage.
* Note: Ion Barna - Eisenstein, Tineretului Publishing House, 1966.
