Just finished watching Quiet City, a trailer I spotlighted awhile ago, and was softly charmed by its nascent looseness and its oft-inverting depiction of a modern romance. The mumblecore movement, or alternatively, the Slackavetes, emerged correspondingly in the early-2000s embracing & realizing a consortium of tenets which New Sincerity strives for: D.I.Y., collaboration, economic frugality, and an exacting of self-authorship. Aesthetically and economically, mumblecore recalls the focused improvisation of French New Wave & Cassavetes, and dawdles in the scenes and compulsions of sparkless twenty-somethings.
I blogged about Hannah Takes The Stairs, another mumblecore effort, when it came out on DVD, using it as a platform conceptually for meaning becoming the aesthetic. However, my perspective on such compromise has taken broader perspective since reading Saramago and watching Blindness onscreen, along with of course the passing of Time.
For the many reasons mumblecore is contextually innovative and necessary, these same qualities are also its weaknesses moving forward, ultimately speaking. These flicks are being done by artists generationally at the Gen X-Gen Y intermingling. This is to say that in these works there are the spirited manifestations of New Sincerity as well as the perspective and symptomatic reflections of Gen-X postmodernity. The movement of mumblecore into the next realm revolves around the consummation of these latter tendencies.
In its focus on interpersonal relationships, mumblecore cinema subversively comments on our subsisting cultural contrivances, primarily communication and sexuality. This is usually done by inversion - in Quiet City, moments usually resulting into kisses don't - and by scenes capturing a moment of vulnerable musing away from the hustle. These subversive hints are in a way passive-aggressive. Hints, without the risk of accountability or more semantically, responsibility. Slackavetes.
So this conflict I'm having with mumblecore doesn't remain in the cinema itself, but in its inherent reflection of our potential unfulfilled. Can we find compromise to passive-aggressiveness and find a potent, gentle force? French New Wave captured these same relational dynamics, but more significantly, used cinema as a platform and breeding ground to not just capture these relationships but to doctorally observe them. (Furthermore, French New Wave was a battle for liberation of aesthetics). Mumblecore, however, projects inherently a certain postmodern nihilism in its immediacy, or rather its immediacy without arching tenet of greater purpose blanketing its narrative. In this sense, all this capturing is merely a shapeless cataloging - to be incisive, a postmodern form of vanity and hedonism.
In Quiet City, sure it celebrates the elementary beauties of collaboration and teamwork (making music on the keyboard together, getting help over the wall), but in what seems to be the overriding trait of mumblecore and late Gen-X cultivation, the twenty-somethings are unambitious, immature and utterly irresolute. They do cute, random things for attention, they own and collect cute, random, usually nostalgic blasts from the pasts. But they're not immature because they can be a degree of blithe in moments, it's because their co-dependency, their unsureness and inability to show resolve and composure becomes kiddish, in the most detrimental way. All this vagrant cuteness reverts back to an ironic kitsch. And that's exactly it, it's lacking in that last consummation of sincerity, to no fault of its own.
So, the consummation that follows mumblecore is enabling and sustaining such hypercapitalism killers as self-authorship, D.I.Y. and frugal economy and channeling them into works that focus and weave together all that yearning and enervating spontaneity into something purposefully interconnected and holistic.
PS I fell for Erin Fisher.
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