not an entry on Aurora Borealis (Márta Mészáros, 2017) (Patreon)

I tried to watch this film, but it was a ghastly flavor of Europudding. It soon became clear that it was yet another story about (spoiler, I guess) a family with Nazi secrets hidden in its past. But the acting, pacing, and writing were all uniformly terrible, partly owing to a multinational cast grinding it out in broken English. I lasted 15 minutes.

But this made me think. Many years ago, back when I was an undergrad and just starting to get into film, I was quite an admirer of Márta Mészáros's films. It's been a long time, but I distinctly recall finding Adoption and Diary for My Children to be examples of a gritty realist style that was somehow punctuated by unusual, handmade rhythms. Her mode of depicting everyday events was, in fact, diaristic, quite distinct from the miserablism that was becoming fashionable even back then. Her fiction films had an observer's eye and a patient pace, but never indulged into showy longeurs.

So what happened? I haven't kept up with Mészáros, but then, neither have film festival programmers, so I can only assume that at some point, there was a precipitous drop-off. She was good, and then she just....wasn't. 

How exactly does this happen, I wonder? As we know, there are master filmmakers who stay sharp and vital and adventurous right through their entire careers. Akerman, Kiarostami, Resnais, Rivette, and Oliveira come immediately to mind among those who have passed on. As for those still alive and productive, Godard and Varda are the obvious examples.

But then there's the odd case of Robert Altman, who had a period in the wilderness and came back as strong as ever. So one could say that great directors have fallow periods (or worse) due to extrinsic factors like budget constraints or studio indifference, and, all other things being equal, they would never have faltered. But I'm not sure it's so simple.

What do we do about filmmakers who are still active or semi-active today, who have made good or even great work, but are spinning their creative wheels or, frankly, making unwatchable dreck? Do I need to name names? Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Alex Cox. Denys Arcand. Nicolas Roeg. Wim Wenders (fiction division). Until very recently, I would probably have put Peter Greenaway on this list, but I would strongly contend that with Eisenstein in Guanajuato, he redeemed himself.

And I could make a secondary list of avant-gardists who fit the bill, but I hereby recuse myself, for professional reasons.

How does one just up and lose one's mojo? Is it a question of being left behind by dominant tastes and concerns? Do certain masters just so intently follow their own star that they eventually lose touch with any broader sense of film culture and its aesthetic passcodes? Or can you actually forget how to make a film?