The gap between what’s good and what’s widely available in theatres-between the cinema of resistance and the cinema of consensus-is wider than ever. This is all to say that 2018 has been a banner year for movies, but you’d never know it from a trip to a local multiplex-or from a glimpse at the Oscarizables. New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s best. Many of the year’s most ostensibly “political” films have earned critical praise, they’ll likely get awards, and they can be counted on to have as little effect on current-day politics as they’ll have on the history of cinema. It’s easy for filmmakers to treat political matters as cynically as they might approach any dramatic subject-perhaps even easier, because they’re easier to tailor to the expectations of a targeted audience. They challenge received ideas of what stories and images are, and challenge their makers’ own artistic practices they expand viewers’ imaginations, deepen and sensitize their emotional responses, and create forms of perception that go far beyond the events depicted in the movies to become enduring experiences in themselves, enduring incarnations of their time.īy contrast, in the rush to be of the moment, in the self-conscious and vain exertion to capture the times, filmmakers often make movies as disposable as an op-ed, a commentary that converges with the averages and approximations of prevailing attitudes rather than the intimate specificity of experience. They resist clichés of audiovisual thought, which are as desensitizing to the individual mind as they are deluding in the forum of social debate. Movies of resistance offer, foremost, aesthetic resistance: they resist the making of images and the telling of stories that take their own power for granted. But the cinema of resistance isn’t necessarily overtly political (though it may well be that, too-as in many of this year’s best films). Resistance takes many forms, including cinematic ones. The word “resistance” has been central to political, intellectual, and, for that matter, moral life in the past two years, as policies of a sadistic fury and bullying remarks to match have issued from the seat of American power.
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