If only Star Wars had never happened. Photograph: Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty
In an interview published last weekend, Francis Ford Coppola lamented that the course of his career - and specifically, such monumental early successes as The Godfather Parts I and II and Apocalypse Now - had diverted him from what he claimed was his true intention: to be an experimental filmmaker.
This plaint is a familiar one: George Lucas, a peer and longtime friend of Coppola's, is given to the same regretful murmurings. If only Star Wars hadn't happened. If only he'd not been taken prisoner by his franchise. Then he could have made those crazy, non-narrative movies that were, he would have you believe, his genuine and abiding passion.
Never mind that the 16 years between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace were not, so far as we can tell, exactly busy ones for Mr Lucas. (Surely there were a few moments, in between overseeing Industrial Light and Magic, watering the geraniums at the Skywalker Ranch, and stacking his dollars in neat piles, to produce at least a 10- or 15-minute short?) No, two roads diverged in the wood sometime back in the mid-1970s, and George Lucas, for whatever reason, took the one that led to Hollywood, merchandising options, and the worshipful adoration of fanboys around the globe. While Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Leslie Thornton et al went happily down the other.
But what would an experimental film by Lucas or Coppola be like, you wonder? Given the former's distaste for working with human beings on set, his evident unease with the actual business of directing actors, I suspect it's safe to assume that an avant-garde Lucasfilm would be pure son et lumiere: a visual poem perhaps in the vein of Stan Brakhage - only with state-of-the-art graphics from the very latest CGI software. (Dog Man Star Wars, anyone?) Yet it's doubtful that we'll ever know for sure. Lucas's long-threatened avant-garde career, like Paris Hilton's vow to undertake community work in Rwanda, is unlikely ever to materialise. It's what Mary Poppins called a pie-crust promise: "easily made, and easily broken".
Francis Ford, however, is a different case. After ten years of silence, he has now made his experimental movie - it's his latest feature, titled Youth Without Youth - and a good many of its audience, including Hollywood Reporter and Variety, are feeling regrets of their own.
Once, the idea of two such titans dabbling in this strand of filmmaking would have seemed ludicrous. Yet, weirdly, their timing is spot-on. In the past decade, Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle has changed the entire dialectic of experimental cinema, not only in terms of visual grammar, but also from a production standpoint. With their lavish sets, their elegant, well-lit cinematography, their celebrity cameos, these films looked as expensive and as slick as any Hollywood studio picture. And while the entire budget of Cremaster 3 would have barely covered the canteen expenses on an average mainstream movie, it still cost significantly more than anything else in its field. The simple difference in scale between a Barney opus and, say, Jennifer Reeves' feature The Time We Killed or even Bill Morrison's magnificent Decasia is staggering.
The shift was profound. No longer the exclusive preserve of boffins with an 8mm camera and an optical printer, experimental cinema suddenly became a far broader church. Suddenly, one could be Sadie Benning, toiling away on a Pixelvision camera in one's bedroom, or Shirin Neshat, making beautifully poised 35mm meditations on ritual and identity - funded (like Barney) by the prestigious Barbara Gladstone Gallery in NY and by the deep pockets of some very well-to-do private collectors.
Predictably, this development has been greeted with some unease among more ghetto-minded cineastes. I recall an especially uncomfortable lunch a few years ago with one independent filmmaker in New York City, whose own sterling critical reputation didn't prevent him from seething at Matthew Barney's very existence. The Cremaster films, he declared, had "destroyed" experimental cinema - poisoning the well with big budgets and non-specialist audiences. (Among Barney's other crimes against the indie-rock set: he was a jock - a former footballer - and not a nerd; he'd been a male model, posing for a Gap campaign; he got to shag Björk.)
If all this proves anything, it's that one's career as a filmmaker - whether you're Hollywood royalty or a cult-hero among downtown film-society groups - inevitably holds you hostage to your reputation. You're trapped in your box, enslaved by your CV, unable to cross over. Still, I can't help but suspect that both Coppola and Lucas, and the thousands of experimental filmmakers out there struggling to pay their rents, look with the same envious gaze at the one man who has managed to successfully reconcile the movie-theatre and the art gallery: David Lynch.
