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by djross
Sat Jan 07, 2017 6:55 am
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Two statements on the state of cinema
Replies: 45
Views: 23690

Two statements on the state of cinema

“Cinema is gone. The cinema I grew up with and that I'm making, it's gone. The theater will always be there for that communal experience, there's no doubt. But what kind of experience is it going to be? Is it always going to be a theme-park movie? I sound like an old man, which I am. The big screen for us in the '50s, you go from Westerns to Lawrence of Arabia to the special experience of 2001 in 1968. The experience of seeing Vertigo and The Searchers in VistaVision. It should matter to your life.” Martin Scorsese.


“…certain celebrated compatriots operate in a genre called Cannes.” Sion Sono.


Between these two recent statements, much of what ails contemporary cinema can be gleaned. The first may seem (and is) pretty obvious, but sometimes what is staring one most in the face is what people find most difficult to see, or wish least to perceive. But the fact is that we have now lived through two generations, or forty years, in which the blockbuster has ever increasingly dominated film production and consumption, a period that has also seen the rise of the suburban cineplex, the growth of merchandising and the increasing infantilisation of filmgoers, film critics and the films themselves (note: the infantile is opposed, not to the intellectual, but to the adult). Sorry to say, but if you’re spending money to see superhero movies at the local mall, you’re contributing to the death of cinema.

Even before reading to the end of the above words, I am certain, the riposte is already on the way to being formulated: surely arthouse cinema persists, or even thrives, and are there not indeed more films of this type being produced now than ever before? But “arthouse” is a word that has become almost as pitiful as “indie” (usually a lie) in describing a kind of movie that, today, can succeed in finding a niche. This is why the second of the quotations above is just as significant as the first, even if it is perhaps not quite as obvious. That Cannes has become a genre means that it is inherently conventional, that movies are produced according to rules, hidden or acknowledged, generic signs that mark the boundaries within which it is safe for filmmakers to swim. It may be entirely understandable that in a world where mass entertainment spectacles produced by a few gigantic corporations dominate global aesthetic production, those who have not been brought on board one of the giant studio franchises cling to whatever strategy seems to promise the possibility of at least staying afloat. Yet however much the triumphs of Cannes or Venice or a hundred other festivals are celebrated, hyped, discussed and analysed, mostly the insights are familiar, the themes are conventional, the artistry is pedestrian and the films are, ultimately, forgettable; well-crafted, perhaps, but of of little lasting significance. They don’t matter to your life.

Two hopes have flickered to counter these regressive tendencies. One is that television will rise to the level of art, and so fill the cinematic void. Scorsese has himself tried his hand in this direction, but he seems less than enthusiastic about its prospects, and with good reason. Leaving documentary and non-fiction formats to one side, what masterpieces has television delivered, really? For me there is only Scenes from a Marriage, Hitler: A Film from Germany, Fanny and Alexander and, perhaps, P’tit Quinquin, three out of four being at least 35 years old. That there are more good quality television series today than in previous times is probably true: that TV can deliver works of art to rival the great works of cinema is a far more dubious proposition.

The other (and in some ways opposite) hope seemed to lie, for a time, and perhaps still does (if it lies anywhere), in the rise of digital cinema production. It was quite reasonably thought that, by greatly reducing production costs and making the editing process far more accessible and efficient, this new technology contained the potential to enable a kind of democratization of cinematic production, where the consumer can become the producer, just as Chris Marker helped to bring filmmaking to the factory workers of Besançon and Sochaux with the Medvedkin groups. In this way, the consumers of cinema could also get behind the camera, and know filmmaking from the inside, thus becoming an audience educated in a new kind of cinematic understanding. Hence for example we have The Gleaners and I, made with an affordable but adequate digital camera, an example, perhaps, of a new kind of personal documentary production enabled by this revolutionary technology. But Varda is, of course, not herself part of this new generation but rather of the French New Wave, themselves mostly highly educated critics who wanted to get behind the camera, and wanted to educate audiences along with them on a new cinematic journey informed by analysis, interpretation and critique. But what new Agnes Vardas or Jean-Luc Godards or Eric Rohmers or Jacques Rivettes or Robert Bressons or Alains Resnaises (hah!) have emerged from digital film production? Perhaps the most prominent effect of this new technology is the rise of so-called “fan fiction”, a symptom, one can only presume, of the second generation of infantilised filmgoers. The reasons for the disappointment of this digital hope are undoubtedly complex, extending far beyond the specific milieu of film production, or even “art”, but it seems that this tendency, if one cannot say that it has run its course, nevertheless does not seem to be flourishing, and does not seem to be producing new great filmmakers, at least thus far.

The craft of cinema continues to progress, but the art evaporates as cinema retreats into new industrial conditions, whether of the "blockbuster" or of the "arthouse". Cinema may not be totally gone, but the desert grows. To counter this desertification, something genuinely new must again be invented. The question is under what conditions this inventiveness can be fostered, and whether what is invented will still be called by the name "cinema".