The Death of Cinema pt. 94

Given yr poopooing of masterpiece-hunters, how the fuck do you measure aesthetic advances then, quitit? Most avant-garde films I've seen recently are, as usual, fucking empty.

you kind of answer yourself there. what aesthetic advances do you see in art-house cinema? i sort of think it's hard to separate technological from aesthetic questions, personally, though that can lead to hyping sheer novelty.

the avant-garde i'm thinking of is bunuel, franju, marker, that kind of tradition. not empty at all. but not really thriving now either.

I'm trying to make a list of the best films of the decade thus far, and I'm hard-pressed to find more than 6 or 7 I consider 'excellent,' let alone great. I think the even SOMEWHAT trad narrative feature... well, almost everything's been done. Even more than ever.

i don't understand this impulse, to treat cinema like this. why can't it be as ephemeral as music or theatre or literature?

because ephemeral = worthless.

no it isn't.

to shakespeare's audiences, his plays were ephemeral. they changed through the run and were then forgotten, except by the performers.

why is that a bad model for other media?

Film has always had a difficulty straddling the importance it desires academically, and the cold hard fact that it is run as a business AND HAS TO RUN AS A BUSINESS cos it costs a lot of money to make.

Why cinema isn't dead. Because it no longer costs quite as much money to make. This is still in its infancy though of being exploited because the word cinema also means exhibition IN THE CINEMA. But as the study of cinema likes to think of its subject preserved in aspic (Celluloid, or if a bit modern DVD), they miss out on the importance of the ephemeral. Same as it ever was.

Same Sight & Sound has a terrific suggestion on how the multiplex could be used to the casual viewers advantage as exhibition costs go massively down. Get fifty friends, or (fifty facebook people - social networking possibly being the cornerstone of this idea) who want to see a film, any film avilible for digital projection, go see the film in a cinema. Hopefully a clever inner city cinema (with a good bar) will toy with this suggestion, as it strikes me that there is plenty of money in them thar hills (particularly money over the bar which is pretty much pure profit in a good cinema).

the avant-garde i'm thinking of is bunuel, franju, marker, that kind of tradition. not empty at all. but not really thriving now either.

I think I've said it before and I'll say it again: Inland Empire saved my cinephilia for the time being. I'm not even positive it was a great movie, but it did that much.

I don't think of Bunuel as being avant-garde

(x-post) That's ed, I'm still trying to work myself away from the sort of cinephilia that ebbs and flows with the whole "summer movies/Oscar season" calendar.

re the Shakespearean model, because cinema is an inherently repeatable experience now. And we have indoor plumbing.

IE did something similar on a smaller scale for me, even moreso (maybe) The Joy of Life.

'chien andalou' and 'l'age d'or' are sorta avant-garde, tom.

i can take or leave his other stuff.

xpost

The E in the R is HBO as the new studio system, 8 pages on the Sopranos in the NYRB, hi-def tvs larger than many minor multiplex screens etc etc etc.

Apatow is just fine, but he's never going to be involved in anything as good as 'Freaks & Geeks' unless he goes back to telly...

'chien andalou' and 'l'age d'or' are sorta avant-garde, tom.

But those are more about the art world than cinema! To use your phrases.

the golden age of TV is over.

otm

R.I.P. Maude

tom -- no way, not when they came out. they played in cinemas, not art galleries.

The E in the R is HBO as the new studio system, 8 pages on the Sopranos in the NYRB, hi-def tvs larger than many minor multiplex screens etc etc etc.

Apatow is just fine, but he's never going to be involved in anything as good as 'Freaks & Geeks' unless he goes back to telly...

-- Stevie T, Thursday, September 13, 2007 2:50 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

for the true believers multiplex screens and tv screens just don't compare with the big screen. they also have a thing for the communal experience, etc.

it isn't just about quality of transferable "content."

but the ending of 'the sopranos' and 'the wire' within 12 months of each other is a bit of a marker too.

Oh, Enrique, btw, you still haven't explained to me why Repulsion isn't shit.

try explaining to us why it IS, goofus.

I don't believe "the big screen communal experience" is coming back as anything other than charming nostalgia outdoor summer screenings etc.

except more people are going to the cinema than ever before. so what exactly do you base that on

no, i agree. but that's one reason why people think the thing is dying.

xpost

s1ocki that's not true. or, not within the west. people went to the cinema habitually once or twice a week up to the '40s.

more people are going to the cinema and acting like they're in their living room than ever before.

re the Dargis article in the TIFF thread, the problem of cinephilia gaining sustenance from the likes of Inland Empire is that it's marginalized. Culturally discerning [sic?] 25-year-olds who would've seen and discussed every Godard film in the mid '60s now reserve their passion for Knocked Up.

ya but that's because they all worked there. xp

re the Dargis article in the TIFF thread, the problem of cinephilia gaining sustenance from the likes of Inland Empire is that it's marginalized. Culturally discerning [sic?] 25-year-olds who would've seen and discussed every Godard film in the mid '60s now reserve their passion for Knocked Up.

-- Dr Morbius, Thursday, September 13, 2007 2:14 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

what is the evidence for this exactly

try explaining to us why it IS, goofus.

I did, on that London movies thread.

Get fifty friends, or (fifty facebook people - social networking possibly being the cornerstone of this idea) who want to see a film, any film avilible for digital projection, go see the film in a cinema. Hopefully a clever inner city cinema (with a good bar) will toy with this suggestion, as it strikes me that there is plenty of money in them thar hills (particularly money over the bar which is pretty much pure profit in a good cinema).

had a similar idea a while back but more based around small indie cinemas AND a range of viewable material not constrained to films (think TV, live sport/events).

Why not just invited your mates round to your house and bring yr own booze?!

but morbs those godard fans were also the first-gen auteurists, going to hawks and hitchcock retrospectives. i don't see that as any more mature or whatever than digging on 'knocked up' (a far more mature, if less formally interesting, film than anything lunatic maoist godard has done).

xpost

Why not just invited your mates round to your house and bring yr own booze?!

houses and screens/systems in houses are not as big. not so much '50 friends' anyway but '50 people who want to see this', as it is now. essentially what has already been happening for years with some bars showing a film in the back room.

i saw Vanilla Sky in some bar in Brighton with about 20 people. it was a cool experience.

watching vanilla sky could never be a cool experience.

predictable ;)

and there's those guys in NYC who showed films on a projector on a building roof in Summertime. nice.

ya, rooftop films? i saw their mtl show.

i have done lots of public screenings in bars/show venues/etc. mostly of my own stuff tho, i guess that's diff.

democratisation of viewing films as well as making films

(Funnily enough, I spoke to Lynch about all this stuff when he was in town earlier this year, and though he very much still thought of cinema as the big screen in the dark room, he thought that more and more this was likely to be in the form of home/private projection or large screen entertainment systems...)

Lynch would never make a film for outdoor big screen heh

'knocked up' (a far more mature, if less formally interesting, film than anything lunatic maoist godard has done)

If mature equals boring, sure.

what is the evidence for this exactly

ILX

Yeah the key is that you'll know 15 of the 50 ppl so if the other 35 are twats you'll still have as good a time as just going to the cinema w/friends, BUT if they're not you know you've got at least 1 thing in common and you've got a readmade conduit for meeting and chatting - it's a good idea and someone not wasting their time on ILX might make a bit of fake dotcom money out of it. (xpost)

ILX is not cinephilia, tho, or do the stats at ILF mean nothing?

ILX has 'ruined' Comedy for me because ILX can be as funny as/funnier than anything else out there. As long as I don't start reading THIS IS MY VLOG on a cinema-sized screen, film will prevail.

oh, I wasn't saying the Apatow monks of ILX were cinephiles. They might've been in a different cultural moment.

where's Southy with the 'it HAS to be grainy, you cannot watch it on cellphone' rockismo

Ooooooohhhhhh, bitch! (xp)

where's Southy with the 'it HAS to be grainy, you cannot watch it on cellphone' rockismo

-- blueski, Thursday, September 13, 2007 3:34 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

haha indeed.

fwiw i will chip in with: CRT televisions >>>> pwn the shit out of >>>> digital bullshit.

well cinema may be dead, but so is the novel, poetry, the fine arts, classical music.....or maybe it's just dispersing itself into smaller and smaller audiences, all part of the inevitable march of modernity surely?

what sight and sound and the like seem to be yearning for is a whitman-esque "return to the common people" aesthetic that will find some way of bridging the increasing distance we all feel between each other and our values and experiences. a super film that will unite us all!

whitman aside, this is not a new desire, and it's always been utopian.

and like all utopian desires it projects itself into the past as much as the future.

i don't get morbs on this score. the "original cinephiles", the parisians in the 50s, were crazy for uncomplicated, populist filmmaking.

xpost

no sight and sound don't think the golden age can return. it's not a new lament, but it's not that old either. your line of thinking tends to say nothing ever changes, but of course it does.

What was "uncomplicated, populist filmmaking" in the heyday of French cinephilia was also filled with solid formalism that is basically not even in the equation w.r.t Apatow.

yeees, i.e. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?is a superior example of uncomplicated, p*pulist (GODDAMN YOU) filmmaking, and that Napoleon Dynamite is a horrid one.

last night i saw a movie at IFC and they have seat arms that lift and the house was mostly empty so i was able to make my own couch. i recommend it!

IFC is such a weird space, I don’t really like it

I have made it my main weird space for many years.

There is a theatre by us with wide reclining comfy chairs that also have heaters. Like they want me to fall asleep and miss the movie.

I think picking seats is such a PIA, period. Throw in price ranges and ... fuck that. How are they even going to enforce it?

The IPIC theater in Maryland has had some form of seat surcharges as long since it opened. I've never been there (for that and other reasons), so I can't say to what degree it works.

they enforce it for real at Nitehawk and Alamo but that's because they are selling you food

Saw this trailer yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tDrxxjumYA

The similarity to both The Fabelmans and Empire of Light in the "light becomes stories/stories become films" bit--a variation on scenes in the other two--jumped out. I'm sure there'll be more of these elegies-for-a-vanishing-art in the near future.

In an Oppenheimer pre-show that must have lasted 30 minutes, we had to put up with a bunch of those non-trailers where they interview cast members on the movie instead of an actual trailer. In two of them, people (David Harbour one of them) made the same point: how amazing and courageous it was because you think this thing that you're watching--car crash, explosion, whatever--is CGI, but it was real people doing real stunts.

Not actually depressing, but somewhere on that continuum. This is what amounts to the new Italian neo-realism: hey, it's real people, not CGI.

Yeah I'm sure that's not the first time I've seen that kind of thing used as a selling point.

Hence why I show up 15-20 minutes before start time. I don't wanna watch pre-shows or trailers -- gimme the movie.

lol AFTER start time

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/martin-scorsese-urges-filmmakers-fight-010914512.html

get 'em!

related, my 12 year old has tapped out on Marvel and Star Wars now (though we'll likely watch Andor S2 whenever that premieres, which is fine by me.) he was really into watching Hangover Square and M Hulot's Holiday recently, i think they really just worked for him as immersive and surprising viewing experiences. having been immersed in watching a lot of green screen films with dumb quips and slumming actors over the last few years, i hope this trend continues. we're gonna try to dig into some classic spookfests this month, maybe some Karloff/Lugosi classics, Hammer horror, etc.

I think the enemy is franchises in general and if people are genuinely sick of Marvel and DC superhero films I fear huge IP owners will just use whatever they own that is in different genres and maybe be very discreet about being Marvel, Disney films.
Huge IP owners and studios might give more creative freedom, maybe make some genuinely great films and then take away creative control when they think they can milk a formula or milk nostalgia for that time they made good films of Jonah Hex and Willie Lumpkin. Apparently big studios only let people try new things when the formulas stop working.

i'm trying to think of a franchise i'm not sick of, maybe Mission Impossible but I haven't seen #7 yet.

also probably the minority opinion here, by some distance, but after the last John Wick film i just wondered what the point of the whole thing was. the "world-building" didn't really add up to much in the end, just a lot of flourishes that were interesting but not a lot more, the style of the thing and the aesthetic was so impressive but i didn't feel anything except impressed. zero emotional attachment to any character, really. they just milked that first film for everything it was worth, created a new type of action genre in a way, all this creative talent largely for naught. i can't say i wasn't mostly entertained but the last one was as long as The Godfather and started to feel like it. i think this last one for whatever reason made me question the whole series and why i should bother watching movies along those lines with the limited time i've got.

(speaking of non-Marvel/SW stuff above)

I enjoyed the action scenes and that was mostly enough for me. Just like any other martial arts series I'm interested in. Of course filmmakers should aspire to more than that but 3 and 4 were still impressive feats to me in a genre I like that typically doesn't have amazing stories.

Universal Monsters and Hammer Horror are much the same: I come for certain things but I know I'm unlikely to get a full package.

it just seemed like diminishing returns after awhile to me, the first film is a masterpiece and the second is close, but it felt like they were padding them out in the last two and they felt emptier even as they drew to some kind of attempted emotional close. i think the best part of the last pair was the opening of #4, up to the point where the story arc of Rina Sawayama's arc finished (not counting the vv end.) i almost found the repetitiveness impressive after awhile but not enough.

i think though the Disney industrial complex stuff is worse in terms of dominating the industry and the conversations and the talent, though JW has a couple spinoffs and maybe yet another sequel. JW at least did not set out to please the crowds, it's a much more difficult and relentlessly creative and original thing, even if it started to feel empty.

I'm sure there will be a Funkopop movie. And then a coca cola movie about sentient coke bottles and cans. And a Ronald McDonald movie. Then a Kellogs movie about the evils of masturbation, wholesome cereals combating the urge, then a porn parody with people jizzing in their cornflakes.

Still amazes me that Fist Of The North Star has made more money than James Bond, but I'm told that's mostly due to pachinko machines.

It's not on the list anymore so maybe that wasn't so reliable, but there are still surprises on here if this thing is to be trusted
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises

I'm quite perturbed by the amount of YouTube videos of film commentary titled things like "audiences hate it when movies do these things", as if they can speak for everyone.

hmmm is this conversation not more "death of hollywood" really

not that other national cinemas are exempt from the lure of franchises but

there was already a Kellogg's movie, Matthew Broderick i wanna say... yeah Road to Wellness https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0111001/

I've seen a bit of it.

I did wonder if there's even the possibility that a different film industry could attract all the big American stars by saying "come over here, we'll treat you better"

It was a different situation, but obviously Europe did that for a number of folks from Hollywood during the era of blacklisting. Not that escaping franchise work is akin to that.

I have several friends who are either writers or directors or both, and one by one they've been sucked up into franchise work and for me it is a little bit depressing to see considering where they started. Much similar to how virtually everyone I know from the cinema program at my school wound up working in reality television. The latter is much more depressing I think though.