The Death of Cinema pt. 94

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.

there were bad movies lots of ppl liked in the old days too dude

not that knocked up is even bad

i hate 'napoleon dynamite' and it isn't populist. but both of you are mental to think late '50s hollywood was particularly golden, it's sheer cineaste myth-making.

xpost

i like 'knocked up' a lot.

me too it's great

i like 'knocked up' a lot.

We noticed

(I used ND as I haven't seen any Apatow films, but substantial critics who've liked his stuff have generally said "well, this isn't cinema")

Was there popular trash in the '50s? Of course. Was there a higher % of watchable studio films? Fuck yes.

substantial critics who've liked his stuff have generally said "well, this isn't cinema"

name names

(I used ND as I haven't seen any Apatow films, but substantial critics who've liked his stuff have generally said "well, this isn't cinema")

sigh

you might want to try actually watching movies sometime morbius.

but both of you are mental to think late '50s hollywood was particularly golden

Who is arguing that? Nobody's claiming every last studio film between 1953-1958 was blindly accepted as an artistic breakthrough.

As this thread proves, the real problem with cinema is that cinephilia refuses to fucking die.

this is an interesting discussion and i'm sorry to say i don't have much to add to it, except that whenever e.g. godard pops his head out of his hole to proclaim the d"eath of cinema" every two years or so my kneejerk reaction is usually "stfu"

what do you call cinephilia when it doesn't actually involve watching the movies you're talking about

'napoleon dynamite' isn't populist

Yeah, that's why I see VOTE FOR PEDRO tees on the street

I will watch Knocked Up when it hits DVD shortly. Given the track record of people who love it, I'll send the universal $11 cost of a NYC film ticket to my creditors instead, thanks.

great attitude.

As this thread proves, the real problem with cinema is that cinephilia refuses to fucking die.

YES

what do you call cinephilia when it doesn't actually involve watching the movies you're talking about

Every cinephile I know does this. We're not all working critics, after all.

Yeah, attitude? It's hardcore personal economics.

also stfu w/ "populist" forever and ever and ever

at this point i don't think a Hollywood youth-orientated comedy can ever appeal to me again. too late for Zoolander 2.

tonight hollywood weeps

they'll get over me, in time.

s1ocki, I have been writing a little about film for just over 8 months (for the first time since college) without benefit of a single free screening or DVD screener, so tell me who's supposed to subsidize my seeing all the 'important' films like KU.

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

Are you ever going to let this go, Morbs? Like "cinephiles" didn't love Mazursky or Blier.

whatever dude, if you can't afford to see it, maybe hold back on criticizing it

i could care less if you ever see an apatow film but if you're going to talk shit about them i might take your opinions a little more seriously if you had a clue what you were talking about

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.