There are two parallel phenomena going on in the arts world, and they took place over the last 10 years. First was something that I’ve been ranting about over the last few blog entries: music ain’t what it used to be, rock is dead, and it’s no longer fresh. The second thing is Martin Scorsese ranting about the death of what he calls “cinema”.
In both ways, they are what I consider to be the slow death of high art. It’s true that art cinema isn’t dead. But it’s being depracated. It’s no longer as important as it used to be. The world of Marvel is different from the world of cinema. An over-simplifying paraphrase would be that it’s a world where adolescence took precedence over the more adult issues. Problems of the world were simplistic and could always be resolved by violence, or flashy CGI. You resolved issues, rather than asking open ended questions. You made films for a global audience, rather than engaging with them on a more human and intimate level. You made clunky attempts at diversity and inclusiveness, rather than creating stories that were genuinely profound or original.
In a way, Scorcese does seem to be yearning for a throwback to a world he was more familiar with – a world where a relatively small cabal of critics would shape the dialog around what constituted artistic merit, and the rest of the world admitted that they didn’t know better, and simply went along with that.
The old system may have been a little too clubby, a bit too snooty / snobby, but at least they engaged with cinema in a deeper and more profound way. They worked towards a cinema-going experience that was richer and more profound. That being said, there were many forces that went against cinema as high art.
First (and this is also a culprit in the death of rock) is the rise of streaming platforms. It meant that TV and cinema no longer monopolised video content delivery. It meant that the viewing habits of the audience changed. In the old days, you had to buy a ticket for a movie, or you had to decide what you wanted to watch on TV, and you relied on word of mouth, or the opinions of the literati to help you decide. Today, you no longer had those things. You could watch anything you wanted. There would always be those snooty discerning viewers who still went for what went for good taste back in the day. But increasingly, you could just veg out on the sofa watching any form of content. You could watch youtube content, no matter how trashy it was. You could go down a few rabbit holes and joint the QAnon crowd. Nobody would ever judge you based on how trashy your taste was.
Secondly, the world was coming together even closer than before. Back in the day, circa the 90s, when globalisation was discussed, it was a period of American cultural hegemony, when American tastes bestrode the world like a colossus. It was a world where the Americans had the first and last word, when they were the window upon the world. And gradually, it seemed as though this was too much for Hollywood. There was no way Hollywood was going to have the ability to speak for the rest of the world.
There would be a revolt: there were great arguments about how cinema and the oscars reflected a world that was centered around the White Male experience. The audience gradually became more and more global. Hollywood initially assumed that they were still the center of the film world, even as it seemed, increasingly, they had to do whatever it takes to capture a larger slice of the global pie. Maybe it meant they had to water down their American-ness, and they ended up sanding away all the cultural nuances and they ended up with something that was totally bland, but would be acceptable to the Chinese. Maybe they had to settle for guys in costumes, or computer animated characters, to sand away the essential “American-ness” of the characters.
There would also be another revolt from within America: the Blacks, Latinos and Asians were increasingly vocal about being able to create their own cinematic idiom. And that ought to be a good thing, except that it was hard to discern what, if any cultural masterpieces were made from these communities. I could see “Moonlight” winning a Best Picture, and “Roma” being acclaimed as film of the year, but I need to see those for myself to see what other strides were made.
This cultural neutrality would unfortunately be a reflection of peoples’ lives. There are an increasing number of people who have to wear two masks and two faces, because they have to deal with two different worlds. They have to live within their own immigrant community, and also have to deal with the outer world, and deal with people in a working culture that’s totally different from their friends and family. I don’t know how that’s going to translate into the language of cinema, which traditionally portrays tribes of people in a face to face setting.
People increasingly interact with each other online, and that is hard to portray in cinema. You could be a scientist, turning over in your mind a new and exciting discovery. That’s a difficult thing to portray on screen. I remember being an Asian high school student, in an Asian high school, and we studied a lot. And I couldnt’ for the life of me figure out how to make a film out of that, or spin a yarn around that.
There was also a growing chasm between the haves and have-nots of cinema. In order to produce a show that had a large budget, you would have to go with the blockbuster playbook. And perhaps that would limit the scope of what you could achieve if you were truly into indie cinema.
With the rise of non-western cultures, there should be a greater scope for them to make compelling cinema that’s more aligned with their own cultures. They should be able to make for a widening of the cinematic vocabulary, but for some reason or another, that hasn’t happened on a large scale. Take the example of Zhang Yimou. There was a time when you could classify him as being an arthouse director. The films that he made with Gong Li seemed to appeal to a western arthouse audience. In particular, the film “Raise the Red Lantern” was a critique of the repressiveness of the CCP regime that would almost paint him as some kind of dissident. But later on, he made “Hero”, which was an about face. It was an allegory, where an assassin was supposed to meet the emperor to kill him, but instead he changed his mind, and decided that the right way to be a hero was to fight for the glory of the Chinese empire. I don’t think it’s possible to be more direct about it: the dissident was being co-opted into the system. And somehow Zhang Yimou morphed into this guy who just directed technically demanding movies and steered clear of trouble with the CCP.
Also, the elevation of the Marvel franchise type movies and the depreciation of the “cinema” type movies has to do with this trend of art forms that emphasise leaving nothing to the imagination.
It’s been said that cinema is the art form that incorporates all the other art forms: dance, music, visual art, theatre, written word. It’s the one which immerses more of your senses than most other art forms. (Maybe not virtual reality or computer games, where it’s actually an interactive medium.)
The older art forms are the ones that leave something to the imagination, in the sense that it rewards active watching and active listening. Where there are gaps waiting to be filled. Some of the more highbrow movies are the ones who make their points more subtly, who place insinuations here and there, and invite the watcher to join the gaps.
The problem is some of these modern blockbusters, who feel that every moment and every frame must be filled in with state of the art special effects. I remember watching the Transformers franchise, which is full of intricate special effects, to the extent that the director forgets that he’s actually supposed to tell a story and allow that story some room to breathe. Or some movies where a high powered committee has discussed a story to death, and feels like they need to remind you over and over again how serious they are. Or other movies which are engineered to death and move deliberately slowly, just so that they make the point that everything is portentous.
Good cinema is cinema that somehow manages to avoid all these pitfalls and traps.
Music Composition 