Anthony Oliver Scott has been a New York Times film critic since 2000. He has also been its chief critic since 2004. His contributions have appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, The New Yorker, and The Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Professor Emeritus of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He today he can be considered the dean of American film critics.
He recently wrote a much-cited and award-winning book on the critic's work: Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth.
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE THERE
Scott in this book intends to show that critics - himself included - can make mistakes and find faults where they shouldn't, but criticism as a discipline is one of the most noble, creative and important activities of cultural work.
Using his own film criticism as a starting point – from rejecting blockbusters like The Avengers to the admiration for Pixar animated films such as Ratatouille – Scott extends his analysis to discuss the complexity of the critic's work dealing with past giants like Rilke and Shelley, as well as with contemporary artists like Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones or Marina Abramovic. True criticism was, is and always will be a shot in the arm for creativity. As he himself says: "The time for criticism is always now, because the imperative to think clearly can never fail".
Below we publish an excerpt from his long intervention in the "New York Times" of July 17 with the title The movies are back. But what are movies?With this truly existential question for cinema, we leave you to the reflections of the New York Times critic.
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IT'S GOOD TO GO TO THE CINEMA
There's something special about the way things can be sexy or scary or funny or thrilling on the big screen. There's also a particular satisfaction in buying a ticket and sitting down to watch an entire film, without having the option to pause, skip forward or return to the main menu. There is also the risk of being disappointed by a film seen in a theater, but boredom and annoyance can also be fun if you are alone with your thoughts. And there is always a surprise to wake us up.
All this panegyric to say that the fear that streaming, with the pandemic, could kill cinema has proven to be unfounded. People like to leave the house. Which does not mean that it has returned to what it was before Covid 19.
LET'S TELL THE TRUTH: BEFORE IT WASN'T GREAT
It's not like everything was great before. Blockbusters and franchises sucked all the oxygen out of theaters as smaller, more difficult films jockeyed for ever smaller market share. The brave films of the festivals remained buried in the algorithms of Netflix or abandoned in the suburbs of video-on-demand. The cultural and artistic imprint of this cinema was increasingly restricted within an ever-expanding universe of contents.
Is this really the normal we want to return?
THE CULTURE OF FILM
Setting aside the turmoil of the coronavirus, the culture of films, that is, the set of assumptions and aspirations that guide audiences and artists beyond the imperatives of mere business, today feels more precarious than ever, more uncertain, more invested by dangers and possibilities .
This moment could prove to be a real earthquake, similar to what happened with the introduction of sound in the late 20s or with the collapse of the studio system a few decades later.
The way we watch movies is changing, which means that what we watch and why we watch it is also changing. It is too early to tell where all of this is leading us and whether there is reason for optimism or concern. But worrying is my nature, and part of my job as a critic.
A CULTURAL WAR
The confusion and ambivalence that preceded the pandemic has intensified to the point that an innocent question like asking if anyone has seen Nonadland in a cinema it can be taken as a pretext to trigger a culture war.
What, for most people, is a matter of simple, individual choice – should we stay home and watch this, or go out and watch that? – is often treated, at least by media and technology journalists, as a matter of ideology or zero-sum economics.
A dogmatic and triumphant techno-determinism, which sees in streaming the inevitable and perhaps desirable death of an antiquated and inefficient activity, is contrasted with an equally dogmatic sentimentality on the aesthetic and moral superiority of traditional cinema.
My sympathies may also lie in the camp of cinephiles, but I can't help but perceive in the wishful thinking of the most extreme positions of cinematic suprematism, an attachment to the past that is as ahistorical as bold prophecies of a digital future are.
HOW DIFFICULT IT WAS BEFORE
I'm old enough to remember when most movies were difficult, and in many cases, impossible to watch. There were movie clubs and cinephile associations on campuses, but outside of those activities the best chance to see something old or sought-after was on a local UHF channel in the late evening. The cinephile's obsession with movies manifested itself in the search for old reviews and the satires of parody magazines such as "Mad Magazine".
What changed everything was the Home Video revolution that began with the arrival of movie rental stores and cable channels like Turner Classic Movies and the "old" Bravo (which carried many foreign language films, believe it or not).
The sheer variety of movies available today to buy or rent or through a streaming subscription is astonishing to an older guy like me, even if it's taken for granted to my older children, students, and colleagues. young.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE OPPORTUNITY
This endless supply by itself could also be a problem. When everything is accessible – I know it's not literally everything, and likewise not accessible to everyone – then nothing is more special, then we are deprived of any sense of occasion.
Movies coexist in the cloud along with a myriad of other forms of entertainment and distraction. Publications like the NYT may report on titles leaving a given platform, or issue rankings or anniversaries, but most of the film archive at hand is bound to remain unexplored.
Still, the archive is there and growing every day, at least until the companies that own the film rights find ways to monetize them. But those films occupy a small corner in the vast universe governed by algorithms.
LOOKING FOR NEW FANS
I'm afraid movies are becoming less special and more and more specialized. Big studio films destined for streaming services become less attractive as a matter of commercial policy. At the same time, smaller productions cater to the interests of fragmented and self-selected communities of taste. So it turns out that global blockbusters, designed to appeal to the widest possible mass audience, are by definition conversation stoppers: they offer vague themes and superficially complex plots rather than food for thought. There is very little to discuss.
Franchise is the primary means of recruiting new fans and extending the brand. And the very logic of fan-seeking culture – the logic of favourites, the effort to elude the action of sowers of discord, the predominance of sentiment over reasoning – extends to the furthest reaches of online cinephilia.
Meanwhile, the broad middle ground that defined popular cinema's success and potential – the best popular-cultural entertainment, the topics that everyone at work or online seems to be talking about – continues its migration to television. If television is the right word.
THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE
What is cinema, and if we know what cinema is, then what is television?
This question is a paraphrase of a reflection by Gertrude Stein on the difference between poetry and prose. As in Stein's original question, the answer is both intuitively obvious and theoretically mind boggling.
For every simple distinction, such as that between the cinema and the home screen, between independent stories and serial narratives, between the medium used by a director and that of writers; between an art form and a piece of furniture – there's a three-word explanation: Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Disney, which owns Marvel (along with Pixar, "Star Wars," and ESPN, as well as theme parks and cruise ships), has immense resources of money, labor, and talent to maintain its position. as the dominant entertainment brand in the world. We already had three Marvel series this year (WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier e Loki) with Black Widow, with Eternals which will be released in theaters in November.
One reason streaming services and movie theaters will coexist for a long time is that studios hope to profit from both. On his first weekend, Black Widow it grossed $80 million at the U.S. box office and an additional $60 million in premium purchases from Disney+ subscribers.
Even without a premium offering, Warner Bros. seems to have Disney-like ambitions for sci-fi epic Dune, , which will debut in theaters and on HBO Max this fall.
TELEVISION IS THE INTERNET
Recent evolutions in the film business show us that the boundaries between film, television and the internet have become totally obsolete: Disney gobbling up Fox; Warner Bros. and its sister company HBO Max being offloaded from AT&T to Discovery; Netflix, Apple and Amazon taking an interest in old studio locations in Los Angeles; Amazon acquiring MGM. Tech companies become movie studios. Movie studios become television networks. Television is the internet.
In terms of creative effort and popular reception, there has been a certain osmosis between film and television that has led to a flexibility that was once rare to find. Novels that once could be cut into two hours or adapted for network or public television – normal people, The Queen's Gambit (The chess queen), The Plot Against America (The plot against America) – today they can find a more organic outlet, in episodes.
Directors such as Barry Jenkins (The Underground Railroad/ The underground railway) and Luca Guadagnino (We Are Who We Are) can express their skills in more extensive and articulated narrative forms. Actors, especially women and people of color, can escape the strict typing that is one of Hollywood's most enduring and maddening traditions.
THE TELEVISION IS STREAMING
As what we used to call television is rapidly becoming synonymous with streaming, a subscription-based medium, the old methodologies of measuring success – through ratings and box office revenues – no longer work (they will also slowly disappear).
This gives the measure of freedom enjoyed by entertainment professionals and directors whose work becomes permanently accessible to anyone who pays a monthly fee.
Expanding creative opportunities are fueling a content glut that may prove unsustainable. It could be the latest in a series of tech-induced bubbles.
OFFER SURPLUS
How many subscriptions can a person afford? How much are we willing to spend on ad hoc purchases – through the iTunes store or video-on-demand or “virtual cinema tickets” – in addition to the monthly fee for Netflix or HBO Max? These trivial questions have big cultural implications.
If we stick to platforms and consume what is at hand – that is, what we have already paid for or what friendly domestic robots recommend to us – we risk limiting our taste and confining our interest to an enclosed garden.
THE COMPETITION FOR ATTENTION
Attention – yours, mine, the aggregation of the planet's eyes, ears and brains – is a precious and abundant commodity, renewable if not quite infinite. Every artist, writer, film studio, legacy media, social media platform, television network, and streaming service is vying for a share of this attention.
It has always been this way to some extent, but the intensity of competition and the global reach of the market is new.
For much of human history, life has been marked by tedium and drudgery. Leisure was scarce, precious, and unequally distributed. When art was not yet a sophisticated product, it was homemade and within reach.
SCREEN SERVITIES
Today an international economy has grown up around our time which aims to fill it with pictures, stories and other gimmicks. The by-products of this economy – fan culture, celebrity information, ancillary media that help in the work of sorting, classifying, interpreting and evaluating – occupy the same virtual space as the primary artifacts, and therefore complement but also compete with them. with them.
You can watch a show, read the synopsis, listen to the podcast, and post reviews, using any available screen and keyboard.
This is also, and increasingly, the way we work, socialize and educate ourselves. We are not so much dependent on screens as enslaved to them; we repay the utility, knowledge, or pleasure they give us with our time and conscience.
The screen doesn't care what we're looking at, what matters is collecting data on what we look at and what we say about what we look at.
THERE IS NO ESCAPE
Movies didn't produce this situation, but they are also part of the technology that made it possible. Movies whetted an appetite for imagery, storytelling, and emotion in a way never before possible.
But movies are also a potential casualty of the screen-saturated world. Once upon a time you could buy a ticket and escape from reality; the common space of the cinema was also an area of intimacy, privacy and anonymity. Now, obviously, screens are surveillance tools.
When the Netflix screen asks: “what do you want to watch” the real message is that Netflix is watching you.
The act of looking offers no escape; leads to passivity. The more you watch, the more the algorithm works to turn its idea of you into reality. As art becomes content, content transmutes into data. The consumer's job is to give information back to the companies that sold them access to the art.
LET'S TAKE BACK THE CINEMA
The question is not whether films will remain as a pastime, a destination or a resource of the imagination.
The point is to understand whether the kind of freedom that "going to the movies" has represented in the past can be preserved in a technological environment that offers endless entertainment at the price of one's submission; if active and critical curiosity can be maintained in the face of the dominance of big services; if artists and audiences can rewrite the democratic DNA of a medium whose potential for control has never been so widespread and strong.
The question is not whether we go back to cinema, but how we get cinema back.
