Scorsese is half right
One can certainly share the feeling of sadness that Martin Scorsese feels in seeing so many beautiful films excluded from viewing in cinemas. The big screen is increasingly occupied by franchise films that Hollywood studios churn out on the assembly line. One can also partially share the opinion that the Marvel films are a surrogate for cinema with only the flavor of cinema, but not its aura.
What cannot, however, be shared is that cinematography is dead as an art. Sure Hollywood is lost, at least for now. Fortunately there is technology to throw a lifesaver to the art of cinema and its non-Hollywood expressions. Which are independent cinema, experimental authors and those outside the pack.
It is precisely streaming services, such as Netflix, Prime Amazon, Hulu and others, that produce the kind of film that Scorsese misses and produce them in quantities never seen before. They're putting $30-40 million to finance a film about Heinrich, about the drought in Africa, about the Easter Rising in Ireland. Netflix gave Scorsese $140 million for The Irishman.
Streaming helps the art of cinema
Streaming services have over half a billion subscribers who ask for content of all kinds in order to have their $10 subscription fee collected at the end of the month. It is a demanding and diverse audience. Then there is Mubi which is the greatest arthouse cinema of all time. There is all the cinema that Scorsese and I like. Whether or not these films end up in theaters is a secondary matter. They are there and it sustains the authors, attracts new ones and educates viewers of franchises in the lost art of cinema.
It is an immense phenomenon, that of streaming. The latest issue of the Economist dedicates the cover and the editorial to him. The Economist says that today streaming is attracting resources and intelligences that push equal to those that supported the railway boom in the 650th century and the car boom in the second half of the XNUMXth century. A XNUMX billion dollar bacchanalia, headlines the London weekly.
What inevitably happens is that the means of using these contents moves from cinemas to the television screen and the smallest mobile devices. And this leaves a certain bitterness in those who practice and love cinema with the big "C". But that's the way it is and you can't stop a flood with a bucket. Then if few streaming films end up in theaters, the fault is certainly not of the technological services. Perhaps it is also the responsibility of the choices of exhibitors who, like book publishers, have made the resolution to fight and stem the new advances.
Scorsese's point of view is too important not to be considered properly. Therefore we offer the intervention of him, published on New York Times, to the Italian reader.
Happy reading.
Franchises are a calamity
At the beginning of October I went to England and did an interview for “Empire Magazine”. They asked me what I think of Marvel movies. I've looked at a few, but they're not for me. They look more like a playground than the movies I've known and loved in my life. Marvel movies are not cinemas.
There are those who took offense at my opinion and interpreted it as a form of contempt for Marvel. If someone wants to read my words in this sense, I can't help it. But this is not the point.
Many franchises are made by people with great artistic talent. My disinterest in these films is a matter of personal taste. If I were younger or had reached maturity at another time, I'd probably be a sucker for this kind of cinema. Maybe I could even direct one myself. But I grew up in another time and developed a conception of cinema — of what was and what could have been — that is further removed from the Marvel universe than Earth is from Alpha Centauri.
For me, for the filmmakers who inspired me and for the people I started working with, cinema was an aesthetic, emotional and spiritual experience. It was about the characters, their complexity, the contradictions of their being, how they could love or hate each other and come to terms with themselves. It was about narrating the unpredictable on screen and in life. A situation that cinema dramatized and interpreted, giving meaning to the expressive potential of art.
Our approach
That was our approach: we wanted to build an art form. There was a debate at the time whether cinema was art or entertainment. We took the side of cinema as an art to say that it was like literature, music or dance. This art can be expressed in different places and in various forms — in Korea on fire by Sam Fuller, in Persona by Ingmar Bergman. In It's always good weather by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, in Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, in This is my life by Jean-Luc Godard, ed Contract to kill by Don Siegel.
Or in Alfred Hitchcock's films. I think Hitchcock could be said to have been his own franchise. Or that it was our franchise. Every new Hitchcock film was an event. Stand among spectators in an old cinema and watch The window on the courtyard it was an extraordinary experience: an event that produced an alchemy between the audience and the film that was playing on the screen. It was electrifying.
And, in a sense, some of Hitchcock's films were also a playground. I'm thinking about The other man: The climax takes place on a carousel in a real amusement park. Or a Psyco. I saw it at the premiere at the midnight show. An experience I will never forget. People have come away surprised and thrilled, certainly not disappointed.
Sixty or seventy years later we are still watching these films and feeling the same amazement. But is it the thrill and thrill that still creates the spell? I do not believe. The sets of International intrigue they are surprising, but they would be nothing more than a sequence of elegant and dynamic constructions made captivating by the masterful editing, if it weren't for the intense emotions of the story or the human story of Cary Grant's character.
The climax of The other man it's a great formal filmic construction, but it's the interplay between the two leads and Robert Walker's deeply haunting acting that still captivates the viewer today.
The defect of the franchises
Some say that Hitchcock's films all resembled each other. Perhaps this is true, Hitchcock himself recognized this. But the similarities we find between the films of today's franchises is another matter altogether. There are many elements in Marvel's film that define cinema as I see it. What is missing is unveiling, mystery or genuine emotional involvement. Nothing is really at risk. Movies are designed to meet a certain demand and thought of as a series of variations on a limited number of themes.
They're sequels in name, but they're remakes in spirit. And it could not be otherwise. This is the nature of today's film franchises: market research products, specifically audience tested, tuned, modified and revisited until they are deemed suitable for the use and consumption of the target audience.
In other words, we can say that they are everything the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, Claire Denis, Spike Lee, Ari Aster, Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When a film by one of those directors comes out, I'm sure I'll see something absolutely new that will give me new and certainly unrepeatable or serially replicable experiences. My conception of what is possible to tell through a film will be broadened.
My problem with Marvel
What's my problem with Marvel? Why don't I just let superhero movies and other franchises do what they're supposed to do? The reason is pretty simple. Here, and around the world, franchises have become almost the only option available to cinema audiences on the big screen. It is an extremely dangerous business for cinematography. Today there is less and less independent cinema.
Everything turned upside down. Streaming has become the primary way of enjoying cinema. However, I don't know a single director who isn't eager to create a film for the big screen, a film to be shown to the public in a cinema hall. Me included. And I'm speaking as a director who just made a movie with Netflix.
Thanks to Netflix we were able to realize The Irishman the way we wanted to do it, and for that I will always be grateful to him. But would I like the film to also be shown in theaters in perpetuity? Of course I would. But it doesn't matter who you make a film with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are occupied by franchises.
And if you think it's ultimately just a matter of supply and demand or giving people what they want, I disagree. If people are offered just one kind of thing, and just that is sold endlessly, obviously they're going to want more and more.
We might ask what's wrong with these people staying at home and watching anything on Netflix, Apple TV or Hulu? Of course it doesn't hurt. He can look anywhere but not on the big screen, where the director wants his film to be seen.
The studios risk aversion
It is well known that the film industry has changed completely in the last twenty years. The most alarming change, however, has occurred under the radar, in secret. The studio system has decided to eliminate the risk component from their activity. Many films today are formally perfect products, packaged for immediate consumption. Many of them are very well done by teams with many talents within them. Despite this, they lack an essential component of true cinema: the unifying vision of the artist. Because, obviously, the independent artist is the biggest risk factor.
I'm not saying that movies should be a subsidized art form, nor that they ever have been. When the Hollywood studio system was still vital and healthy, tensions between artists and businessmen were frequent and furious. But it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films in history. In Bob Dylan's words, the best were "heroic and visionary."
Today that tension has disappeared and there are some people in the industry who show the greatest indifference to the necessities of art in cinema. They have an arrogant and assertive attitude towards film history - a destructive combination.
Currently, unfortunately, the situation is characterized by two distinct fields: in one there is globally distributed multimedia entertainment, in the other there is cinema. Sometimes they overlap virtuously, but slowly this happens less and less. I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize or even annihilate the other.
For anyone who dreams of making films or is just starting out, today's situation is brutal and bleak for cinema as an art. Just having to write these words fills me with great melancholy.
