In the summer of 1981, Robert Redford gathered novice and veteran filmmakers together for the first of what has become known as the Sundance Institute's Directors and Screenwriters Labs. Eleven projects were chosen for the workshop (there are 13 for the 2010 program) -- which, over the last 29 years, has included such films as Paul Thomas Anderson's "Hard Eight," Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," Tamra Jenkins' "Slums of Beverly Hills," Darren Aranofsky's "Requiem for a Dream," Hany Abu-Assad's "Paradise Now," John Cameron Mitchell's "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and Kimberly Pierce's "Boys Don't Cry."
That's the old news.
I came across Roger Ebert's account of this initial Sundance event (dated July 5, 1981), which we'd never before published online, and was struck by a bullet-point list of issues concerning those assembled -- including the declining quality of films, festivals, distribution, exhibition, and the debilitating effects of home video and piracy. Does any of this sound familiar?
The big studios and the big movies dominate play dates on most of the nation's movie screens, and there are only a handful of houses in most cities that will even consider booking a "specialized" film. Some 45 theater owners, bookers and distributors sat in the bright sunlight in the meadow at Sundance and agreed, almost without discussion, that:
● There are only seven or eight cities in North America in which a "specialized film" can get a decent booking and have any chance of a good run. They are New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco and, surprisingly, Seattle, which is the best city in the country to open a movie that's out of the ordinary.
● College campuses used to supply large audiences for foreign, art and underground movies, but these days the kids go for action blockbusters like "The Empire Strikes Back," just like everybody else.
● Big chains are completely uninterested in booking offbeat films. Like supermarkets, they're concerned only with the turnstile. Chains with four- or six-screen multiplex theaters don't even consider booking one of the screens with specialized films.
● Unless it's a rare breakthrough like "La Cage Aux Folies," foreign films are up against a wall at the American box office. There are only about 100 theaters in America that will book a serious, subtitled film, even if it's by Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini.
● There is still a market for specialized films among local and campus film societies, but the backbone of that market, rental of movies in 16-mm. prints, is being under-minded by the widespread and illegal practice of videotaping movies and then showing them on video cassettes instead of renting them again. (Almost every campus in the country rips off films that way, it was agreed; even, though they're breaking the law.)
● Exhibitors talked about the "strong want-to-see" factor that fuels blockbuster hits like "Superman II," contrasting it with the curious "desire not to see" that handicaps specialized films. The average moviegoer is under 25. Ten or fifteen years ago, young moviegoers were more enthusiastic about offbeat, anti-establishment independent and foreign films. Now they are much more conformist. More sophisticated big-city teen-agers who once attended films by Jean-Luc Godard have now regressed to the level of "Friday the 13th, Part II." Today's young filmgoers have a herd instinct and are reluctant to take a chance. In a sense, they "wear" movies like they wear clothes, attending a movie that their fashion-sense suggests will look good on them.
Compare that with, for instance, this scathing assessment in The Independent of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, which begins Wednesday ("Has Cannes lost the plot?"):
If you want to know why film festivals (even Cannes, the biggest of them all) are struggling to maintain their relevance, start with Jean-Luc Godard.
In Cannes next week, Godard, now 79, will be presenting what many believe will be his final feature: Film Socialisme. In advance of the premiere, the arch-provocateur has made a subversive trailer, which lasts under two minutes and shows not just highlights but the entire film speeded up. In the frenetic digital age, Godard is telling us, audiences don't have the time or the patience to go to festivals to watch 35mm prints of art-house movies in cinemas. They want instant 90-second gratification on YouTube.
Godard is one of the legendary figures in Cannes history, leading protests in 1968, showing many of his films there. Now he regards it as a place to sell movies, not to celebrate the art of cinema. "Now, it's just for publicity. People come to Cannes just to advertise their films," he said on one of his last forays to the festival. [...]
Way back in 1957, François Truffaut, when he was still a fiery young journalist, launched an outspoken attack on Cannes. He wrote that French cinema was dying "from its false legends" and its preoccupation with "quality cinema", and called Cannes "a failure dominated by compromises, schemes and faux pas." If he was still alive, Truffaut might have thought that Cannes today is in need of some creative renewal. We are in a world of 3D and Avatar, of file-sharing and video on demand. Cinema attendance may be booming, but big event movies are dominating at the box-office, not art-house fare. In the face of rapid and jarring technical change, the major European festivals are carrying on much as they have always done, showing 35mm prints of new films by venerable auteurs to audiences of critics who themselves appear to be growing older and older.
There was a time when these festivals seemed at the absolute centre of debates about cinema. Whenever, and wherever, new talent emerged, whether it was film-makers from Iran or Romania or Argentina, the festivals would champion it - and the films would be given an international life on the back of their festival screenings.
Arguably, the role of film festivals is now changing. Where once they showcased the new, they are now more concerned with protecting an old and increasingly endangered tradition of auteur cinema. Movies can now be watched on phones, on TVs and on the internet. The technology of cinema has advanced in rapid fashion. Whether the aesthetics of film-making have kept pace is another question altogether. Critics would be very hard pressed to argue that there are better, formally more sophisticated movies being made today than there were when auteurs like Jean Renoir, Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick were in their prime. Festivals continue to programme work that is in the spirit of such auteurs. As they do so, their relevance risks dwindling. As Jean-Luc Godard's speeded-up version of his new film suggests, outside these festivals, fewer and fewer spectators have the time or the inclination to watch such fare.
That's worthy of another discussion altogether (does upholding traditional standards of auteurist cinema at an old festival best-known for topless starlets on the beach put the event at risk of becoming irrelevant -- or any more irrelevant than it has ever been?), but I hope the point is obvious: Yes, in most respects the state of movies is bad -- perhaps as bad as it has ever been. And we've been saying that ever since the talkies came in.
That doesn't make the above complaints any less true, but perhaps it offers a little perspective... even, as David St. Hubbins once said, "too fucking much perspective."
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It feels to me that the concerned individuals in question are afraid of feeling inadequate next to the average movie-goer, and thus want to impress them with film that works as an alternative to the blockbusters that hit theaters so often. They feel misrepresented or unrepresented -- and they could be, the prevalence studios have over theater chains -- so they start to act dismissive.
I'm with you, Jim, when you say that films should be regarded on their own merits and how successful they are at them, not constrained to their genre or budget or audience. It's why I can enjoy a good Hollywood movie when one comes along (not very often, it seems) while still watching something entirely off the beaten path: because the filmmakers for each have demonstrated a mastery of the tools given to them, and thus create a film that is technically brilliant that is also easy to lose yourself to. I think, sometimes, people forget to have fun at the movies, while others forget that thinking can be a change of pace, too.
Be careful, though, not to put "fun" and "thinking" (which, to me, means intellectual and emotional involvement, since I can't imagine being engaged in a film that doesn't achieve both) in separate categories. One person's idea of "fun" is another's idea of banal torture. I'd rather attempt the impossible (but somewhat evidence-based) task of defining "art" than the utterly subjective and pointless task of defining what constitutes "enjoyable." I wonder why people are so eager to argue about the former, but assume everybody has the same definition of "fun" (or "mindless fun," as it is so often put). Maybe sex can be "mindless fun" (though it wouldn't be nearly as much fun without the "mind" component -- fantasy, focus, release), but movies?
"I'm with you, Jim, when you say that films should be regarded on their own merits and how successful they are at them, not constrained to their genre or budget or audience." I completely agree. The idea that independent films (I refuse to use the word 'art fim') or non-English language films are superior to Hollywood films or that Avatar was a masterpiece merely because it made a lot of money, is nonsence IMO. Just as it frustrated me when some people refuse to see foreign language films, because they have sub-titles, or older films because they may be in black and white, it also infuriates me when so-called cinephiles refuse to see a film simply because it comes from Hollywood, has a reasonable budget and stars someone the general publich knows.
Haha, Ever since the birth of cinema, it's death seems to have been talked about a lot...
Instead of lamenting that the same clichés get repeated every year, I would be embarass to notice that the situation didn't improve in 30 years!
What did any of the guys who sat in the Sundance meadows do to implement changes to improve the situation since 1981??? What did you do to educate the younger generations?
Do you think Truffaut, Godard and Bazin sat there waiting for things to change by themselves? You think that the only explanation why the audience rejects high art is because filmmakers aren't good enough?
If critics don't care enought to get things changed, it's not Hollywood who will alter their optimised profit scheme for you...
Thinkin'. Ebertfest was so much fun, I wonder if there won't be a ton of little filmfests eventually. There's one in Madrid, New Mexico, pop. 500. Local people, 5 and 10-minute shorts. Some very good, none long enough to bore people. They made out on tickets & beer sales.
Video piracy didn't kill anybody after all, did it? Neither did music downloads. It's always been that way, the technology made little difference, the spread was good for business.
And I feel fine.
It's all downhill once you've passed your peak
-Nick Lowe, "Marie Provost"
And the more things change, the more they stay the same. Movies have always been an extremely commercially viable art form. As such, there will always be a tension between what the larger populous wants (or what executives think we want), and what artists (or people who are interested in film art) want. For the artists, cinema will always be dead; for everyone else, it offers a relatively cheap, sometimes exciting weekend diversion. The truth about cinema can probably be found somewhere in between.
I'd tweak that a bit: The "truth" is that there's never been only one truth. As you say, different people want different things from movies -- and from art, and from entertainment. I'm sure there are still those who say movies shouldn't even aspire to art, even if it was possible for them to achieve that status. I doubt they'd be reading a movie criticism blog, though...
Instead of saying "The truth about cinema can probably be found somewhere in between", I should have said "...can probably be found somewhere else."
That "somewhere else" is in the larger context of film history and theory, a place far too big to include singular truths about the nature of cinema.
Can you imagine a literary critic proclaiming that the novel is dead while taking every Harlequin romance into account? That critic would be missing the grand historical reality that there always has been and always will be trash literature. The same rings true for every art form. If we want to asses the state of any given art form, we have to look at the highest achievements, and compare them to the past; it's simply not fair to compare "Furry Vengeance" to "Psycho".
What's particularly interesting about the Sundance bullet list is that it came only a few years after the end of Hollywood's most deliberately creatively ambitious era (67-77, give or take). Sundance was trying to reclaim, or revive an era that had been the exception to the rule of Hollywood history. Cinephiles (like myself) would love to see the spirit of that era reborn, but if that is ever to happen, it will have to be a part of a larger cultural shift. That period in Hollywood didn't happen in a vacuum; it happened in the context of a major shift in American values and attitudes. The larger audience, beyond the movie geeks, have to be interested in paying money to see challenging, adult films.
I honestly think that if you're really interested in seeing great current films, you can. With netflix alone, you no longer need to live in a major city, and you aren't at the mercy of the local Blockbuster manager. You can see just about anything you want, and there should be plenty of wonderful movies to take up your time. The real issue, in my mind anyway, is that the quality of the average Hollywood entertainment film is low. It would be nice if studios would return to the fundamentals of solid storytelling and characters.
One of these days someone will listen to me and the whole "blockbuster thriving, art film dying" gripe will get solved once and for all.
Perhaps cinema will finally join every other form of entertainment, and discover if you price accordingly, recepits grow across the board.
Does it cost as much to see U2 as it does to see a much smaller band touring in a Ford Econoliner? Does it cost as much to see Ms. Saigon as it does to see a one set, two-man play with unknown actors? Then why does a two million dollars film have the same ticket price as a two hundred million dollar film?
And while films aren't live entertainment like concerts or theater, they still require an audience to get off their butts and go to some sort of venue, and in such cases, folks want what they paid for.
Give smaller movies a smaller price, and more people will be willing to roll the dice. But as it stands, they can chose to spend their $12 on wild spectacle, or people talking. Don't be mystified that they're choosing the former.
@JJ
What you're describing happens all the time. Ticket prices at the local art cinema where I live are only $6.50. Of course, it's a smaller venue with a lot less overhead. What you're forgetting to mention is that one doesn't go to see the small touring band in the same stadium venue that one sees U2 at.
Art house cinema can't compete with Hollywood cinema because, as a reaction against Hollywood conventions, art house cinema forgot that good storytelling was essential to captivating audiences.
Art house cinema is deliberate in its unconventional (or nonexistent) storylines. Contemporary film studies often focus on geopolitical issues more than on the art of entertaining an audience. Do audiences really want to go to a foreign film just because it is foreign? No. Audiences want to see an entertaining flick.
Given a choice between a penetrating, textured, and sensitive depiction of Zambian immigrant women (or something like that) and Iron Man 2, well, the average moviegoer would just be nuts to not go see Iron Man 2.
I believe that art house cinema has lost its imagination, albeit in a different manner from the way Hollywood lost its imagination. Art house cinema could compete, too, if it only had a little imagination, particularly in terms of visuals.
You speak like someone who never goes to see any "art house" films at all. These are just broad and inaccurate caricatures of what foreign films are about.
While I readily admit my own desire to see more art house films, I also must admit that it becomes a chore at times. I do enjoy a great quantity of what I do see, and I do admit the necessity of breaking free of Hollywood's formulaic molds. However, I don't think that audiences are driven to see art house movies. In my experience of art house films, I would say that many of them lack the visual and narrative imagination that I would prefer to see, and that most audiences woud prefer to see.
In a perfect world, a relatively low-budget film would have high standards of aesthetics, visuals, and storytelling, and would be commercially successful. Sometimes this does happen. Sometimes Hollywood films are good too. Forgive me for being overly general. In screenwriting, it seems that there are, however, certain schools of thought. One school of thought believes in writing by numbers, which produces a formulaic and predictable Hollywood film, and another school rejects this completely. This is the art house school of thought. Sometimes the storytelling and narrative drive in such films seems sparse, which may explain the difficulty that such films have in capturing large audiences.
I fear for the future, people.
Yes, I was aware I was wandering a minefield, there.
Yes, there is a subjective idea of what is "fun" and what isn't; to me, "fun" is something novel and thoughtful, while to others, it is seeing Megatron and Optimus Prime pound each other repeatedly for a good five minutes. I find the former more satisfying than the latter because it often gives me something to genuinely reflect on when I leave the theater.
Now, a good "popcorn movie" with exciting action that's well put together -- that can give me something to reflect over, too. But it's a rare thing: explosions are often just explosions, and the idea of conflict is a soulless fistfight between the protagonist and antagonist where there is little feeling as to what is at stake and what isn't. And even what used to prove to be effective is no longer. Avatar felt so derivative of other films in terms of style, story and even the narrative (CUT TO: beautiful long shot of the rain forest with SWELLING, EMOTIONAL SCORE. There are birds in the trees, and did we emphasize how beautiful it is?) that I could not let myself be fully engaged in the film. It felt formulaic. It was finely edited and composed formula, but if I've already seen it before, then what was the point?
One of the most illuminating things about Phillip Lopate's collection of American film criticism was the Death of cinema topic. You see that in 1924 essays were already written about the recycled, uninspired nature of Hollywood films and the fact that only if one looks to Europe one can find inventive cinema. It really was quite encouraging.
I agree, Jim, about 'fun'. I've gotten into arguments with people over 'Iron Man 2', because I refused to acknowledge that it was a fun movie. They'll grant me that it is badly written, shot, edited and directed with some weak performances- but they can't understand how I didn't enjoy myself despite that, as Tony Stark is The Man.
Cinema died when studio hacks decided it was better to adapt a comic book, or a bomb TV show from the 60's rather than adapt a good book, or a well written original screenplay.
What an myopic statement. Sure many adapted comics are handled poorly, but please don't blame the material, but the producers.
When handled correctly great movies such as The Dark Knight or Sin City can offer a fresh experience.
Btb, a few years ago a friend of mine got a brief job reading movie scripts. It's a "who you know" job. He said that everybody else was 24 or under. That explains a lot about why so many crash-boom films.
Relevant shmelevant! What is this concern with relevance? I don't care if it's relevant, or popular, or any of that crap. What I wanna know is, is it good? Believe it or not, good endures. I don't see a lot of new releases because I don't care whether a movie is new or not. I just want to see movies that are good. Screw relevant, screw commercial, screw all these words related to marketing. Marketing sucks, and that's old news. All we want to do is watch good movies.
I work in the programming department of a Southern California film festival, and had this very conversation with a fellow programmer a few weeks ago during our festival. We came to the conclusion that, in the case of serious film, it's not the films that are "slow," it's the audience. I find it staggering that the average person would actually choose to watch a car commercial with babes and explosions like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen but wouldn't bother with a film like The White Ribbon.
Is this death of art-house cinema the reason that IFC fare like The Human Centipede is not opening near me?
"More sophisticated big-city teen-agers who once attended films by Jean-Luc Godard have now regressed to the level of "Friday the 13th, Part II." Today's young filmgoers have a herd instinct and are reluctant to take a chance. In a sense, they "wear" movies like they wear clothes, attend ing a movie that their fashion-sense suggests will look good on them."
The irony, of course, is that those teenagers of old were following just as much of a 'herd instinct', and they wore movies by Godard like clothes. The difference, in that sense, is only that fashions changed for that particular group of "sophisticated big-city teen-agers" and college students.
I don't think anything has really changed. You know what, I have a hard time accepting that Ben-Hur and all the lot were actually better than today's CGI movies. For one thing, they largely based their appeal on the strength of the "spectacle" they offered the public.
"Cinema died when studio hacks decided it was better to adapt a comic book, or a bomb TV show from the 60's rather than adapt a good book, or a well written original screenplay."
Jeff, is the source material really that important? The truth is that 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' was based on a comic strip, and 'Troy' was based on the freakin' Iliad.
Hi Jim,
I think with cinema, you never know the outcome. It depends on how you see things. For me the 90's was a great decade in film. The naughties isn't even comparable when it comes to great films within a decade. However, that's when you look at it from a decade to decade point of view.
Let's say we compare films from on a single year. I believe 2007 was one of the best years in cinema. "Ratatouille", "There Will Be Blood", "No Country for Old Men", "The Great Debaters", "Zodiac", "Into the Wild", "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", "Atonement" are just some of the great films of that year.
Still, I get what you're saying and agree with you that film seems to go downhill as a medium, but every once in a while a year reminds us why film is a form of art and not just entertainment.
I feel for the future of film. Especially with the sudden 3-D craze. Hopefully it's a temporary phase (50's 3-D, smell-ovision, etc.) and not a transitional phase (silent to talkies, b&w to color, etc.).
Best Regards,
Wael Khairy
Best Regards,
Wael Khairy
I would like to "attack" this from another angle:
I think there will always be an audience for so-called Art House cinema, independent films and the like. But today, unlike years ago, if the filmmakers want more crowds they have to go out and get them: create events, use today's technologies to their advantage. For these kinds of movies, today, a large audience (and potential filmmakers in this genre) may not come by itself. But I believe an audience is there for the taking.
If one thinks of this as the big studios vs. the art house, then it's a lost cause: of course they are concentrating more on the more viable, commercial pictures than small, "artsy" films. But I don't think that's knew. On the other hand, many a good movie - and a good movie blockbuster, at that - has suffered at the hands of studio execs who know little about film. "Superman II" is a prime example, but there are many others.
A more serious gripe, I think, would be against the completely unnecessary remakes, reboots, re-call-it-what-you want of classic films: Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm St - really, were these remakes necessary...? do we really need a "Spiderman" reboot (already?) just because the studio wouldn't let the director do it the way he wants to do it?
THIS is where money is wasted; THIS is where countless time and effort is going, instead of spent developing fresh materials, new concepts, even "variations" on once-done stories, could have been implemented. They paid millions & millions to the screenwriters of "Transformers 2" - for what? this has to be one of the biggest heists in movie history!
But on a more positive note, if you're going to "study" from blockbusters, I think Empire Strikes Back has a whole lot more to offer than Transformers 2, don't you think?
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