28 Film Discussion Threads Later

[Skitch]

But it is a bit apt because hes saying the ones who did it first are the only ones that count. Film is a relatively young art, especially when compared to music. Why is it so impossible that in a hundred years BD's grandchildren will be saying the same about the director's hes scoffing?

[baby doll]

But you are also often extremely negative towards films that make modern innovations (whether the technological or formative) and compare them unfavorably to older works and artists.

So is it not just that you, personally, live in the past with this art form?

I'm not sure which modern innovations you're referring to, but for what it's worth, I find Pedro Costa's films innovative and I like them.

[Irish]

But it is a bit apt because hes saying the ones who did it first are the only ones that count.

Lemme put it another way: It's like making a comparison between "One-Armed Swordsman" (or any Golden Harvest / Shaw Brothers / wuxia) and "Big Trouble in Little China."

It's entirely possible to enjoy "Big Trouble," while recognizing it also essentially lame as fuck.

[Irish]

Also gotta say, there's shit Godard did in "Goodbye to Language" that makes the rest of the people we're talking about look like schoolboy try-hards.

But then, as noted, Godard has never been forced to bend to the commercial market the way Scorsese and Tarantino have.

[baby doll]

But it is a bit apt because hes saying the ones who did it first are the only ones that count. Film is a relatively young art, especially when compared to music. Why is it so impossible that in a hundred years BD's grandchildren will be saying the same about the director's hes scoffing?

If something's been done, why do it again? Of course, unlike Scorsese, Beethoven was the inheritor of a living tradition and an innovator. Certainly Haydn and Mozart threw down a challenge for subsequent composers--"What's left do be done now?"--but at the time Beethoven arrived on the scene, Viennese classicism wasn't completely exhausted, whereas the classical Hollywood cinema was already moribund when Scorsese began making films in the late 1960s. Scorsese is undoubtedly a talented filmmaker but an individual talent without access to a living tradition can only do so much.

[Irish]

If something's been done, why do it again?

/laughs in george lucas and steven spielberg

[Skitch]

I think if BD had it his way, they would've stopped making movies decades ago.

[baby doll]

I think if BD had it his way, they would've stopped making movies decades ago.

You raise an interesting point: do we really need new movies? I would answer yes, but we need traditions that are suitable for the present. I should stress that traditions like classical Hollywood cinema and the postwar European art cinema were, in their time, extremely generative, but in addition to having been more or less used up, they no longer speak to the world we live in (hence, the anachronistic quaintness of a film like Michael Haneke's Happy End, which assumes that the conventions of 1960s art cinema are still an adequate means of representing the present). As you say, cinema is a relatively young medium but contemporary movies feel very old.

[quido8_5]

I have a bias toward more "classic" movies, maybe somewhere between 20s-50s. Full disclosure: it's doubtful that any filmmaker in the last 20 years will have the same estimation for me than some of the filmmakers listed by BD. At the same time, it is a bit of a reach to say that many of the modern directors are simply aping the past. Many of the filmmakers previously mentioned make art that is different, if reliant upon previous filmmakers. Although I don't think comparing early, hugely influential fine artists is the best comparison, it's worth noting that many contemporary filmmakers incorporate previous strategies with their own unique style.

If building upon past artists' work is boring, then what is the point? It certainly is a good question whether or not we need new movies. However, we only need new movies if they offer something different. People like Scorcese are using past techniques toward a different goal. Does that make him better than the greats? No. You can't redesign the triangle. It's more relevant to look at how contemporary directors build upon as well as create new avenues, of art. It's a big tent. FWIW, very few contemporary directors line up IMO, but those that do: Kiarotstami, PT Anderson, Ceylan, Tarantino (ugh, but true), and Nolan (double ugh). All of these filmmakers seem to be doing something artistically important and different. Of course they're standing on the shoulders of giants, that's how progress in any field happens.

[megladon8]

Should we have just stopped making films with sound after The Jazz Singer?

Was colour played out after The Gulf Between?

[Irish]

^ Relevant and interesting

Whatever I think about his movies, he always strikes me as the smartest guy in the industry when I see him interviewed

[Irish]

You raise an interesting point: do we really need new movies?

No. Not really.

I'm only half-joking.

I think the future of entertainment will be some weird combo of YouTube vids, Twitch streams, Fortnite dances, and VR porn --- and projected so the images are the size of your living room wall.

[Wryan]

I think the future of entertainment will be some weird combo of YouTube vids, Twitch streams, Fortnite dances, and VR porn --- and projected so the images are the size of your living room wall.

I've seen this Black Mirror.

[Peng]

Going to bed without update on Bob Odenkirk is upsetting.

[megladon8]

Going to bed without update on Bob Odenkirk is upsetting.

Agreed. That was jarring to read about.

[baby doll]

Should we have just stopped making films with sound after The Jazz Singer?

Was colour played out after The Gulf Between?

I can't tell if I'm not making myself clear or if you're deliberately mischaracterizing my argument because you don't have a good counter-argument. In any case, when I talk about traditions like the classical Hollywood cinema or postwar European art cinema, I'm not talking about individual techniques like sound and colour but a menu of narrative procedures and stylistic options capable of generating a wide variety of films--in other words, a paradigm. (For example, in classical Hollywood cinema, a director might cover a dialogue scene in a single two shot or break it up into a series of shot/reverse shots.) As a paradigm, classical Hollywood cinema was flexible enough to accommodate a broad, but not unlimited, range of stories and styles. (In contrast, Soviet montage cinema--which lasted less than ten years--could accommodate a much wider range of techniques but only a limited number of stories.) However, sometime around 1960, the classical paradigm more or less petered out as a living tradition--either because it was largely used up or because changes in American society had rendered it an anachronism or both--and most of the films of the New Hollywood era that are regarded as classics today (Bonnie and Clyde, 2001, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Badlands, The Conversation, and Taxi Driver being only the first half-dozen titles that come to mind) tried to reanimate the paradigm by hybridizing classical narration with art cinema. This doesn't mean that Scorsese is a bad director or that his films aren't worth seeing--only that one shouldn't succumb to what Mark Fischer has aptly described as "the relativistic illusion that intensity and innovation are equally distributed throughout all cultural periods." It's no insult to Scorsese to recognize that, as good a director as he is, he isn't--and can't be--as great as Kazan, Preminger, Ray, et al., nor can any other contemporary American filmmaker working in any proximity to the commercial mainstream.

[Peng]

Agreed. That was jarring to read about.

oh thank god

[StuSmallz]

I don't think Scorsese himself would agree with that assessment. He's obviously a very fine director, and I think Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, After Hours, and Goodfellas could all be creditably described as great films. That said, I don't think he's an original enough director to warrant comparison with the likes of Griffith, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Ozu, and Bresson--or, among living directors, Godard, Hou, and Straub. He's more a synthesizer than an innovator, appropriating stylistic devices from European art cinema (e.g., freeze frames and iris shots Ã* la Truffaut) and repurposing them so that they fulfill classical functions (representing character subjectivity rather than authorial commentary), and thereby making these devices somewhat less self-conscious. Lurking beneath his stylistic pyrotechnics is an acute sense that the classical tradition is exhausted and there's nothing new left to be done but remixes of old standards--or as Scorsese himself put it, "Whatever you do now that you think is new was already done in 1913."

Yeah, but that's an appeal to authority, and a lot of artists tend to be pretty humble about their art anyway, so Scorsese underplaying his quality as a director doesn't convince me anymore than all the movie scholars who consider him one of the greatest directors of all time (don't get me wrong, I'm happy that they feel that way, it's just not part of the reason why I personally feel he's a great director). At any rate, as for the point about Scorsese being more of a "remixer" than an innovator, it's irrelevant to me how original a director's style is or not; the only thing that matters is the quality of the final product they create with their choices, so I don't care if Marty took the dolly zoom from Vertigo for the scene in the cafe in Goodfellas or not, because the only thing I care about is that that was an effective, striking aesthetic choice for that moment, and contributed to the movie standing right alongside the greatest works from any other director, whether they be past or present, as I'm concerned.

[Irish]

that's an appeal to authority

wat

it's irrelevant to me how original a director's style is or not; the only thing that matters is the quality of the final product they create with their choices,

You're describing a craftsman, not an artist.

In the Western tradition, greatness is directly linked to innovation.

[baby doll]

Yeah, but that's an appeal to authority, and a lot of artists tend to be pretty humble about their art anyway, so Scorsese underplaying his quality as a director doesn't convince me anymore than all the movie scholars who consider him one of the greatest directors of all time (don't get me wrong, I'm happy that they feel that way, it's just not part of the reason why I personally feel he's a great director). At any rate, as for the point about Scorsese being more of a "remixer" than an innovator, it's irrelevant to me how original a director's style is or not; the only thing that matters is the quality of the final product they create with their choices, so I don't care if Marty took the dolly zoom from Vertigo for the scene in the cafe in Goodfellas or not, because the only thing I care about is that that was an effective, striking aesthetic choice for that moment, and contributed to the movie standing right alongside the greatest works from any other director, whether they be past or present, as I'm concerned.

I find this a rather peculiar argument: namely that Scorsese's derivative remixes are just as great as the work of more original filmmakers because he's adept at swiping ideas. First of all, I think this overstates just how derivative Scorsese's films actually are. It was never my argument that Scorsese's pastiches of classical Hollywood and European art cinema are as mechanical as, for instance, Woody Allen's appropriations of Bergman and Fellini in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Celebrity (although Casino comes close). On the contrary, my point is that Scorsese's eclecticism in swiping from a range of sources is a large part of what makes him a relatively lively filmmaker in the context of the New Hollywood period and its aftermath (for the most part, a pretty depressing era in American moviemaking)--a point Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson already put their finger on in the mid-'70s when they wrote that Taxi Driver ravishes "the auteur box of Sixties best scenes, from Hitchcock's reverse track down a staircase from the Frenzy brutality, through Godard's handwriting gig flashed across the entire screen, to several Mike Snow inventions (the slow Wavelength zoom into a close look at graphics pinned on a beaten plaster wall, and the reprise of double and triple exposures that ends Back and Forth)." At his best, Scorsese is about as exciting as a filmmaker can be without access to a living tradition, but in the absence of a tradition capable of generating new stories and styles, he's unable to do anything truly original. Hollywood cinema is dead and Scorsese is a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together parts from different corpses and trying to reanimate them. The results are frequently entertaining but it strikes me as rather astonishing to claim that they equal the work of genuinely innovative filmmakers like Hitchcock, Godard, and Snow for the reasons I've already stated: If something's been done, there's no need to do it again, and in doing it again anyway, Scorsese fails to find a mode of representation suitable for the present. He's American cinema's greatest cover band.

[StuSmallz]

I think what I've already said about Scorsese could easily apply to most or all of the directors you've listed: None of them are especially innovative, nor are any of them in possession of a living tradition as Ford, Hawks, and Lubitsch were. Even at their most entertaining, Almodóvar's pastiches of Mankiewicz and Sirk, Anderson's lifts from Salinger and Malle, and Mann's post-neo-noirs are like attempts to temporarily reanimate a dead organism by administering periodic jolts of electricity. In other words, their films belong more to the past than the future.

Also, I think you're selling a lot of contemporary directors short, particularly Michael Mann, since, even you exclude the films of his that obviously don't come close to the category (like Last Of The Mohicans), his work still isn't particularly Noir-ish, even in just the "Neo" sense of the term, as the similarities between his movies and the genre tend to be pretty surface-level and unintentional, IMO. And, more importantly, the general tone of his work also tends to distinctly lack the strong sense of cynicism and distrust that's a defining feature of most Noir; I mean, the entire plot of Thief hinges on [

Show Spoiler

Frank initially trusting Leo enough to go to work for him, even after the rocky start they had to their interactions, and the affable front Leo puts up which is clearly insincere

], a level of trust from a protagonist that would be unheard of from, say, Robert Mitchum in Out Of The Past.

[megladon8]

Speaking of new and innovative films...

Watched Mandy last night.

Holy wow.

[Irish]

I find this a rather peculiar argument: namely that Scorsese's derivative remixes are just as great as the work of more original filmmakers because he's adept at swiping ideas. First of all, I think this overstates just how derivative Scorsese's films actually are. It was never my argument that Scorsese's pastiches of classical Hollywood and European art cinema are as mechanical as, for instance, Woody Allen's appropriations of Bergman and Fellini in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Celebrity (although Casino comes close). On the contrary, my point is that Scorsese's eclecticism in swiping from a range of sources is a large part of what makes him a relatively lively filmmaker in the context of the New Hollywood period and its aftermath (for the most part, a pretty depressing era in American moviemaking)--a point Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson already put their finger on in the mid-'70s when they wrote that Taxi Driver ravishes "the auteur box of Sixties best scenes, from Hitchcock's reverse track down a staircase from the Frenzy brutality, through Godard's handwriting gig flashed across the entire screen, to several Mike Snow inventions (the slow Wavelength zoom into a close look at graphics pinned on a beaten plaster wall, and the reprise of double and triple exposures that ends Back and Forth)." At his best, Scorsese is about as exciting as a filmmaker can be without access to a living tradition, but in the absence of a tradition capable of generating new stories and styles, he's unable to do anything truly original. Hollywood cinema is dead and Scorsese is a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together parts from different corpses and trying to reanimate them. The results are frequently entertaining but it strikes me as rather astonishing to claim that they equal the work of genuinely innovative filmmakers like Hitchcock, Godard, and Snow for the reasons I've already stated: If something's been done, there's no need to do it again, and in doing it again anyway, Scorsese fails to find a mode of representation suitable for the present. He's American cinema's greatest cover band.

"You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to baby doll again."

Great post.

[Dukefrukem]

Anyone want to have a MC movie night (watch party)? - https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/jolt

https://www.amazon.com/Jolt-KATE-BEC...t-video&sr=1-1

Sat night? 745:PM EST start?

[Skitch]

I think if you guys would really believe all films of the last few decades have been derivative or unneeded or what-have-you, you would have stopped watching new films by now. Whats the point?