Is cinema dying - or just turning into Wal-Mart?

When we talk about the idea of cult movies, what are we talking about, really? Wikipedia offers a few helpful starting points: “a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans”, mentioning that they often produce “a thriving, obsessive, and elaborate subculture of fandom, hence the analogy to cults.”

I can think of no better definition for the cinephiles who can be seen weekly at the local art-house theater. This is a group of people who react to incorrect aspect ratios like comic book fans reacted to nipples on the batsuit (I would know; I proudly stand alongside both groups). So in celebrating cult cinema, I think it’s more than worthwhile to spend some time each week looking at the films followed almost exclusively by those who made a cult of cinema itself.

And it looks like I started this endeavor just in time – because cinema is dying!

At the dawn of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Roger Ebert wrote about the kind of things that keep me up at night. He talked about a little-reported story that the FCC approved a request by the MPAA to allow films to be released through cable systems in advance of their DVD and Blu-Ray releases. Ebert wrote:

In my nightmares, I imagine first-run Hollywood cinema becoming The Movie of the Week, pitched at the broadest possible audience. If box office grosses are a sad way to rate a movie's success, how much worse are opening night Nielsen ratings. I see stories pitched to safe genres: Horror, romcom, sci-fi. I see quirky pictures, what we amusingly call Art Films, disregarded.

On the plus side, that landscape doesn’t seem so different from what we have now.

To bolster this point, Jim Emerson posted some notes from the first Sundance Institute’s Directors and Screenwriters Labs, a gathering of filmmakers old and new, in which they outlined primary concerns about the cinematic landscape at the time. You can read the full list here, but I wanted to highlight one point that is as salient today as it was then:

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.

Now… that last sentence certainly puts a crass spin on matters, but there seems little doubt of the pervasive notion that a great many people today, not just young people but ALL people, “have a herd instinct and are reluctant to take a chance.” This isn’t a matter of classification – obviously Godard’s work is not automatically better or more artistically valid than a major, mainstream release simply for the modes each operates in. There is no question that his work was more daring, however, and to use modern parallels, when one is faced with the choice between this, there’s little question as to which is would be a braver choice for your time or money.

"'You’ll get your money’s worth' is considered high praise, as though seeing a movie is like buying a dishwasher."

These are matters that go beyond the choices each person makes for how to spend their time. We live in a culture, at least here in America, that doesn’t encourage intellectual curiosity; it practically discourages critical thinking. We’re told to “turn off your brain,” “enjoy it for what it is,” or thousands of other excuses for sub-par art and entertainment. “You’ll get your money’s worth” is considered high praise, as though seeing a movie is like buying a dishwasher.

I’m often reminded of Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, when I think of the model of mainstream cinema, a system that has convinced us to accept what we’re given and like it. Legend has it that even in its inception, Davis didn’t want the strip to ever be outstandingly funny, lest readers expect too much of it, nor did he want it to be complete crap, lest readers never set eyes on it again. It had to stay middling. He called it “aggressive mediocrity.”

Indiewire, one of the few major online outlets championing the art of film, recently published its yearly “Does Cannes Matter?” piece. The question is answered the same way it always will be:

As we said when we asked the same question last year, chances are, if you believe in the power of cinema (and debate things like the death of film criticism), you will quickly say, “yes.”

Even if you’ve never attended the festival here in France, the Cannes brand has likely been associated with a certain type of cinema: films that are celebrated but sometimes hard to find, movies that are heady and often dense, work that is eclectic but can be transformative.

The answer to the question ‘Does Cannes (still) Matter’ ultimately parallels one’s own response to the broader question:

Do movies (still) matter?

It will be no surprise over the next 12 days, our answer is a resounding:

YES!

And they’re right – movies will always matter as long as they are loved. I hope my investment in this topic has proved my love for them. The transformative power of cinema is a wonderful thing, and in spite of my gripes about the financial model for modern cinema, I know that I’ve been transformed and elated by recent works as diverse as Silent Light, Synecdoche, New York, In Bruges, A Serious Man, and Speed Racer. Even more recently, I really loved Iron Man 2. But films like Iron Man 2 will never have trouble getting made, seen, and appreciated. Films like Silent Light and Synecdoche, New York will. Always. This is a weekly column to shed light on, celebrate, and encourage wider viewership for that other end of the spectrum. I hope you’ll join me, and share your comments. Next week I’ll have the column’s first review, which will either be The Secret in Their Eyes or Breaking Upwards, and the week after I’ll recap reactions from the Cannes Film Festival.

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS ARTICLE, PLEASE HELP SUPPORT OUR SITE, AT NO COST WITH ONE CLICK ON THE FACEBOOK 'LIKE' BUTTON BELOW: