Scorsese on Cinema

Just a couple of weeks ago Martin Scorsese (supported by Francis Ford Coppola) caused a bit of a dust-up by questioning the aesthetic validity of the Marvel films. I mentioned it in a Friday Miscellanea. As that came in the form of a brief answer to a question, Scorsese has followed up with an essay elaborating his point: Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.

In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.

I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary.”

Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.

For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.

From my point of view, this process, whereby the individual aesthetic vision is slowly replaced by formulas and thrills, market research, computer-generated imagery and what are little more than live action cartoons, resembles the way that certain kinds of popular music have driven both other kinds of popular music as well as classical music out of the marketplace. I think this works through a slow-acting kind of deception. The first artists in a new form such as cinema are experimental and base their work on what is authentic human nature to them. But over time, certain little formulas are discovered that have a particular effect on audiences and over time, the formulas take over the art form. This is true whenever aesthetic or human values are replaced by monetary ones because at the end of the day, the formulas pull audiences into the theaters. For a good review of what kind of formulas we are talking about, review a number of trailers for recent films. They are thickly larded with just those formulas that market research and focus group testing have revealed to have an immediate impact.

I think there is a cycle here: innovative creativity is slowly replaced over time by stultifying regurgitation of formulas. As these become dominant, the whole field becomes ripe for the next wave of genuine creativity. In this sense, I suppose I am more optimistic than Scorsese. If we look at the recent history of popular music we see the phenomenon repeated several times. The Beatles were a huge creative leap over their immediate predecessors, but were followed by a great deal of formulaic repetition. Disco, grunge, heavy metal and other forms made the occasional splash before all was washed away by rap and hip hop. Those genres as well as the repetitive diva ballad ones have now become moribund. So when Kanye West released his new album Jesus is King the other day, a fusion of gospel and hip hop, it made quite a splash. Whatever you may think of Kanye, he is most certainly his own man and every album he releases makes some kind of creative point. Listen to this, the first cut on the album, for its creative use of a gospel choir and dynamic jazz/boogie woogie piano: