I just watched Patrick H Willems opinion piece on YouTube asking, “Who is Killing Cinema?” The need for a 90-minute thesis on this topic squares perfectly with my experience of the past decade.
Retrograde, Two Ways
I can recall seeing fewer than ten new-release movies in the past ten years. More than that, the last time I had a truly thrilling experience in the cinema was six years ago, seeing Dunkirk, and prior to that, close to 20 years ago, when King Kong and The Return of the King were in the magnificent Art Deco theater (built in the 1920s and still open in my hometown.)
I think the average moviegoer would probably rejoin with, “You’re a stodgy old elitist. There have been a ton of exciting movies in the last 20 years.” My own dad even said something like that when he told me about Dunkirk. I had to admit, “finally, a movie I will pay theater admission to see.”
The simple fact is, I love movies, not just cinema. I’m no elitist – I grew up in the ’90s on formulaic sports movies. I loved seeing the restored Star Wars movies when they were released in theaters. I even had hope for the prequels, despite Jar Jar Binks.
But ever since the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies, the direction major studios have taken has been a massive disappointment. I like Tobey Maguire. I liked him as the reluctant hero Spiderman. I thought his casting and his acting lent the perfect dimension to the role of the superhero – a force born of necessity, not machismo or hubris.
But during this time, more superhero movies started coming in. Three Spiderman movies weren’t enough. Different actors, different characters, yes, but soon, it seemed like every new release was either a superhero movie or was tarted up to feel like one – wall-to-wall giant objects crashing and characters leaping into the air for no reason. It got old in a hurry, and that was 15 years ago. Today, the number of these films has multiplied, and their quality is accordingly… insubstantial. Excepting The Dark Knight, I haven’t paid admission to another superhero movie since. The movies ceased to be about actors, story, setting, or much else besides milking an IP for all they could.
My disgust is not even a matter of principle. I simply found that subsequent superhero movies were inferior to a lot of older movies I wanted to watch.
This hasn’t changed. In fact, since major studios have Frankensteined most of their movies to become superhero movies, my sh*t list now includes all of those movies, too.
Here’s the silver lining: before this happened, there were already about 90 years worth of good movies. This was confirmed when I reallocated my movie ticket budget and got a Criterion Channel subscription. This is not an endorsement, but I certainly liked the change of pace – I could discover movies the filmmakers themselves actually cared about. There are other options for discovery, some free – including a cache of good noir flicks from the ’40s and ’50s on YouTube.
If major studios and streaming services are otherwise killing cinema, maybe more theaters could prioritize classic movies. AFI puts out lists of the best movies of all time, and I’d sure love more time machine experiences like seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey or Psycho on the big screen. Actually, I just realized that as I write this, I’m missing a midnight screening of Donnie Darko at IFC, which gives me chills just thinking about it. (Looks like it’s still playing through Saturday – going to buy tickets now, be right back.)
More Ways
When I was a kid, it was a revelation that my grandmother still had a working hi-fi with a turntable. My grandparents had kept it in their front entrance where the acoustics were best. Their tastes in music were… different… than my teenage self, but it was a thrill to hear Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic and a couple of Count Basie original release records in a pretty decent cabinet. I didn’t get into vinyl because it was cool, I got into it because of that sound. Lucky for me, a few years later vinyl came back in a big way, and audiophiles are better for it.
But this is just scratching the surface. I have discovered more old records on YouTube than in all of the browsing in all of the stacks in all of the indie shops I have visited. It’s a pain in the neck to sample vinyl in most places. With YouTube, the sampling leads the discovery – what could be better? With so much choice, it’s amazing that anyone is content to simply stream whatever Spotify floats to the top of the list. I’m sure you already know what I think about pop music, but when in history have we been able to bring up Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums of All Time and then switch over to another screen and listen to each and every one?
We can all be cinephiles now. We can all be music buffs now. And we can deep-dive into great art of other kinds. In our previous post, we ran down some excellent sources of public domain content, but the single greatest development for me personally has been the digitizing of art.
The Digitizing of Old Art
I don’t mean AI generating a “Rembrandt,” and I don’t mean digital brush sets for use on a tablet. I mean, twenty years ago, almost none of the art we care about was online.
Twenty years ago, (thanks, Wayback Machine!) the bio on the Wikipedia page for William-Adolphe Bouguereau was about 70 words, with no sources cited, and a link to a page with 17 images, one of which is possibly misattributed. To judge from this entry alone, he was a curiosity, and there was little hope of further research about his life and work.
Today, there are over 70 images on the main page alone, a link to the Wikimedia Commons repository with many more, a bio of over 3,000 words, and nearly 40 works cited. The sortable table of his paintings has nearly 300 works with title, collection, and description. There is also a link on the bio page to what claims to be “The Complete Works” that contains over 500 entries (errant, but commendable, since there are over 800 known).
Bouguereau was and is an icon, and he was and is divisive. That aside, the fact that his work is now abundantly available online, hi-res, for free, is amazing. It’s also emblematic of both the means and the desire to rediscover skill-based artwork and the artists behind them – the existence of both were until very recently extremely difficult to ascertain.
The absence (read: suppression) of skill-based art in formal education is now being offset by the willingness of people of all walks to share what they love with this new, efficient means. It is mostly still relegated to “unofficial” channels for documenting and discussing this work. However, the sheer amount of material is tremendous and it is growing all the time. It speaks to the groundswell of interest and a renewed desire to see more of the same. Right now, my research must rely on things like Flickr, historical society archives, topical websites about historical, mythological, fantasy, or religious painting, and other bloggers who have the same quirky tastes. But, my research is also benefitting more and more from higher resolution images, published catalogs from retrospective exhibitions, and others obsessed with (at least) cataloguing this art.
What is left now to do is to continue to fall in love with old things. I want to encourage others to discover them, too. I want people to understand that we can say “no” to the flood of convenient and relentlessly advertised mediocrity and a baseless worship of novelty. It really is ok to love old things enough to praise them, especially when new things cease to impress. It is ok to seek something more satisfying. It is ok to quit apologizing and simply revel in the old work and the old artists we love.
You’ll notice that in the bios on this site, we have largely, intentionally left out rhetoric about movements, progress, and the fashion of opinion from times past and present. There’s enough to discover by keeping those pages as informational as possible. The “unpopular” opinions that many people actually have but are afraid to share will come to the forefront as we write more articles, but for now, I want to encourage you to simply give a thought and a moment to indulge your love of good, old things.
The feature image is of an old thing I love. It’s a painting titled The Souls of Acheron (1898) by Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl.
Leave a Reply