Holy Scorsese, Batman

Martin Scorsese has a great essay in the latest Harper’s magazine about Fellini, seemingly tied to the Criterion Collection’s recent box set. Does Marty love Federico? Are you talkin’ to me?

Twitter has been amusing on the subject as well since, naturally, Scorsese takes the opportunity to allude to his previous comments about the MCU—

As recently as fifteen years ago, the term “content” was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against “form.” Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. “Content” became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. (bold mine)

and then he makes a second important point, about how and where we watch movies—

It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores. On the one hand, this has been good for filmmakers, myself included. (bold mine)

then he breaks some off for the almighty algorithms—

On the other hand, it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is “suggested” by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema? (bold mine)

The argument online was essentially Marvel fanboys and pop apologists vs. critics and cineastes arguing about whether it’s really okay for Martin Scorsese to say that some movies aren’t cinema, or whether that’s actually what he’s saying, or whether anyone should give a fuck about what this old dude says, whoever he is, obviously Civil War and Endgame are the best movies ever made.

With reference to the first selection about content, above, he speaks the truth. From the point of view of, say, Netflix, The Irishman is simply a unit of “content,” albeit one that has a special shine to it. It was a big outlay for the company, as far as movie budgets go, but they were paying for the prestige of giving one of the greatest directors a huge greenlight to make his picture. I’d say it paid off in that sense, even if the actuarial economics disappear into the streaming black hole, forever detached from understanding.

I remember telling an old boss of mine at the dotcom I worked for in 2001 that my ten year plan was to make media, maybe TV, movies, web video. Something like that.

He said to me, “Ah. So you want to be a content provider.”

I understand how it sounds to Marty’s ears, but I didn’t take it that way. While I liked this guy, he was kind of a business doof. I didn’t really care whether the moving image media that I loved was going to be called “content” now, as long as I could make some of it. So I thought, Yeah, I guess he’s right. I want to be a content provider.

But as Scorsese gets into his relationship to the great films of Federico Fellini, it becomes clear that cinema, for him, means auteur cinema. That is, not that Fellini made films alone, far from it, but that his singular vision created works of art out of the available materials (including his collaborators). There are many reasons to attend to this art, rather than to less interesting films. For Scorsese, films made by a corporate “author” are not cinema.

But why should anyone care about whether Marty says it’s cinema or not? Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest filmmakers; we can respect his opinion. We can respect him and, also, at the same time, disagree with some of what he says. It’s okay! What’s more important is that we understand the point he is making about a real change in “movies.”

I don’t personally have a dog in the fight about what “cinema” means or “film” vs. “movie” or whether the term “content” diminishes the value of certain types of “moving image art.” The word content does diminish anything lumped into that meta-category, but no more than art has always been devalued by the forces of the market. Scorsese’s ability to make films depends on a market that values veteran artists like him who have been able to deliver on that value for the market. The value proposition is in flux, thanks to streaming’s reconfiguring of how the film and TV markets work. This doesn’t mean that this reconfiguration is or will be bad for artists or the art form, necessarily. But if the art form itself, from your point of view, is tied to a specific distribution mechanism (such as theatrical) and to the culture that grew up around that mechanism, the media sea changes of the last forty years would certainly look like an assault on the art form.

It’s undeniable that the theatrical experience has changed. The blockbuster-factory retrenchment of the 1980s studios after the utopian excesses of the 1970s New Hollywood, followed by the rise of home video, followed by the era of corporate “synergy” and consolidation followed by the pointillist fragmentation of all culture and disruption of all media business models in the wake of the World Wide Web, has meant big changes for film culture. Of course, film culture has always been in flux, from the earliest days of rogue patent pirates hightailing it to Chicago and then California to escape Edison’s goons, through the upheavals of war, sound technology, national cinemas, censorship, more war, the breakup of the studio system, the rise of television, more war, the influx of foreign cinema, film schools, the collapse of the censorship regime in the U.S., new wave after wave—the point is that, no matter when you began your personal journey with the movies, it was destined to turn into something else by the time you came of age and something else again later in your life.

They have never made em like they used to. This in no way should be seen to undermine Scorsese’s celebration of Fellini and the auteurist model. Auteurism is a useful way to organize our thinking about filmmaking and film canons, but there are other useful ways to think about these things, as well. Language often gets in the way, as some will insist that “cinema” is this and not that—but we all reach for ways to corral unruly ideas within the fences of language.

There are important differences between Fellini’s work and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; both can be called cinema, but the differences are stark enough that the word isn’t very helpful. People also love to make distinctions between “art” and “not art,” but those distinctions are arbitrary. To say that 8 1/2 is art but Endgame is not art doesn’t ultimately help us understand what either of those movies actually are, or why they are that way.

In the meantime, theatrical has become the domain primarily of hegemonic corporate cinema, made for the largest possible audience, each unit of which costs a quarter to a half a billion dollars, each unit of which had better earn back that money and then some, whereas there are very few big screens left for the thrilling movies for adults that Scorsese (and most critics and cineastes) treasure. At the same time, we have never had so many screens before at any time in movie history, whether they are in our pockets, on our laps or screwed to our den walls. And Marty’s right about one thing—if we don’t find good ways to curate the abundance, and leave it to algorithms, then the culture will simply become an algorithm. This has implications far beyond the cinema.