THAT'S NOT CINEMA

"That's not Cinema."


Recently, famed director Martin Scorsese, in an interview promoting his latest film, inflamed the internet by saying about Marvel Movies, “I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”  When another famed director, Francis Ford Coppola, echoed Scorsese's comments, he added “Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is." ,more uproar and backlash ensued.
Now part of this is an inevitable cycle of any art form, with the older generation (both directors are over seventy) lashing out the new generation in predictable fashion.  And anyone thinking that Scorsese and Coppola are making over the top critical statements should read Frank Capra's 1971 autobiography, in which the creator of films like IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE  ranted that"practically all the Hollywood film-making of today is stooping to cheap salacious pornography in a crazy bastardization of a great art to compete for the 'patronage' of deviates and masturbators."(!).  In other words, the old have always romantized the art of their formative years and rejected the new.
When Scorsese and Coppola first began making their movies in the late 60's and 70's, most mainstream movies were definitely for adults; the end of the production code in 1968 allowed them and other filmmakers to deal with subject matter that would have been impossible just a few years earlier.  This new artistic freedom resulted in movies that were both grown up and successful (Coppola's THE GODFATHER was not only a critically acclaimed film for adults, it also was the biggest hit  film of 1972). 
But the death knell of the grown up film as big box office came long before the Marvel Movies: when George Lucas's STAR WARS was released in  1977, it showed that if you updated the kiddie serial stories of Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon while adding top flight special effects, kids would not only flock to see them, they would see them again and again, and buy merchandise on top of that.  While hugely successful films had been around since the very start of the medium, no other movie had dominated the box office for so long, or had built such anticipation for its inevitable sequels.  And really, right then, the concept of a series of films as a franchise was born. 
Which brings us to today's Marvel Movies, which show just how much moviemaking has become about spectacle, with  bigger and bigger effect scenes with one over the top battle after another.  I agree with both Scorsese and Coppola  that these movies are repetitive and formulaic, with individual directors subsuming any personal style they may have into a sameness that matches all the other films in the series; lack of individuality is the point.  Now, film series are nothing new (between 1938 and 1950 a stunning 28 movies based on the comic strip Blondie were released!), but between the Marvel Movies and the DC movies, I can't think of a time when the main stream box office was so captured by one kind of film.  Scorsese compares these kinds of films to theme parks, but think of them more like fast food: mass produced variations on the same thing.  Spiderman is to Bat Man as the Big Mac is to the Whopper. 
Now, I'm not naive, I know that movie making is a business, and that these films make boat loads of money both in the US and overseas.     The logic behind them is obvious, with the modern viewing public having so many choices of watching movies in so many formats, giving audiences thrills on a big screen with good sound is one of the best ways to entice them into the theater.  This is also nothing new: back in the 1950's Hollywood responded to the rivalry of TV partly by making bigger and bigger epic movies in Cinemascope, providing images that no TV screen could equal. 
But the difference this time is that Marvel movies, and other blockbusters like them, are squeezing out smaller, more intimate films from screens, pushing them exclusively into art houses or home viewing, making it harder for them to catch an audience at all.  Disney, which owns the Marvel movies, has gobbled up so many theaters with these films and their other (mostly uninspired) big releases that it's hard for rival studios to get a foothold.
So how will this all play out?  Well, for people who care about movies for grown ups, the Oscars are probably more important than ever, with the prestige of nominations and awards bringing attention to movies that would have no chance of being seen by big audiences otherwise.  Really, without the Oscars, Disney could just buy all the multiplexes and only screen their films and few people could tell the difference.