Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                                                       IS THE CINEMA DYING?

 

In 2017, in a much-reprinted interview, the American film director and producer Martin Scorsese said that real movies are dying. It was, he said, harder and harder for truly adult films to be financed and to be seen on the big cinema screens. He cited the dominance of films relying on computer-generated images, meaning that big money-spinners now were what he called “theme-park movies” – blockbuster superhero junk aimed at adolescent and juvenile audiences. Franchises dominated, allowing for the repetition of the same formula in film after film. On top of this, he said, the proliferation of easily-accessible images on computers and mobile phones was robbing films of their uniqueness as spectacle. 

 

 

His views might have been broad generalisations, but I can’t help endorsing the general drift of what he said. On the whole, if you want to see something truly grown-up, you no longer go to the big movie houses. You might go to the boutique or art-house cinemas, but even there now, there are far too may films pandering to an old audience who want comfort rather than real cinematic quality. So there’s your choice: superhero rubbish or comfy, often period-set, movies for oldsters. You’d be better off staying at home and whistling up something from Youtube or Netflix.

Recently, I encountered an inadvertent endorsement of Scorsese’s thesis from an unlikely source, but it’s a tangled story so please stay with me.

Way back in 1995, Martin Scorsese scripted and narrated A Century of Cinema – A Personal Journey Through American Movies. In America, it was shown as a TV series; but in New Zealand and elsewhere it was shown as one very long film in the international film festival, which was where I caught it. Scorsese certainly expressed his personal views of movies but, as I recall it, he shaped his survey of American cinema around genres, analysing gangster films, romcoms, musicals, westerns etc. and being very open-minded even about movies that were clearly not to his taste.

Just a few weeks back, I saw a similar film, only this time the work of a French film director examining French cinema. Made in 2016 and only now shown in New Zealand in the French Film Festival, this was  Bertrand Tavernier’sVoyage a travers le cinema francais or in English My Journey Through French Cinema. I sat through all three hours and ten minutes of it with an audience of about 50 people in a niche cinema. As an usher warned us at the beginning, there was no intermission. Seven or eight people obviously couldn’t take the pace, and walked out well before halfway through. Tavernier’s approach was far more idiosyncratic than Scorsese’s. Tavernier did not structure his reflections around genres and did not examine French films in the chronological order in which those films were made; but by the order in which he encountered films. Early on, he said that he was a child of the Popular Front (i.e. France’s left-wing political coalition before the Second World War) and of the Liberation, so many of his favourable judgments had to do with films depicting people working idealistically together for the common good, and there was the odd comment about who did or did not resist during the Occupation. He was also clearly a child of the nouvelle vague, endorsing the “new wave” of French film-makers and self-styled auteurs of the late 1950s and 1960s.

 

 

            So – with generous clips from all the films he discussed - he began with the director Jacques Becker, because the first film that impressed him as a child in the late 1940s was a gangster film made by Becker. This in turn led him to talk about two directors who flourished earlier in the 1930s, Jean Delannoy then (in more detail) Jean Renoir.

When Tavernier entered the film industry himself, he was mentored by the producer-director Jean-Pierre Melville. Apparently Melville was a bit of a tyrant and erratic in his working methods, often alienating cast and crew. (Tavernier plays a bootleg recording of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo shouting angrily at Melville for wasting his time by missing schedules and otherwise mistreating him.) But at this point Tavernier moves in another direction and devotes a long section of his film to the huge effect the actor Jean Gabin had on French films and how he’d been handled by different directors. This in turn leads him to discuss the unique role of music in French films, briefly referencing music in films by Marcel Carne and Jean Vigo. French directors worked in collaboration with composers; in America, musical scores were usually imposed upon completed films, with the director having little say in the matter. So we hear much about French composers for film such a Maurice Jaubert, Georges Auric and Kosma.

I forget what the segue was, but for some reason this leads him to deal with the cheap, raw 1950s and 1960s gangster films starring Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution, basically formulaic B movies. This, of course, was another trait of the nouvelle vague–ists of Tavernier’s vintage – a tendency to claim great aesthetic merit in schlock films as a way of thumbing their noses at the more formal “classic” films that preceded them. And so, inevitably, to Jean-Luc Godard who also loved the schlock. Tavernier told us, with illustrative clips of course, how much he admired “beauty”of Godard’s films. Heretic that I am, I still regard Godard’s films as pretentious and often clumsily made tosh. However, saving the day a bit, Tavernier then gives generous space to Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) and then he rushes back to look at the (very minor) 1930s director Edmond Greville before fading out.

As I said, this was a very idiosyncratic survey of French films, in no way as all-encompassing as Martin Scorsese’s survey of American films, and based very much on what had influenced Tavernier himself or on people he had worked with. At the end, I couldn’t help reflecting on all the great or at least influential French film directors who were not mentioned or were skipped over in a one-liner – Louis Feuillade, Abel Gance, Rene Clair, Marcel Pagnol,  Jean Gremillon, Julien Duvivier, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Claude Autant-Lara, Yves Allegret,  Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol. As a rather lame apology for not mentioning all these worthies, there was a little joke at the end saying “Coming Attractions” and listing those who had been ignored.

I’d like to make it clear that I regard Tavernier himself as an important and interesting director. I was already a young film-reviewer when, in 1974 I saw his L’Horloger de Saint-Paul (The Clockmaker) and was impressed by it. Later I thought his Round Midnight (1986) was one of the best fictional films concerning jazz that I’ve ever seen, and his La vie et rien d’autre (Life and Nothing But, 1989) a moving meditation on war and death. Maybe the most recent Tavernier film I’ve seen, Quay d’Orsay (The French Minister, 2013) was a bit more predictable – a satire on questionable decisions made by France’s Foreign Affairs department – but even so the director’s hand was sure.

But at last we come to my enigmatic comment about Tavernier’s survey inadvertently endorsing what Martin Scorsese said about the death of the movies.

Bertrand Tavernier (who died aged 80 in March of this year) stays only with movies made between the 1930s and late 1960s. One film only from the 1970s is referenced. It is as if he wished to completely ignore all the films made after the 1960s. It can’t have been because he had not seen or was unaware of French cinema between the 1970s and 2016 when Voyage a travers le cinema francais was made. He himself was still a part of the French film-making community up to this year. The only conclusion I can reach is that he either did not wish to discuss either his contemporaries or his own films; OR he was aware of the great decline in quality of French films over recent years – the imitation of, or pandering to, American and “international” tastes; the false images of what France is in films aimed at tourists; the lack of any outstanding or emerging directors.

            In his own way, he was saying the movies were dying.